They've also recently discontinued dialup.
According to ChatGPT, the final AOL free trial CDs were in 2006.
I know a lot of people that were previously unhappy with their old ISP, went to LEO, and then returned to their old ISP within 1-3 months.
Feels like it would be a fun marketing gag.
I still have a SATA CD/BD-ROM drive in my main PC system under the desk, not because I need or use it much but because the system is in an older tower PC case on wheels that I keep putting new mobos in because it's high-quality, flexible, roomy, quiet and has a ton of slide-out media bays. The CD-ROM has just stayed installed in the case as new mobos get installed and there's always extra SATA ports to plug it into.
RIP AOL dial up. Your free trial CD's provided many a day of comfort to my coffee mug over the years.
http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/S/September-that-never-ended...
I never had it myself, but their dialup service either forced or heavily pushed their own browser, which encouraged the use of AOL keywords rather than URLs. Always thought of this as major negative and the start of heavy corporate control over the web. Seeing commercials list AOL keywords instead of their own websites annoyed me a lot, as did the transition to using myspace then facebook then twitter the instagram etc.
On the other hand, I liked AOL Instant Messenger a lot. It used XMPP so I could use other IM clients most of the time (namely Adium). On top of that, AOL Instant Messenger's Direct Connect feature was by far the easiest way to send files of any size* to your friends. Far more convenient than much of what exists today.
* Google suggests this limit may have been 4GB, but that was basically limitless in the 90s and early 2000s
I remember I had a pluging for Trillian that allowed me to write code to script it in Tcl. And then a plugin written in Tcl that allowed me to quicksearch my contacts. Good times.
Pre-Internet AOL was like Yahoo in the 2000s which aped it on the Internet. Sort of a hybrid syndication machine like a magazine/newspaper/tv hybrid.
There was a few similar services, Prodigy was the one my family used. They basically did web commerce before the web. My dad even did banking. Prodigy was a joint venture between Sears and IBM and used an x.25 network behind the scenes powered by AS/400 iirc.
My entire youth was making that mistake! I'm glad to see I wasn't the only one.
Dial up was a huge cash cow because of the remaining subscribers who never cancelled, likely because they forgot or gave up trying, and AOL made it famously hard to do so.
I don't know why we would do that though. Maybe someone else can riff off this idea.
edm0nd•2h ago
ashleyn•2h ago
matja•1h ago
brewtide•1h ago
Either way, the memories!
andrepd•34m ago
matja•19m ago
pimlottc•5m ago
esafak•1h ago
Loughla•45m ago
Simpler times, I guess?
WD-42•1h ago
edm0nd•1h ago
chrisco255•49m ago