Seeing the list of contacts for delegated subdomains reminds me of a time when there were a lot more local ISP's. Inreach.com for Stockton, lodinet (possibly an ISP?) for Lodi..

But the one that really shocked me was https://www.snowcrest.com/mysc/ - which seems to still be up and running?? I wonder if the login page for webmail (ISP-provided email was a thing! And even hosting space!) still works.

https://web.archive.org/web/20090909141302/http://neustar.us...

Here in the Boston area, the first commercial ISP https://www.theworld.com/ appears to still be up and running, and is similarly frozen in time.

What a strange time machine.

The website offered to sell unlimited dialup for me, in Ohio, using a local phone number.

I Googled that number, and it appears that it may belong to another (related? different?) time machine: https://www.panix.com/dialup/

I worked at a tiny ISP in 2000. We had nationwide (maybe worldwide?) dialups through MegaPoP [1]; they would passthrough auth for user@dgx.net to our radius server, and charge us (IIRC) $5 for each user that successfully authenticated every month. I think we charged $10/month for local dialup only (where they called into our T1 modem bank) and $20/month for nationwide dialup... at least until our modem bank T1 failed and we couldn't get the telco to fix it so we just pushed everyone to the megapop numbers.

[1] I have no idea what they're called now. There's a huge chain of acquisitions. They may have stopped serving this market, but someone still is.

Neat! I didn't know how that worked. The little ISP I used to do some things for had physical POPs in different cities and AFAIK never went with Megapop or similar. Eventually, their POPs became all-in-one card cage devices that took a combination of PRI and T1 circuits and screwed them together with PPP, which seemed quite highly integrated to me at that time.

It does look like these may be Starnet/Megapop numbers, based on the panix.motd.megapop newsgroup mentioned on Panix's website. I did spend a minute trying to find who (if anyone) is steering the remaining dregs of Megapop, but I didn't make it very far.

Very curious if you would actually get a dialup number that worked if you filled out the paperwork. I guess probably not? But I have no idea.

I called a couple of them that were nearby and a modem answered.

I'm not interested in dialup data services at all at this point in 2026. I have no remaining means with which to use such a thing. The last cell phone I had that could act like a modem got retired in 2009 and the last time I had a dialtone in my house was 2010.

But if I had to guess, then I'd guess that these time machines are still operational.

What a blast from the past. I completely forgot that I was a The World customer way back when.

Interesting that they still have an old school webcam.

And now it's getting well stress tested

Maybe you should try one of the other numbers at https://www.snowcrest.com/dialup/numbers.php - most support v.92!