The classic hands of Dial-Up sounds melodic, scratch and hard, and is inexorably associated with the connection. Now it is also silent. The AOL decision this week of finally finishing the telephone access service is not surprising, but it still feels like a door closure, one for which I passed more times than I can tell to enter the world network.
It is an immortalized sound in Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan Ryan of 1998 You’ve got mailA film in which the incredibly popular Aol service drives the plot forward to its non -surprising and deeply romantic conclusion.
When I began to cover and work online, AOL was one of the main portals of the New World Digital, and the only way to cross that the portal was through a telephone access modem, one connected to its PC on the one hand and its telephone line on the other. (Having a telephone line near your computer was a big problem: today’s children are spoiled by Omnipresent and high speed Wi-Fi … but I’m wandering).
In the world always connected today, it is difficult to conceive the intentionality of this act. In the 1990s, our phones were dumb and their computer treated with local networks and files. We called Dial-Up “Going Online” because it was like making a trip in which the mode of transport was a small picture with the magical code to connect it to the Internet and, ultimately, the information superchoca.
Before the broadband of the home, everyone knew the sound of the handshake and, yes, millions were marking AOL (America online), their own network, to access the Internet.
If you were breaking down the telephone access process, you can see it as two different parts: the marking of the AOL number, and then a series of negotiation sounds designed to ensure that the modem was legitimate and speak the correct language. Once the system on the other side of the connection was satisfied, it would be connected and soon heard: “You have mail.”
That mail system was also an integral part of AOL. There was no Gmail, and much less people used Yahoo or even Microsoft online mail systems (I must add that these days, having an email account of @hotmail.com is similar, for some, to have an email account of @AOL.com).
Telephone access began its rapid decrease in the late 1990s, since cable companies introduced broadband on the coaxial cable. Instead of knocking on the Internet door with a phone call, the broadband raided an open route to the digital kingdom. One day, we had the classic telephone access sound in my house, and the next day, we didn’t.
Telephone access continued to fulfill a purpose in the first decade of the new millennium, and the broadband took years to reach rural communities. In 2009, Netzero tried to return telephone access as an affordable alternative to expensive broadband. Imagine someone who tries to sell consumers on the horse and in Buggy decades after the car had become omnipresent. It was a terrible plan and, in my opinion, it delayed a broadband reach for a few years.
Even so, by 2022 the number of people who still use telephone access had fallen to 175,000. I am sure that today’s number could match the population of a very small city in a street in Central America. I hope AOL is at least supporting those who still cannot connect to the cable or fiber.
It is not as if we did not see this coming. In recent years, other large companies with names that begin with have been turning their backs on telephone access technology.
My sadness is not Ennui for a better time. It really is only nostalgia for a digital snapshot, a time when we had to make an effort to connect and then wait, in advance, while the modem completed its digital handshake before opening the door to reveal the growing world of digital connections and information. I wonder if, perhaps, we appreciate the miracle of the connection more for the effort involved.
We take it for granted now; And generation Z, in particular, surely has no idea what the pump means online before adding an Instagram post. But what if they did? What would happen if, only once a year, we declare it ‘Telephone access day’ and had to run a fake modem handshake before you can use your laptop or smartphone?
Ridiculous, I know, but thought makes me smile.
