Most of us probably moved on from dial-up decades ago, but AOL, or as most people who grew up in the ‘90s and early aughts might remember it, America Online, is only just now in 2025 fully discontinuing the service. For the young’uns among us, dial-up is a wired internet connection that monopolizes your phone line–this dates back to when most people’s primary telephone service was over landline–in exchange for pretty slow internet speeds by today’s standards. Nowadays most people use broadband internet, so dial-up has become less and less common, but somehow, AOL has kept its service going for decades. It’s finally officially shutting down on September 30.
For most people, this is a moment of “oh, I didn’t realize people were still using dial-up,” but according to the Census Bureau, an estimated 163,401 households were operating on dial-up as of 2023. I wouldn’t be surprised if most of those homes are older people who only use the internet for things like email and the occasional Google search.
Whatever the case, if you were alive and alert in the ‘90s, you were likely very aware of AOL and its internet services. And even if you weren’t alive then, you’ve probably heard the “You’ve got mail’ sound effect AOL played out of your speakers when you got a new email. Good lord, imagining that clip playing with the frequency at which the average 2025 inbox receives email sounds miserable. I suppose it’s just an example of how far the internet has come since AOL’s heyday.
My family couldn’t afford dial-up until I was near the end of elementary school, so a lot of my early dial-up memories are of getting online at a family friend’s house or my uncle’s place to print out pictures of Shadow the Hedgehog for my school binder and watch music videos that took so long to buffer they looked like slideshows. A lot of people who are a bit older than me probably have memories of playing online games on dial-up, but its unreliability is also part of why in-person LAN parties were so prominent back then. Nowadays, the internet has gotten good enough that we create virtual facsimiles of what used to be our workarounds for poor internet. Discord calls and online lobbies are another part of the average gamer’s life, so somehow we’ve come full circle. But while the internet has long since outpaced dial-up’s capabilities, it’s hard to overstate just how prominent AOL and its services were.
AOL’s folksy “You’ve got mail” voice clip, its Instant Messenger app, and the sound of a modem screaming to establish a dial-up connection are nearly as synonymous with ‘90s nostalgia as boy bands, the original 151 Pokemon, and the Internet Explorer logo. AOL’s dial-up, and the assortment of chatrooms and services it offered, were so embedded in the public image of the internet that our cultural perception of it as a kind of ISP/online hub has outlasted its actual providing of internet service.
Once it seemed poised to take over the world, buying Time Warner in 2001 in what was then the largest corporate merger in history. But those days are long gone. Did you know AOL merged with news website and search engine Yahoo! in 2015, and is now mostly an aggregate site? It’s a bit sad that something that was once so unifying as a cultural artifact is now unrecognizable. AOL’s shift is the result of decades of changing hands, private equity fuckery, and massive changes in the market. It turns out even the biggest businesses can crater. If you live long enough, you, too, can outlive corporate gods as they topple into the abyss.
