Have they open sourced the server? Revival projects should always do this, otherwise they are preserving nothing. A single point of failure means someone else will have to reverse-engineer the protocol and write the server software again in the future. Do it for posterity!
There was Nina too and then they destroyed the discord over a weirdo pedo mod and took down the website. Also closed source because they’re also selfish.
AOL is not the internet we lost. It's literally what bigtech is trying to turn the rest of the internet into. Online service as centralized marketing platform for bigcos. Remember "Visit us at www.blah.com or use AOL keyword 'Blah'"? The real internet was much more amorphous and chaotic.
Pretending that AOL represents the pre-enshittified internet is like pretending that Clippy represents the idealized past of desktop computing when he was a prototype of what Microsoft is building now.
This. A decentralized, 90's-style internet would probably involve home servers, and there have been attempts to do that: Sheevaplugs would be a good example from the late 2000s. I don't think anyone ever managed to make self-hosting at home frictionless enough, though, with secure defaults and turnkey startup. Open-source, sadly, tends to overestimate the amount of fiddling the average user will tolerate; Apple does a better job of making difficult things simple.
The dial tone was prior to dialing. Upon connection, there was an audible sound from the modem handshake.
Through some google searches, I came across this recording:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=abapFJN6glo
Awwww, my teenage years reborn. I was just down the road from Westwood Village Drive, Tysons Corner in Reston learning to kung fu, math, hack, and talk to girls on AIM. I mastered 2 of those things.
Keen to give this a shot as I had stacks and stacks of AOL CDs and floppies in my youth.
AOL was your ISP - you would connect via your telephone line instead of cable/fiber. Your modem would call their number and establish a connection. No one else could use the phone while you were online.
When you connected, it would load the AOL application which contained most of what AOL offered - built in AIM (AOL instant messaging), a web browser, group chats, keyword search, email, etc.
You were still connected to the internet and could use alternate browsers, but most people stayed inside the AOL app and ecosystem. Keywords were a time before search, where companies could buy keywords (from AOL) and then when people searched them they would show up. It was kinda a separate system from DNS that AOL tried to profit from.
You had competitors like Prodigy and CompuServe offering similar dial-up + custom app offers.
You wouldn't use the AOL app without having AOL dial-up service (although I recall them offering it separately late in its life, bring your own internet). People thought "AOL" was the internet. You might recall the classic "You've got mail" movie. That was from the AOL app which loaded after connecting.
aside: It's crazy how AOL could have become Facebook. AIM chat was the main focus - but AIM had "profiles" which you could customize, and I did - even with daily status updates. Modern Facebook is basically the reverse - profiles with a chat attached.
AOL started off as something different from an ISP.
Like Prodigy and Compuserve and GEnie and some others, it was an on-line information system. Chat, message boards, news, stock quotes, (limited) shopping, games, software downloads, etc. But all within a single system. Kind of like a nationwide/global BBS, but with a GUI interface. In the 80s, all these systems were independent, in the early 90s they got internet email, and the mid 90s added web browsers and (eventually) real tcp/ip.
Yes. I worked for the world's largest ISPs (NETCOM (#1), which merged with Mindspring (which was considered #2), which merged with EarthLink (the previous #3, then #2 to the post-NETCOM Mindspring). It was funny, in hindsight, that even though AOL had already adopted TCP/IP and integrated an "Internet Gateway" functionality and had more subscribers than even the combined #1, 2, and 3 rollup I just described, at no time did anyone in the industry actually consider AOL to be an ISP, so the "#1" in size distinction went to the companies mentioned. AOL, deserved or not, never really escaped their second class designation, which also tended to taint their users as they ventured on to the larger internet.
All that said, I still communicate with one person who maintains their aol.com email address to this day in spite of it all.
I dunno. I left around 1999, just before the EarthLink merger.
Related, while doing a quick search to see if I could learn anything about what you described I found Wikipedia quoting NYT as writing about EarthLink in 2000: "second largest Internet service provider after America Online". I guess it was around y2k when aol finally got its ISP (and this its "world's largest") designation by the world at large. :)
Wildcat bbs implemented tcp/ip around 1995 but by that point AOL had won. Had wildcat came out with tcp/ip support maybe even a year earlier, the “internet” would be a wildly different place today
Wildcat was unique because it still required you to interact with the BBS. With majorbbs the bbs would be relegated to an internet provider and their bbs would disappear.
Wildcat was like aol for bbs but it immediately brought users to a web browser so they could get internet connectivity while still getting a pop up of the BBs’ services.
What you are missing is that “full isp’s” did not exist until about 1996, 1997. And even then AOL and secondarily Compuserve where the go to providers. Wildcat absolutely challenged that status quo in an independent manner
AOL was an "online service", internet connectivity was provided starting in the mid-90s but the real value was in their proprietary members-only services. An online service was more or less a large BBS you dialed into via modem, the first of which could be accessed with an ordinary telecoms program but later ones like AOL and Prodigy required special client software that could decode the proprietary protocol allowing the service to send graphics, menus, and other information to present a UI to the user.
Did the AOL protocol (whatever the AOL app itself used for chat etc.) go over TCP/IP, or was that its own network, parallel to the internet?
Was the limitation that you couldn't use AOL from a different ISP artificial (whitelisted IP ranges, no routing to relevant addresses from the outside), or did it actually use an "internetless" protocol that you just couldn't emulate if all you had was the internet?
I vaguely remember reading somewhere that internet access was a late addition to AOL, hence the question.
AOL was it's own network, completely parallel to the internet. It didn't use TCP/IP, it used a propritary transport called P3 - heavily optimized for dialup.
They had their own dedicated client app, where each page loaded in its own window. It didn't use HTML, it used something called "Rainman". URLs weren't a thing, you accessed "channels" (pages) by entering a specific "keyword".
Later on, in 1993, they added support for Usenet (see: "Eternal September"). Then in 1994 they added support for Gopher and WWW. So you could dial into the AOL client, and then open a regular web browser. But for most home users, there was more content in the AOL walled garden, so the web was something of a curiosity at first.
So to answer your question: It wasn't an artificial limitation. AOL was designed in a way that was fundamentally alien to the way the Internet + Web evolved.
(At some point, you could connect to AOL over TCP/IP - useful if you had a broadband Internet connection but still wanted access to content on the AOL network. This was done by encapsulating P3 inside a TCP/IP header. You still had to use the AOL client software and have an AOL membership.)
I was pretty young at the time, but I think it started as basically a BBS. With an Internet backbone so a bunch of local numbers could all access the same server. They added Internet access later, and initially only via their own browser.
In the early 1990s, back before anyone was ever sure if this Internet thing would ever take off outside of academic communities (and also ostensibly before Sir Tim-Berners Lee invented the World Wide Web), America Online was a proprietary online community that was reached via dial-up modem over the telephone network.
AOL allowed their users to interact with eachother (chats, forums, multiplayer games), read news, and otherwise kill some time. It was a walled garden that required both money and special software to access.
There were other paid services that were vaguely similar, each with different shapes for how the walls of their respective gardens were arranged. In the US, some of these competing services were CompuServe, Prodigy, GEnie, and Delphi.
Of all of these, AOL became the most-broadly known. As time moved on, they increasingly would mail out floppy disks with their software on what seemed like a continuous basis, with flashy color brochures, to millions of homes. (Some weeks I'd wind up with as many as 3 or 4 new AOL disks to use for whatever, delivered right to the mailbox on the front porch. Later, they'd send CD-ROMs instead that were most-useful as drink coasters.)
These services each vied to get as many users locked into their garden as possible, which was important to them because they tended to be metered services: Unlike something like a Netflix or Hulu streaming account, the more time a person spent using these services, the more money they had to spend.
And then, September came again -- and it never ended[1]. The walls of the gardens began to open up and users of these proprietary services began being exposed to what the greater Internet had to offer.
But at the same time, AOL grew. They got proper-fucking big. They went from being a cheeky dialup service with a friendly interface and some pervasive advertising campaigns to buying Time Warner for $182 billion.
And today, all of that business is just kind of a dusty memory.
It was an "online service", basically a dedicated client and a curated experience before the internet and web standardized things.
When you logged in, you'd get a "Welcome" screen with news, if you had any mail, etc. Most of AOL was organized into "Channels" which were different sections focused on things like Sports or Kids.
You could jump to a channel with a keyword, somewhat like a URL.
The channels looked somewhat like hypercard decks. Everything was designed to load fast on a slow modem and assets were shipped with the client, typically on floppy or CD. Occasionally a channel would download an "art pack" which could take 5-10 minutes, but this was rare.
After AOL 2.6 or so it had internet functionality and became an ISP. You still needed to use the AOL software to dial in (it didn't use PPP like others) but otherwise it worked fine.
It was the easiest "one of those" at the time, competing with CompuServe and Prodigy. Apple had a rebranded AOL briefly called eWorld.
I learned the concept of social engineering in middle school through those AOL CDs. There was a culture of making proggies and learning about the inner workings of how AOL the program and the company worked if you were interested and knew where to look.
If you called into a certain department at AOL, you could tell them you were a business and would like to put out their CDs for display. So long as the order was for under 1000 or so they would send them to you, for free, directly to the address of the "business".
I also learned in middle school that CDs sting but don't really hurt and the various ways to launch attacks in a CD war with friends and classmates. You throw CDs vertical to be precise and sideways for a crazy flight path to confuse your opponents.
Sadly I also discovered that all the racist didn't die in the 70s, as the owner of one of the largest AOL hacking discussion forums I frequented loved to talk about how he would move if a black family ever moved into his neighborhood.
I really miss those sounds. Learned so much about all the different frequencies. No to get too woo-woo but did you know each tone is actually two frequencies a high and low one?
The video above shows dialing either LOVE or FEAR. Not sure where this app is going but I had this idea to help catch myself whenever I'm following fear vs love.
Have they open sourced the server? Revival projects should always do this, otherwise they are preserving nothing. A single point of failure means someone else will have to reverse-engineer the protocol and write the server software again in the future. Do it for posterity!
There's another project, P3OL, that's also closed-source. I assume they're connected somehow.
P3OL makes 100€/month through Patreon, I guess that is also this project's reason to stay closed-source
There was Nina too and then they destroyed the discord over a weirdo pedo mod and took down the website. Also closed source because they’re also selfish.
The absolute state of FOSS communities in 2025. I'd rather teh good old days of pedantry, swearing and trolling instead.
Why wouldn't a project like this be OSS? How do they expect to monetize? People buying dialtone subscriptions as a social network?
Besides monetization there are other factors for not open sourcing.
* fear of being critizied for bad code
* not wanting to deal with contributions
* license compliance (maybe using something commercial, maybe trying to hide bad license usage)
* trying to keep control
* missing understanding of open source in general
* ...
So what is the idea with something then? Build software and...?
I'm unable to find the server, but it looks like they've released some protocol analysis tooling: https://github.com/iconidentify/wiretap
Still waiting on a Prodigy online emulator, but in the meantime at least somebody recreated MadMaze!
https://www.vintagecomputing.com/madmaze
See https://www.prodigyreloaded.com - getting closer to public alpha.
Also all the Prodigy Reloaded implementation is open sourced here : https://github.com/ProdigyReloaded/delivery-system
The reverse engineered client side programs from the various prodigy caches will be shared I just haven’t gotten around to it yet.
Oh man. I’ve been hoping someone would build this. “The internet we lost” was formative for a whole generation for better or worse.
One thing I’d wish for would be for it to use an LLM other than grok though.
Given their seeming affinity towards signing in with "X" I doubt you'll have the option.
AOL is not the internet we lost. It's literally what bigtech is trying to turn the rest of the internet into. Online service as centralized marketing platform for bigcos. Remember "Visit us at www.blah.com or use AOL keyword 'Blah'"? The real internet was much more amorphous and chaotic.
Pretending that AOL represents the pre-enshittified internet is like pretending that Clippy represents the idealized past of desktop computing when he was a prototype of what Microsoft is building now.
This. A decentralized, 90's-style internet would probably involve home servers, and there have been attempts to do that: Sheevaplugs would be a good example from the late 2000s. I don't think anyone ever managed to make self-hosting at home frictionless enough, though, with secure defaults and turnkey startup. Open-source, sadly, tends to overestimate the amount of fiddling the average user will tolerate; Apple does a better job of making difficult things simple.
It can be both. For many, AOL was their onboarding platform for the chaotic internet at large. It served that purpose well.
Maybe you just really need unhinged mode for verisimilitude
I tried the Mac demo on mobile and there wasn't a classic modem sound when connecting to AOL. It would be a nice touch.
Dialtone doesn't sound like a dial tone?
The dial tone was prior to dialing. Upon connection, there was an audible sound from the modem handshake. Through some google searches, I came across this recording: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=abapFJN6glo
Hugged to death it seems. They should put up a proxy that gives you a busy signal.
Awwww, my teenage years reborn. I was just down the road from Westwood Village Drive, Tysons Corner in Reston learning to kung fu, math, hack, and talk to girls on AIM. I mastered 2 of those things.
Keen to give this a shot as I had stacks and stacks of AOL CDs and floppies in my youth.
what was AOL exactly i never experienced it but would constantly get these CDs in the mail with Air Warrior
AOL was your ISP - you would connect via your telephone line instead of cable/fiber. Your modem would call their number and establish a connection. No one else could use the phone while you were online.
When you connected, it would load the AOL application which contained most of what AOL offered - built in AIM (AOL instant messaging), a web browser, group chats, keyword search, email, etc.
You were still connected to the internet and could use alternate browsers, but most people stayed inside the AOL app and ecosystem. Keywords were a time before search, where companies could buy keywords (from AOL) and then when people searched them they would show up. It was kinda a separate system from DNS that AOL tried to profit from.
You had competitors like Prodigy and CompuServe offering similar dial-up + custom app offers.
You wouldn't use the AOL app without having AOL dial-up service (although I recall them offering it separately late in its life, bring your own internet). People thought "AOL" was the internet. You might recall the classic "You've got mail" movie. That was from the AOL app which loaded after connecting.
aside: It's crazy how AOL could have become Facebook. AIM chat was the main focus - but AIM had "profiles" which you could customize, and I did - even with daily status updates. Modern Facebook is basically the reverse - profiles with a chat attached.
AOL started off as something different from an ISP.
Like Prodigy and Compuserve and GEnie and some others, it was an on-line information system. Chat, message boards, news, stock quotes, (limited) shopping, games, software downloads, etc. But all within a single system. Kind of like a nationwide/global BBS, but with a GUI interface. In the 80s, all these systems were independent, in the early 90s they got internet email, and the mid 90s added web browsers and (eventually) real tcp/ip.
Yes. I worked for the world's largest ISPs (NETCOM (#1), which merged with Mindspring (which was considered #2), which merged with EarthLink (the previous #3, then #2 to the post-NETCOM Mindspring). It was funny, in hindsight, that even though AOL had already adopted TCP/IP and integrated an "Internet Gateway" functionality and had more subscribers than even the combined #1, 2, and 3 rollup I just described, at no time did anyone in the industry actually consider AOL to be an ISP, so the "#1" in size distinction went to the companies mentioned. AOL, deserved or not, never really escaped their second class designation, which also tended to taint their users as they ventured on to the larger internet.
All that said, I still communicate with one person who maintains their aol.com email address to this day in spite of it all.
Mindspring, I haven't read that in a long time.
Didn't they try to come back as a brand when free ad-supported dialups became a thing for a bit?
I dunno. I left around 1999, just before the EarthLink merger.
Related, while doing a quick search to see if I could learn anything about what you described I found Wikipedia quoting NYT as writing about EarthLink in 2000: "second largest Internet service provider after America Online". I guess it was around y2k when aol finally got its ISP (and this its "world's largest") designation by the world at large. :)
Wildcat bbs implemented tcp/ip around 1995 but by that point AOL had won. Had wildcat came out with tcp/ip support maybe even a year earlier, the “internet” would be a wildly different place today
Unlikely. MajorBBS had the ability to act as a SLIP/PPP connection back in 1993-1994 but most people would have still gone with a full ISP.
Wildcat was unique because it still required you to interact with the BBS. With majorbbs the bbs would be relegated to an internet provider and their bbs would disappear.
Wildcat was like aol for bbs but it immediately brought users to a web browser so they could get internet connectivity while still getting a pop up of the BBs’ services.
What you are missing is that “full isp’s” did not exist until about 1996, 1997. And even then AOL and secondarily Compuserve where the go to providers. Wildcat absolutely challenged that status quo in an independent manner
I was young during the era, your probably right. I was just sharing my experience.
AOL was an "online service", internet connectivity was provided starting in the mid-90s but the real value was in their proprietary members-only services. An online service was more or less a large BBS you dialed into via modem, the first of which could be accessed with an ordinary telecoms program but later ones like AOL and Prodigy required special client software that could decode the proprietary protocol allowing the service to send graphics, menus, and other information to present a UI to the user.
Did the AOL protocol (whatever the AOL app itself used for chat etc.) go over TCP/IP, or was that its own network, parallel to the internet?
Was the limitation that you couldn't use AOL from a different ISP artificial (whitelisted IP ranges, no routing to relevant addresses from the outside), or did it actually use an "internetless" protocol that you just couldn't emulate if all you had was the internet?
I vaguely remember reading somewhere that internet access was a late addition to AOL, hence the question.
AOL was it's own network, completely parallel to the internet. It didn't use TCP/IP, it used a propritary transport called P3 - heavily optimized for dialup.
They had their own dedicated client app, where each page loaded in its own window. It didn't use HTML, it used something called "Rainman". URLs weren't a thing, you accessed "channels" (pages) by entering a specific "keyword".
Later on, in 1993, they added support for Usenet (see: "Eternal September"). Then in 1994 they added support for Gopher and WWW. So you could dial into the AOL client, and then open a regular web browser. But for most home users, there was more content in the AOL walled garden, so the web was something of a curiosity at first.
So to answer your question: It wasn't an artificial limitation. AOL was designed in a way that was fundamentally alien to the way the Internet + Web evolved.
(At some point, you could connect to AOL over TCP/IP - useful if you had a broadband Internet connection but still wanted access to content on the AOL network. This was done by encapsulating P3 inside a TCP/IP header. You still had to use the AOL client software and have an AOL membership.)
I was pretty young at the time, but I think it started as basically a BBS. With an Internet backbone so a bunch of local numbers could all access the same server. They added Internet access later, and initially only via their own browser.
I admit I was a young child during the AOL-mailer-cd era. I don't really know what came before.
3.5" floppies that you would put scotch tape over to save your homework assignments on, to show your prowess in hypercard on the Mac classic.
In the early 1990s, back before anyone was ever sure if this Internet thing would ever take off outside of academic communities (and also ostensibly before Sir Tim-Berners Lee invented the World Wide Web), America Online was a proprietary online community that was reached via dial-up modem over the telephone network.
AOL allowed their users to interact with eachother (chats, forums, multiplayer games), read news, and otherwise kill some time. It was a walled garden that required both money and special software to access.
There were other paid services that were vaguely similar, each with different shapes for how the walls of their respective gardens were arranged. In the US, some of these competing services were CompuServe, Prodigy, GEnie, and Delphi.
Of all of these, AOL became the most-broadly known. As time moved on, they increasingly would mail out floppy disks with their software on what seemed like a continuous basis, with flashy color brochures, to millions of homes. (Some weeks I'd wind up with as many as 3 or 4 new AOL disks to use for whatever, delivered right to the mailbox on the front porch. Later, they'd send CD-ROMs instead that were most-useful as drink coasters.)
These services each vied to get as many users locked into their garden as possible, which was important to them because they tended to be metered services: Unlike something like a Netflix or Hulu streaming account, the more time a person spent using these services, the more money they had to spend.
And then, September came again -- and it never ended[1]. The walls of the gardens began to open up and users of these proprietary services began being exposed to what the greater Internet had to offer.
But at the same time, AOL grew. They got proper-fucking big. They went from being a cheeky dialup service with a friendly interface and some pervasive advertising campaigns to buying Time Warner for $182 billion.
And today, all of that business is just kind of a dusty memory.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
It was an "online service", basically a dedicated client and a curated experience before the internet and web standardized things.
When you logged in, you'd get a "Welcome" screen with news, if you had any mail, etc. Most of AOL was organized into "Channels" which were different sections focused on things like Sports or Kids.
You could jump to a channel with a keyword, somewhat like a URL.
The channels looked somewhat like hypercard decks. Everything was designed to load fast on a slow modem and assets were shipped with the client, typically on floppy or CD. Occasionally a channel would download an "art pack" which could take 5-10 minutes, but this was rare.
After AOL 2.6 or so it had internet functionality and became an ISP. You still needed to use the AOL software to dial in (it didn't use PPP like others) but otherwise it worked fine.
It was the easiest "one of those" at the time, competing with CompuServe and Prodigy. Apple had a rebranded AOL briefly called eWorld.
Finally I can get those 100 free hours I was promised
I learned the concept of social engineering in middle school through those AOL CDs. There was a culture of making proggies and learning about the inner workings of how AOL the program and the company worked if you were interested and knew where to look.
If you called into a certain department at AOL, you could tell them you were a business and would like to put out their CDs for display. So long as the order was for under 1000 or so they would send them to you, for free, directly to the address of the "business".
I also learned in middle school that CDs sting but don't really hurt and the various ways to launch attacks in a CD war with friends and classmates. You throw CDs vertical to be precise and sideways for a crazy flight path to confuse your opponents.
Sadly I also discovered that all the racist didn't die in the 70s, as the owner of one of the largest AOL hacking discussion forums I frequented loved to talk about how he would move if a black family ever moved into his neighborhood.
The world wide web, information super highway.
Love the Mac emulator, what do they use for that?
Landing page design very much gives off that it was vibe coded by Claude. It has those unique specifics of all Claude designs.
The new compuserv is google.
The new AOL is meta.
That is an interesting (and surprisingly accurate) way of framing it.
Spotlight on the fact we are going back to the dark age of global networking...
"Zerocool" nice touch :-)
oh wow, I was just playing with all the dialtone frequencies in a little ios app:
https://i.imgur.com/LGXEU7z.mp4
I really miss those sounds. Learned so much about all the different frequencies. No to get too woo-woo but did you know each tone is actually two frequencies a high and low one?
The video above shows dialing either LOVE or FEAR. Not sure where this app is going but I had this idea to help catch myself whenever I'm following fear vs love.
When you think about how a touchtone phone works, it makes sense. :)
Amazing work! Started playing Civ on the VM and wasted 3 hours lol
Just one more turn before my family can send and receive phone calls on the landline.
Now make a Cosmic Conquest bot for it... ;-)