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The End of AOL Dial-Up: Professor Mar Hicks Tells All
On September 30, America Online (AOL) is pulling the plug on its dial-up internet service, marking the end of an era in computer history. We spoke with technology historian and Associate Professor of Data Science Mar Hicks about how AOL dial-up changed the internet forever — and what its departure signifies for the fast paced, tech-obsessed world we now occupy.
Q: How did AOL dial-up change how we access the internet?
Hicks: AOL was one of the most ubiquitous early internet providers. Its dial-up services, which you could install on your home desktop computer via a free CD-ROM, allowed ordinary and not overly tech savvy people to access the internet in a straightforward and relatively easy way. These CD-ROMs were ubiquitous. For many years you’d see free stacks of them at the local grocery store, or they’d come unsolicited in the mail, or be included with the ads in the Sunday newspaper. They made the internet more well known and more approachable to many folks who had maybe never heard of it before or only had a vague understanding of what it was.
Q: When we think of AOL, we immediately hear the iconic sound of dial-up internet. Why exactly did it make that noise?
Hicks: The robotic screaming that we used to hear when we got online with a dial-up modem was a kind of hailing procedure between two machines that were trying to communicate. The initial screeches in this “handshake” between your computer’s modem and the network you were trying to access consisted of information about the type of connection and connection speed. The later sounds represented the process of negotiating and testing the data connection.
Q: How did broadband become a major competitor to AOL’s dial-up internet?
Hicks: Broadband internet requires two things to compete with dial-up: more infrastructure (wires in the ground) and a lower price. Dial-up was fairly cheap and plentiful because the phone lines that it used for infrastructure were already ubiquitous, going to all homes and businesses. And, people were already paying for a phone line, so it didn’t represent much additional expense, even though you did have to pay for AOL services. Early broadband was limited in terms of availability and also expensive for the average person, who probably wasn’t online much outside of work. Once the network infrastructure for broadband became more available and companies could start to rely on economies of scale in terms of subscribers, prices decreased and demand grew. The demand to be online more often and at faster speeds was as much, or more, manufactured by advances in infrastructure as it was by pre-existing consumer demand.
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Q: Does AOL’s dial-up departure mark the shift from the internet as a place we visited to something inseparable from daily life?
A: Yes, the move from dial-up internet access to always-on Ethernet, broadband, and Wi-Fi has really changed the way we think about “going online.” The “going” part is nearly seamless for most people now, and the online part is always on. The internet is not so much a place anymore as it is a utility, the same way electricity and water (if we’re fortunate) in our homes are. The end of AOL dial-up definitely represents the end of an era, although it’s an era that I’d argue has been in the rear-view mirror for many people for quite some time now.
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Q: What role did AOL chat rooms play in the history of computer dating, and how do we see their influence in today’s apps?
A: Chat rooms varied a lot, but the kind that kicked off the action in the film could maybe be described as the online equivalent of the local cafe or diner — or even grocery store — where the barrier to speaking to folks was low and so a variety of friendly and more-than-friendly interactions bloomed. In a way, it was very old-fashioned, like writing short letters back and forth.
In the 19th century, in many countries, there used to be postal deliveries multiple times per day so that you could write to someone in the morning and receive a reply by the evening. Young women of certain classes were often forbidden from sending letters unsupervised because doing so could put them in contact with men in ways that were considered improper at the time. So, the history of both asynchronous and synchronous messaging has always been intertwined with ideas about dating, romance, and even marriage. Chat rooms and the private messaging features built in to all dating apps today are modern steps in this very long history of how communication technologies have long been important for socializing.
Fun fact: This movie is actually based on a Hungarian play from the 1930s in which two people who work together and are always fighting don’t realize that they’re also each other’s beloved pen pals. Although we often think of face-to-face interactions as the “standard” of communication, the reality is that remote technologies — from postal mail to telegraphs to telephones to DMs — have long been critical in keeping us connected and in community with each other for a very long time.
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Mar Hicks does research on the history of computing, labor, and technology. Hicks studies how collective understandings of progress are defined by competing discourses of social value and economic productivity, and how technologies often hide regressive ideals while espousing "revolutionary" or "disruptive" goals. Hicks is currently working on a book about the history of the dot-com boom and bust and how that has led to many of our current technological issues. Hicks's multiple-award-winning first book, "Programmed Inequality" (MIT Press, 2017), looks at how the British lost their early lead in computing by discarding women computer workers, and what this cautionary tale can tell us about current issues in high tech. Hicks is also co-editor of the book "Your Computer Is On Fire" (MIT Press, 2021), a volume of essays about how we can begin to fix our broken high-tech infrastructures.
Before joining UVA, Hicks was Associate Professor of History of Technology at Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, and was a fellow at the National Humanities Center in 2018-2019. Hicks holds a Ph.D. and M.A. from Duke University in History, and a B.A. in History from Harvard. More information can be found at: marhicks.com.
