Posted on 08/11/2025 11:37:41 AM PDT by Olog-hai
AOL, once a dominant force in the early days of the Internet, has announced the end of its dial-up Internet service, marking the closure of a significant chapter in the history of online connectivity.
Apple Inside reports that after more than four decades of providing dial-up Internet access to millions of users worldwide, American Online has decided to discontinue its iconic service. The company, which started as a very early Apple service in the 1980s, played a crucial role in ushering in the Internet age for countless individuals. Although many readers will be surprised to learn that dial-up internet was still available in the era of broadband and 5G, the company reportedly had thousands of dial-up customers remaining.
In a recent support page update, AOL informed customers that its dial-up service, along with its associated software, AOL Dialer and AOL Shield, will be discontinued on September 30, 2025. The company stated that it routinely evaluates its products and services but did not disclose the specific reasons behind the decision to end dial-up access. However, the ubiquity of faster, more modern Internet connections is likely the primary factor. …
(Excerpt) Read more at breitbart.com ...
That gritty, grindy, connection sound stays in your ears for decades.
I hear that AOL is going to start selling buggy whips.
Ah, yes. Dial-up Internet service. I remember it well.
Back then, the www prefix stood for “world-wide wait”.
Anyway, I blame Al Gore for that. When he invented the Internet he should included provisions to make it faster from the get-go.
“the company reportedly had thousands of dial-up customers remaining.”
Are these people who died or went into dementia-care and no one canceled their subscription? I just can’t imagine today’s internet being functional dialing up from a 56k modem.
Nothing says “I’m an idiot” quite like “@aol.com.”
Otherwise known as AOHell.com
It was a happy day on the rare occasion that I could dial in at 56k.
Ahhh, AOL. Every 1990s teen/young man’s indroduction to black and white ASCII nudie pics. (which were still rated PG because you really couldn’t see anything)
But Jim won’t be able to log onto the forum.
Oh yes, I worked for eWorld many years ago.
Remember in the mid to late 1990’s where the average person would describe a website by saying:
“Double-you, Double-you, Double-you”
Back in the dial-up days I used the Dow Jones service for online access. I still remember how cool it was to explore various BBS systems. They all had creative names, some sounding a little mysterious, like “The Cave”, and I sometimes heard about new ones from talking to other people who hung out at the local computer store (another anachronism). I was really into Atari 8-bit computers back then, and it was almost magical to be able to dial into an Atari BBS and download freeware, demos, etc. (I plead the Fifth on whether any pirated games ever changed hands.) I really miss the feel of home computing in general in that era. Until IBM came along and ruined it, every new machine that came out felt like a piece of alien technology to be investigated and discovered. We spent many hours digging into the new hardware to see what it was capable of, and it was exciting because every new machine was so proprietary, with all kinds of new, never before seen custom chips inside.
Once computers became homogenous commodities, computing became pretty boring by comparison, though in the long run it was necessary to standardize things.
Downloading “Gone With The Wind”, almost done!............................
I had it and still have an AOL email address.
It’s what got me on the internet in 1995. But you can’t stop progress. Dial up went the way of the floppy disk and the printer driver.
GooGoo limits the number of email accounts you can have from your phone number. We needed another so we went back to open an AOL email account and it works (not quite as nicely as GooGoo’s, AOL could polish theirs with just a little programming work... but it is still functional)
AOL has zero effective user assistance. this is a very very very serious omission. a working chat function and an 800 number would enable AOL to recapture a significant market share imho.
Those are still there. They are selected and loaded automatically.
Oh man, I had one more, inactivated CD to use...
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