The Dialup Log / Issue 3: We're in the thick of autumn.

Hello Dialers, it is November! We have now kicked into autumn feels, I live in (almost) sunny California, but I sometimes miss the cold fall/winter of New York and Michigan. Especially, when I want a nice cozy place to sip some coffee.

Can not believe this is the third issue of The Dialup Log! Didn’t think I had it in me to continue with the writing, but I really enjoy writing what I’ve been up to. This is November 2025 / Issue 3 and we just have a few updates on hats and designs.

I feel at least for the first 10 issues, I’ll need to explain what’s generally included in these newsletters. I mostly share about the behind the desk workings, which will be design ideas in the works and research I’ve come a crossed. This week I’ve been working on setting up shop mostly, but I did get my hands into a few designs, lot of research, and did get a few anticipated prints.

Michael from The Dialup Internet

Other things I’ve been working on are: 1) redesigning Rocky the Office Assistant, for that cute curve on the nose 2) Been getting requests/ideas and have worked a few designs like PlayNet and started research on Internet in a Box as well as LYCOS, which I just assumed had trademark, but looking it again, it doesn’t. Specifically for LYCOS, I’m currently trying to figure out how the website looked in the 90s and early 2000s, especially the dog.

Initially, I was worried as I printed the wrong design. The design I wanted to print was one with a black border. While in the end, I did print out the black border, however the background sky had the colors switched and I might need to redo it to get the design right. Yet, the current design still looks great so I’ll be soft launching the AltaVista trucker hat within a week.

Other than that, the embroidery looks great on the trucker hat. I had to reduce the colors for the AltaVista’s mountain range, and Patagonia logo helped a bunch. I mean you can see that I took a lot of inspiration from it. Would love to experiment more with the color so it retains more of that AltaVista website feeling. I’d feel the sky colors can be more experimental to be visually captivating, since I do remember they used a lot of yellow.

I just had to have another Microsoft related design and the MSN explorer’s butterfly icon was perfect. And this posed an interesting problem: while the butterfly icon itself is made up of seven colors; the embroidery machine in use could only do six. My solution was to use the color of the hat to fill in the missing color and I think it works really well. I mean I love the cotton colors from the low-profile baseball hats from OTTO® and the blue color fits perfectly with the MSN butterfly or explorer icon.

I don’t know why, but I really am fond of this logo symbol. Perhaps it’s because it was always the mark on the Logitech mouse for our i486 desktop computer. Perhaps the logo symbol was simply a delight to watch while waiting for computers to boot up and websites to load at 2KB per second. Whatever it was, this image is imprinted in my mind as literally a symbol to mark the early personal computer/internet era in the 90s.

I printed this on a washed cap that had a green brim to match the logo mark. And it looks fine as in super fine.

Also here’s a fine article from 2015 about the origins of the logo mark: Gizmodo article. Here’s an excerpt:

And I had a bunch of reminders for failed internet companies; and one of the hardest one to find actual screenshots for was PlayNet, an online game service before early internet.

Here’s an article about PlayNet back in the day:

What’s crazy is that PlayNet software eventually became AOL. I think LGR’s Videos explains the history really well.

In a nutshell, PlayNet for Commodore 64 PC was initially successful but had troubles growing, so sold licensed for the software to then Quantum Computer Services. Quantum Computer Services modified PlayNet to become Quantum Link or Q-Link for short. Quantum Link was a huge success and by 1986 had about 50,000 subscribers, but still on the Commodore PCs. This started to bring in other companies for collaboration. First was LucasFilm Games, whom created Habitat an MMORPG to run online on Q-Link. Fun fact, software built Habitat became SCUMM. Second was Apple, Apple wanted their online service AppleLink (then only internal usage) to find success in the public and Quantum Computer Services wanted to find more success with the masses outside of the Commodore PCs. Both parties agreed to create a Home Computer version of AppleLink based on Quantum Link’s protocols. In short, partnership with Apple was financially exhausting, and after finding mild success with the product (although a very good product: AppleLink: Personal Edition) eventually they stopped. However, Quantum Computer Services revisited AppleLink: Personal Edition and tweaked it which became America Online, the beginnings of AOL.

This newsletter just became a summary of an archival essay, but hope you enjoyed the history as much as I researched into all this. Oh, but I forgot to show the PlayNet design, here it is:

The behind the desk section is information heavy, I know. Below are magazine ads on fashion and games, so less info to read, hopefully.

Flipping through these 90s magazines and their ads, you feel back then it was more about the storytelling and copywriting. I’d argue copywriting was done better, you actually enjoy reading them compare to today’s ads. I’m trying to study up on writing better ads and looking through magazines gives you much to think about. I should compare it with modern era magazines too.

I did write last issue about why I’m drawn to the 90s failed early internet companies. I’d like The Dialup Internet’s gear to represent what these companies and the ads were doing back then, rooting for the people. Yes, they were selling products, but it was always focused on the end-users, because in the end it was also them who used the products. I think that’s why I find such joy in them, and particularly enjoy my imagination going off when I see ads and product boxes from those era. It invites me to think about what more I can do with their products rather than how I can be a service to the companies. And yes, I’m brainstorming while I’m writing the newsletter. But yeah, this sounds like a good direction for The Dialup Internet.

This has been a fun issue going through history and actually learning where the AOL software originated from, and simply because I followed up on a comment. I also hope you found useful information in this newsletter. I’m still figuring out what this newsletter can be so if you have any feedbacks or just wanna say hi you can email me anytime with the email below!

As always thanks for reading all the way through! And I’ll be signing off! If you ever have questions or suggestions or photos of hats or early internet company gear send me an email at

Just to mention at least for the first few issues that no AI was used to write this.