ZDNET’s key takeaways
- Generation X says goodbye to the past.
- Old technology can linger long after you thought it was dead and done.
- AOL, once a technology giant, is now little more than a footnote.
For millions of people who first heard “You’ve got mail” over crackling phone lines, an iconic chapter in digital history is coming to a close. AOL, also known as America Online, has announced it will shut down its dial-up internet service on September 30, 2025, effectively retiring a technology that was once synonymous with getting online.
You’ve got mail
Even if you’ve never used it, AOL became synonymous with the early days of the popular internet, thanks to the rom-com “You’ve Got Mail,” starring Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan. The movie was a cultural touchstone.
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AOL is the last of the services, such as CompuServe, GEnie, and Prodigy, which enabled people to go online before the Commercial Internet Exchange and the web started us on our way to the online experience we know today. AOL, however, unlike its rivals, embraced the internet rather than trying to fight it.
The result was that AOL’s dial-up network introduced the internet to households across the country in the 1990s. From 1995’s million users, AOL grew to over 34 million subscribers by 1997. The distinctive sounds of a modem connecting were as well-known as the company’s ubiquitous CDs, which promised hours of free internet when tossed into millions of mailboxes.
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The company dreamed then that, after its merger with Time-Warner, it would be worth billions more. At the time, the integration of the firms was the largest corporate merger in the US. In January 2000, AOL was the US’s biggest Internet Service Provider (ISP) and was worth billions. In March of that year, the dot-com crash helped turn dreams into nightmares.
Dial-up is barely hanging on
As broadband, cable, and fiber-optic connections swept across the country, speeds soared, and dial-up became a relic. Dial-up is barely hanging on, mostly in rural pockets where deployment of modern internet broadband has lagged.
Even now, tens of thousands of users still access the internet via their AOL modem accounts. While AOL only says that it “routinely evaluates its products and services and has decided to discontinue Dial-up Internet,” I strongly suspect the death knell was the rise of high-speed, albeit more expensive, internet services such as Starlink and T-Mobile 5G Broadband, which can deliver high-speed broadband to rural areas.
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According to the 2020 census, there are still 163,000 dial-up users. To keep these users connected, a handful of ISPs offer dial-up service. These ISPs are DSL Extreme, Juno, and NetZero. Whether these providers offer a local phone number in your area is another question entirely.
Fun while it lasted
AOL’s announcement has sparked a wave of online nostalgia. For many, the news triggered memories of first web experiences, chat rooms filled with amateur sites and animated GIFs, and the days when picking up the landline meant getting booted offline.
Thanks to my school and then my government connections, I was using the internet long before AOL came on the scene. As someone who was an old guy on the net even then, I recall how we’d make fun of all those noobs coming in via AOL, who didn’t know the first thing about Usenet groups, Gopher, and other early internet services. Now, those memories are only footnotes to history. If you live long enough, everything that was once new turns old.
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As for AOL, the company has been bounced from owner to owner and has consistently declined. AOL became part of Verizon in 2015, then merged with Yahoo, and was later sold to Apollo Global Management in 2021. Now, with the retirement of dial-up, AOL joins other digital mainstays in closing the books on the early internet, following services like AOL’s once wildly popular instant messenger service AIM, Skype, and Internet Explorer.
AOL itself is still around, offering email, and that’s about it. As it happens, I have two good friends who are still using their aol.com email addresses. How long they’ll be able to keep those accounts is another matter. It won’t surprise me if those last remnants of the once ubiquitous online service will soon disappear as well.
I’m sorry to see dial-up go. It was great fun while it lasted. And I’ll always smile when I hear a modem connecting.
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