An internet era is coming to an end as AOL announces that it will shut down its dial-up service on September 20, 2025. The company says that the service, along with its associated software and AOL Shield browser, will no longer be supported.
If you're my age (old as dirt), you may remember a time when the internet wasn't something that was always there, constantly talking to all your devices as they downloaded updates and uploaded data. It was something that you had to go out of your way to access through an odd ritual.
To use it, you had to have a personal computer hooked to a thing called a modem that was, in turn, plugged into the phone line. That's a landline, by the way, which you can ask your grandparents about. It was like a smartphone, only it was mainly just for audio calls and was tied to the wall, often in its own special room in the house.
The good news is that you could then (sort of) surf the internet. Unless, that is, someone else in the house wanted to use the phone. Then you had to start all over again.
Despite its frustrations, dial-up rapidly became popular. Even at 56 kbps, where downloading a single image was a triumph, it helped fuel the first major tech boom of the 1990s, known as the Dotcom Bubble.
Central to this was America Online, later known simply as AOL. Founded in 1983 as a game downloading service, it morphed in 1991 into a user-friendly internet provider aimed at people who were new to computers, which was pretty much everyone at the time.
AOL was famous for its relentless marketing campaign that involved mailing out millions upon millions of CD-ROMs packed with free software tto help neophytes log onto the internet and (no surprise) sign up for AOL. These discs became something of a cultural joke, yet by 1995 the company had three million customers – and by 2000, 20 million, representing 60% of all US internet traffic.
No wonder AOL’s “You’ve got mail” notification became a cultural catchphrase, and many people at the time believed AOL was the internet.
Fast forward to 2025, and the world has moved on. Once a juggernaut so dominant it could swallow Time Warner, AOL was bought by Verizon in 2015 for a fraction of its former value. Today, it's a subsidiary brand of Yahoo, itself a dotcom dinosaur.
As to dial-up? It's lingered thanks to rural users, as a backup uploader for satellite systems, and for other niche purposes. But it’s now estimated that the end of AOL dial-up will probably only affect a few thousand people – some of whom are probably still logging on using a Compaq Presario.
A bit like a great uncle of mine who still had a battery-powered crank phone on his farm in 1970. Confused the exchange no end.
Source: AOL
