AOL did a lot of pioneering work in large scale persistent networks, databases, load balancing, and searching. At the time, there had never been a network like that, with 10M+ concurrent users with billions of messages sent daily.
The colossal hubris of management and failure to adapt are a different story. Imagine if they had given up on the client application two years earlier and instead focused on making an open network, giving everyone access to their content. But no, they kept farking that chicken.

There is some discount shoe chain where you hear a modem handshake every time you use a credit card.

Don't forget the patent on busy signals and getting you so frustrated you use the 800 number that charges your account extra per minute.

How long ago was it that the AOL - Time Warner merger was the biggest invention since sliced bread?

skinink: AOL was good for those of us who were noobs on the net. Their dial up connections weren't bad and was easy to set up. For $23/month unlimited for 100 hours connection that was a bargain.
At least with dialup you had a bunch of ISP you could choose from. Where I am, I either have Comcast or satellite. And Comcast is overpriced.

I remember having to maximize internet efficiency -- you'd plan out what you needed, log on, get what you needed, then log off. This was back in the day when you'd pay some price for a timed connection. Moving to unlimited dialup was a huge upgrade.

/ Many older people still use AOL out of familiarity. Hey, if an 80 year old is familiar with the AOL software, more power to him/her. It took my parents a while, even on DSL, to learn that AOL/MSN != internet, and that you can just open FireFox/Internet Explorer to access "the internet" without having to sign on to AOL or MSN.

Gwendolyn: My parents still have AOL dial up. Whenever I visit I steal the neighbor's wifi.

My in-law's pay for an AOL email account. Apparently, their "computer guy" recommended they keep it rather than switch to Gmail or Yahoo since those sites "may not work on a Mac". Rather than debate that questionable advice, I just add their account as an exception to email blacklist rules.

/guessing their "computer guy" is a strange sub-species of Apple fanboi that hates Google because Steve Jobs hated Google (at the end), but somehow doesn't hate AOL.

PsychoPhil: I know water companies that still use dialup lines for point to point connections to little used pump stations, etc. The master PLC dials up the remote, exchanges data, and hangs up automagically. I did one a few years back for a town's interconnection with another town's water system - rarely used, they'd just have it made to dialup and do it's thing when they needed it...

Lots of pieces of equipment like this are on dial up, and dial up works fine with them. A POTS line and a modem is a lot easier to set up in many situations than DSL or the equilavalent.

Geotpf: PsychoPhil: I know water companies that still use dialup lines for point to point connections to little used pump stations, etc. The master PLC dials up the remote, exchanges data, and hangs up automagically. I did one a few years back for a town's interconnection with another town's water system - rarely used, they'd just have it made to dialup and do it's thing when they needed it...

Lots of pieces of equipment like this are on dial up, and dial up works fine with them. A POTS line and a modem is a lot easier to set up in many situations than DSL or the equilavalent.

So much this. I'm doing VOIP conversions at the moment, the clients chose to remove the POTS lines for faxes and credit card swipes with digiboxes, and have had nothing but problems.

AOL should go back to its 3.0 version, dial up only for nostalgia.

Ahhh AOL...the good ole days (not really)

Calling dibs on "You've got mail!"

Still have my aol email address--it's been free for a decade and it was easier than changing it.

Haven't used actual aol in at least that long.

Yes, and I get to maintain a computer that has as its sole purpose dialing into remote computers to assist our customers because these computers as so in places so remote they are lucky to have a phone line, let alone broadband.

It was a biatch telling our IT department that yes, we are having a problem dialing out on our fancy new IP phone system with a modem. We got a real phone line for it, and the two fax machines...

imontheinternet: Mugato: AOL has DSL too, they have for like a decade.

/used to work AOL tech support
//worst gig ever

Jesus. How many calls out of ten did the caller not know how to turn the computer on?

/betting at least 3

I get so annoyed when I call tech support and ask those types of questions "is it plugged in? Is it turned on?" then a few days later an otherwise reasonably intelligent person comes to me with an issue and they actually didn't pug it in (one of my personal favourites was "my DVD player won't work" when they hadn't connected it to the TV in any way).

They made a bit of a splash a year or so back when they constructed a 50 terrabyte SAN using Solid State drives. Said to cost them over $1 million.

Tech goodness here (new Window)

AOL aside, dial up services still provide a very robust infrastructure for passing data.

Sybarite: Good, I've been looking for the secret of blanketing the country in small plastic discs.

I once made a giant disco ball out of those things.

I remember every time we'd get an AOL disk in the mail, my brother and I would take turns smashing it in the backyard. My favorite technique was sticking it between a couple wooden planks on the backyard steps, then taking a golf swing with a baseball bat.

My PBX can use dial up if everything else fails. In fact, if Avaya sends a tech out for any reason and I don't have the appropriate port in the cabinet punched to a block so he can dial out, he gets cross and yells at me.

/ then I tell him to shut up and remind him he gets paid an exorbitant salary for knowing a secret password and pretending that makes him smarter than everyone else whether he's actually working or not

You urban hipsters need to realize that there are still large swaths of the country that don't have DSL or cable. Half the county I'm in in Virginia doesn't have access to broadband. It's either dialup or HughesNet. To me, $24 a month for dialup seems a better deal than $79+taxes+equipment for satellite service that's barely above dialup.

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We use a fleet credit card for our fuel. Our few in-house gas pumps use dial up for authorization.

Mom still uses aol for her e-mail. She has basic DSL, so she uses the broadband connection, but still uses the aol software and browser. At least I got her to stop paying aol a monthly fee.

Catsaregreen: You urban hipsters need to realize that there are still large swaths of the country that don't have DSL or cable. Half the county I'm in in Virginia doesn't have access to broadband. It's either dialup or HughesNet. To me, $24 a month for dialup seems a better deal than $79+taxes+equipment for satellite service that's barely above dialup.

Never mind the fact that HughsNet has a data cap of suck.

Oh, you can buy little "tokens" to wipe it clean for the day, but you're limited to a daily data allowance.

/I have comcast
//a friend has it, not me
///he hates it

Catsaregreen: You urban hipsters need to realize that there are still large swaths of the country that don't have DSL or cable. Half the county I'm in in Virginia doesn't have access to broadband. It's either dialup or HughesNet. To me, $24 a month for dialup seems a better deal than $79+taxes+equipment for satellite service that's barely above dialup.

So if I sarcastically posted a YouTube video of the Deliverance theme, it might take you five hours before you realized I was mocking you?

/not that I am
//just saying
//no slashes in a loooooong time

Catsaregreen: You urban hipsters

So I should add "having broadband access" to the list of things that makes you a hipster?

We're pretty much at the point now where nobody using the word "hipster" knows what one actually is, aren't we? Is it ironic that the people who use the word "hipster" the most are the least likely to know what a hipster is? Does that make them hipsters? Are we now at the point where people living in some backwoods ass-pucker trash heap in VA that doesn't even have cable internet are hipsters?