Maybe you just really need unhinged mode for verisimilitude

AOL was your ISP - you would connect via your telephone line instead of cable/fiber. Your modem would call their number and establish a connection. No one else could use the phone while you were online.

When you connected, it would load the AOL application which contained most of what AOL offered - built in AIM (AOL instant messaging), a web browser, group chats, keyword search, email, etc.

You were still connected to the internet and could use alternate browsers, but most people stayed inside the AOL app and ecosystem. Keywords were a time before search, where companies could buy keywords (from AOL) and then when people searched them they would show up. It was kinda a separate system from DNS that AOL tried to profit from.

You had competitors like Prodigy and CompuServe offering similar dial-up + custom app offers.

You wouldn't use the AOL app without having AOL dial-up service (although I recall them offering it separately late in its life, bring your own internet). People thought "AOL" was the internet. You might recall the classic "You've got mail" movie. That was from the AOL app which loaded after connecting.

aside: It's crazy how AOL could have become Facebook. AIM chat was the main focus - but AIM had "profiles" which you could customize, and I did - even with daily status updates. Modern Facebook is basically the reverse - profiles with a chat attached.

It was an "online service", basically a dedicated client and a curated experience before the internet and web standardized things.

When you logged in, you'd get a "Welcome" screen with news, if you had any mail, etc. Most of AOL was organized into "Channels" which were different sections focused on things like Sports or Kids.

You could jump to a channel with a keyword, somewhat like a URL.

The channels looked somewhat like hypercard decks. Everything was designed to load fast on a slow modem and assets were shipped with the client, typically on floppy or CD. Occasionally a channel would download an "art pack" which could take 5-10 minutes, but this was rare.

After AOL 2.6 or so it had internet functionality and became an ISP. You still needed to use the AOL software to dial in (it didn't use PPP like others) but otherwise it worked fine.

It was the easiest "one of those" at the time, competing with CompuServe and Prodigy. Apple had a rebranded AOL briefly called eWorld.

In the early 1990s, back before anyone was ever sure if this Internet thing would ever take off outside of academic communities (and also ostensibly before Sir Tim-Berners Lee invented the World Wide Web), America Online was a proprietary online community that was reached via dial-up modem over the telephone network.

AOL allowed their users to interact with eachother (chats, forums, multiplayer games), read news, and otherwise kill some time. It was a walled garden that required both money and special software to access.

There were other paid services that were vaguely similar, each with different shapes for how the walls of their respective gardens were arranged. In the US, some of these competing services were CompuServe, Prodigy, GEnie, and Delphi.

Of all of these, AOL became the most-broadly known. As time moved on, they increasingly would mail out floppy discs with their software to millions of households on what seemed like a continuous basis, with flashy color brochures, to millions of homes. (Some weeks I'd wind up with as many as 3 or 4 new AOL disks to use for whatever, delivered right to the mailbox on the front porch. Later, they'd send CD-ROMs instead that were most-useful as drink coasters.)

These services each vied to get as many users locked into their garden as possible, which was important to them because they tended to be metered services: Unlike something like a Netflix or Hulu streaming account, the more time a person spent using these services, the more money they had to spend.

And then, September came again -- and it never ended[1]. The walls of the gardens began to open up and users of these proprietary services began being exposed to what the greater Internet had to offer.

But at the same time, AOL grew. They got proper-fucking big. They went from being a cheeky dialup service with a friendly interface and some pervasive advertising campaigns to buying Time Warner for $182 billion.

And today, all of that business is just kind of a dusty memory.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September