I remember getting in trouble for BBSing, dialing up from my computer to another computer using text-based menus to communicate and play rudimentary text-based games.
That's why I always was on late at night. I would get off of work at 1:00 AM and be on AOL until 3:00 AM as that is when they would shutdown for maintenance. I did end up meeting my wife in there, so it is a fond memory.
We had two phone lines. I paid the phone bills. It was a critical piece of equipment. I used it to download Half Life 2. I'd have it downloading all night. Wake in the morn, start the day. Go to work, come home. Open up the old olive drab Steam platform, pause download. Surf the net for the evening. Get ready for bed, open up Steam, hit the Resume Download button and go to bed. I don't even remember how long it took for that grand and glorious day when it finally said *Download Comeplete* Game Ready to Play.
My parents eventually solved this issue by paying for a second phone line. They got rid of the second phone line in 2002, when broadband became affordable. I do not feel any nostalgia for the days of AOL. It would take two hours to download one normal-length song in mp3 format. A short video would take hours and hours. And if you lost the connection in the middle of a download, well, too bad, you'd have to start all over again. Plus websites would take several minutes to load. Broadband is so awesome, because everything is instant.
@@hamsterama I think the nostalgia people feel is more about what an exciting time it was. No doubt our high speed internet is way better but most of us alive today witnessed the birth of the information age first hand. Nothing like this had happened since the industrial revolution. Entire generations pass between moments like that, so we really are lucky to have been there and experienced it.
AOL will always hold a very special place in my heart. It's where I met my husband 22 years ago. We met in a chatroom one day in June of 2000 by total fate. It turned out that we only lived just over 3 hours apart (within reasonable driving distance), with me living in central Maine and him in Boston. We had a great deal in common as he was a paramedic and I had just become an EMT, which was how we initially connected and bonded. I was only 18 and had just graduated from high school and he had just turned 30, so there was an 11-year age gap, but we instantly connected. Instant messaging on AOL turned into hours long phone calls. Then, about a week after we started talking, he made the trip to meet me and we spent several amazing days together in Acadia National Park and almost instantly fell in love. The rest is history. We had an amazing 22 years together and were rarely ever apart. He was my soulmate and the love of my life, not to mention my rock. If it hadn't been for AOL, we never would have crossed paths and met. Sadly, he passed away exactly 1 month and 2 days ago very suddenly and unexpectedly and I miss him so, so much. 😥 Thank you, AOL, for leading me to the love of my life.
Haha yeah, I remember using Trillian so I could talk to my friends on MSN and AIM at the same time without having to run both separately. That and good ol ICQ. Man the 90/early 2000s were awesome
I was a teenager during AOL's boom years, having graduated in 2001. Everything shifted culturally in 2000. The moment broadband hit the market everyone my age jumped on it immediately. I remember my friend getting a cable modem and canceling AOL at the same time. Everyone I knew did the same. At that point our landing page for the internet became Google or some other search engine. It was all about AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) from that point on. Also, a lot of people used ICQ or Yahoo messenger. This was also when message boards really took off in popularity. Really though, what drove broadband was Napster, and later Limewire. If you wanted a ton of music and movies you had to drop AOL and get broadband.
Same here Class of ‘01. I remember our shitty little neighborhood got Comcast broadband in ‘98-99. A friend of mine was lucky enough to have a It and good computer. We would use it to play Quake and CS at blazing speeds. Not to mention it was a godsend for school reports. And was about 80% cheaper then it is today. Comcast you’ve become the villain.
I graduated in 07 and I think i was 15 or 16 when we got broadband. It was amazing. My mom and I used to watch Foamy the Squirrel videos and we would let it load and go do other things and come back a half hour later and the video was finally loaded. When we got broadband it would load up in like 10 minutes and then the world of music theft became known to me. I miss the early, wild ass days of the internet. But AIM was where it was at. Like you get home from school, get in the computer and chat with your friends about what moody song lyrics to put up for that day because Amy was a totally f-ing B, in science class.
@@prettypuff1every day after school I'd go to my library just so I could use the official Sum41 chatroom. Man I miss those flame wars, so many "your mom" insults were thrown around
I miss that modem noise...yes being able to access the internet in two seconds is nice, but that noise made every log-in feel epic, like opening the Stargate or something.
@meaturama Stargate is a sci-fi franchise where the then-contemporary US Air force conducted off world exploration using an ancient teleportation device called the Stargate, a giant ring that can connect to other such ring via a wormhole. The original series' earth gate had to be physically dialed like an oversized rotary phone, with an inner ring being spun around to dial a gate address. The original series Stargate SG-1 was quite good. I highly recommend it
LOL...we never ran out of floppies. Those bad boys kept coming. It kinda sucked when they switched to CD's (and was neat to see the mini-CD's), but it didn't take too long before floppies were made irrelevant. But man, those were the days.
As a teen during the burst of AOL, the reason for its death among everyone I knew was the rise of broadband. Online games were becoming more mainstream, and when a technology became more mainstream that allowed people to browse the internet or game and not take up the phone line (DSL), everyone flocked to it. My family went to DSL ~2003-2004. Side note, I lost count of how many times I heard "WHO IS ON THE INTERNET, GET OFF I NEED TO USE THE PHONE" haha
Yup this. I see alot of other people claiming other things but it was honestly this. I remember trying to play Tony Hawk Underground online on dial up lol. It was atrocious. DSL got a little better and then when broadband hit, AOL couldn't keep up with the tech advancements. Or they just kinda gave up really. Instead of advancing they just threw in the towel and said "good run".
@@alec57 fyi DSL is broadband, even that bog slow 128k was broadband in its day, i remember getting DSL in 2005, my family where late to the party, but we finally got it, and OMG i so loved 1.5MB/s downloads vs the earthlink we had that said it was like having a 96kb/s connection lol
@@alec57Why couldn't AOL have just offered broadband access through the phone companies? I remember AOL offering broadband at some point, I wonder what went wrong.
Can't forget when one time my dad wanted to use the phone. He picked it up, heard that funny dial up sound and was very confused. He said, "What's that noise?!" It was too funny 😂
I use the AIM chat message sound for my text messages. Every once in a while, I love when someone will hear it and see them perk up like "Wait, I know that sound."
ISP's used to provide email and webspace. Now they charge more and provide neither. A lot of 'standards' have changed. That's why I avoided AOL because I could have a free webpage and multiple email accounts for the same price as AOL.
I worked at an aol tech support call center, I knew they were doomed when people who had roadrunner started asking me if they could connect to the internet by simply using their browser. Once people realized that they didnt need the aol junk software it was done.
Didn't help that, if memory serves, AOL were much better salesmen than providers of a quality product.....The family was subscribed to AOL for a week or so sometime before 2000...And that was long enough.
I remember signing up in 1996 and just trying over and over to actually go online, because I was always getting the busy signal. Then they came out with the redialer and it would do the work for me. Just hearing that electronic modem sound after it connected followed by "Welcome! You've got mail!" was like winning the lottery.
I would just call them to cancel but they would always give me three more months of free service if I'd stay with them. It went on like that for like a year.😆
@Trantor The Troll Tell me about it. I met so many friends on ICQ. I even had a long-distance girlfriend, and me and all my ICQ friends would get on Furcadia and make cool maps (aka Dreams) and roleplay as furries before it was cringe. Ah, those were the days.
At my last job, AOL was a client of the company I worked for so I got the chance to visit the AOL headquarters once, which I did not know was in my area (DC). This was probably 2017/2018, it was weird because they have pretty tight security, like metal detectors, gates, and all. And the updated logos on the outside made me think they were making or getting ready to make a comeback. But once inside, it was sad. Like one of those dying malls. Broken lights, damaged walls in areas, etc. All while being an active workplace. It was a pretty big campus and wonder what it was like during its hey day. I grew up on AOL and anyone born in the 90s have some nostalgia towards it. I still remember the last time I used it, we had just got Verizon DSL and the AOL program changed from blue to gold. I was finally able to watch videos. Thanks AOL for being such an important part of my life growing up, but like most technology, RIP.
@@adaywithoutdonald64I don’t think it was because of the merger. It’s just a result of technology constantly changing. Look at cable/satellite tv or blockbuster. Great products during its prime but eventually if they don’t innovate, they’ll be phased out. I mean look at TH-cam for example. It was on its way out before it was bought by Google. AOL wasn’t able to provide an alternative to dial up and ultimately failed because of that. But I bet if they had become a leader in internet providers, they’d be a big company now like Google or Facebook.
HOLY HOLY!!! I can proudly say that I have the two HOTTEST women on this planet as MY GIRLFRIENDS! I am the unprettiest TH-camr ever, but they love me for what's inside! Thanks for listening san
I hear you. I literally had internet for free for years due to those free trials. Why pay for it when I could just get anther free trial? That may of helped in their downfall. The free trial CDs may have helped with name recognition, but I doubt if it helped with revenue.
So he scooped up like one week's worth of mailed out discs to his immediate neighborhood, lol. Seriously, I think we had more AOL discs than all other spam mail combined.
As a trucker back then and still, I'd have my phone cord in my laptop bag so I could plug in to the phone lines at the truck stop. back then, all the booths in the restaurants had phones. When booting up AOL, it'd give you a list of phone numbers to select from. If one didnt work or took too long to load, you'd have to click a different one and start over. It was a PIA and slow, but technology was in its infancy, that's just the way it was. I was impressed it worked at all, and even more impressed that we do the same thing now with a hand held phone! Incredible!!!!
I can't believe Gameline was doing that in '83. It seems like they were maybe a bit too ahead of their time but were kind of part in helping pave the way to what we have now.
My parents considered getting it for our 2600 but it was pretty expensive, along with a whole bunch of other Atari stuff that was getting churned out that turned out to be junk so they probably figured it wasn't worth the cost. I remember the '83 crash vividly too because of how annoyed I was after spending $40-$50 per game right before it and how junky a lot of the titles were. It seems cool in hindsight but at the time it was percieved as overpriced and overhyped junk.
I had one as a kid. The problem was I didn't know you couldn't just switch games so I went through my monthly limit in 3 days, then the decline happened.
does anyone remember something called the SEGA channel? This was kind of similar, except it was in the '90s, and it went through the cable company instead of the phone lines. Basically, for a flat monthly rate, it had a device that plugged into your Sega Genesis console, and each month you'd get a selection of games you could download and play. Each month it would change to different games. There were dozens each month to choose from. Very similar to what this guy tried to do, except more successful.
@@GregNixon was there lag in those titles? We didn't have SEGA channel. Was it like PlayStation Now or Google Stadia where games were streamed onto the console or home system?
LOL, I was on the computer while watching this and legitimately thought my internet had cut out with that last AOL “goodbye”. XD I guess that ingrained panic response has yet to extinguish.
Yeah my first thought was "CRAP!!!!" and my heart skipped a beat there. I recall my Dad who would use WebTV in his home theater, often kicking me off when he tried to connect. Wasn't a big deal, I would switch to the other phone line and redial. We had a phone line switcher for the PC just for this reason! Good times!
I joined AOL back in the 90’s because it seemed to be the most bang for the buck. CompuServe and others was around before AOL but just seemed to be too expensive, so I never tried the others. AOL’s campaign to let users try it out for free for a trial period was a good move and is why I even tried it. Once on, I was hooked. It was only after cable came out with broadband, that I left AOL, but I remember using AOL messenger for some time after switching to broadband so that I could chat with all my friends how were still putting up with the slow dial-up method.
Broadband killed it. You didn't need AOL to get access to the Internet. Is was good for e-mail, but the other features were poor compared to those then being offered by others directly on the Internet.
Ha ha I met my wife on AOL too back in 1997. Still together as well. AOL email is long gone though. Have had Yahoo since the early 2000's, I don't think it has the same parameters as regular accounts do today.
I remember we would down load wav files of music bits, and go to chat rooms and talk, and play these music bits for how we were feeling. Only a few seconds long of course, but it was great, but each person had to have the file or the other couldn't hear it when you did the command in the chat room ha ha.
Not many things really get me nostalgic, but the old AOL interface really hit me like a truck. I know it was anarchic by today's standards, but I have fond memories of having a bunch of windows of sites I browsed opened and the same time and splitting my focus between them all lol
@@theenzoferrari458 Personally I think they both fit. Script kiddies roamed the chatrooms and there was little to no moderation many places. The internet is too controlled by algorithms and Puritans these days as well as being tuned to the lowest common denominator.
Does anyone remember WebTV...where when it was dialing in and connecting, you saw a visual of little car riding on a road while it was connecting, and that bland music lol.
I was in high school marching band in the early 2000s (I know, need alert). We would use those AOL CDs as place-markers on the ground when learning our marching sets. My first year we used poker chips, but AOL CDs turned out to be cheaper and more readily available.
I used to cut up the CDs and use them to scare critters out of my garden! I was cleaning out a bunch of stuff in a storage locker recently and found about 30 of the old discs.
The expansion of the internet was ultimately AOLs downfall. Their early niche was having local dialups all over the country - traveling business people could get their email anywhere (this was prior to the wide availability of internet access). Once the internet became available (and freely accessible in many locations), AOL lost its market edge. Their core services were easily replaced by other websites. It was a business model that ironically relied on a lack of internet access to succeed. The availability of ISPs would spell their end.
Your missing the point. Had aol combined with TWs Road Runner Service, the internet would be different than what it is today, maybe, but they missed out by letting TW hoe them out like that
How so? AOL was just a bunch of chat rooms and very basic content. Even with high speed access there was no reason for consumers to subscribe to AOL when they could get email and more expansive content from the broader internet
Truer words have not been spoken. The non-technical people were led to believe that their only access to the internet was by way of services, Gopher, AOL, etc. Once people figured out that these services were nothing more than a bridge, they turned to other services provided by ISP's not reliant on front-end (or GUI) supported technologies.
I got my first computer in 1998 and just loved AOL and everything about it. I loved the chat rooms and made many friends locally here with real people in my area and actually got together with them. I miss AOL and enjoyed the computer so much more during the AOL days
@@456puff it was a standard thing they put on cassette tapes, vhs tapes and floppies to name a few. They usually had a tab that covered the hole so u could break it off if you wanted to make something read only…. But on official software from any company they didn’t include the tab….
Those damn discs were attached to everything: Books, magazines, cereal boxes, toys, you name it, there was an AOL disc attached. It was like they were multiplying in retail environments...
What I remember from AOL that irritated EVERYONE was the massive push of their AOL disks. As you stated, they were EVERYWHERE! It seemed that if you opened a can of Beans or your doctor performed surgery on you, there's an AOL disk inside! People were so fed up with these mass quantities of AOL disks that a group got together, rumored to have collected millions of disks, and then took them to AOL and dumped them at their doors. This was the public proclaiming 'ENOUGH ALREADY!' and from there AOL seemed to disintegrate into oblivion!
I remember going online for the first time in AOL at my mother's house on dial up over our landline phone. I also remember always receiving the AOL disk in my mailbox about once a week until it was over taken by cheaper broadband internet in the 2000's.
I was a user, it was my intro to the internet. I most remember the dial up sound, "youve got mail" and having to get off after only an hour or two because my mom needed to make a call. In high school, my friends and I all used AIM. It seemed like we had better conversations there than thru Facebook and all that came after
I still have my old screen name since I was 19. Time flies...and yes, chatrooms were more lively back then. Now it is just simple emojis and abbreviated conversations.
You briefly mentioned Netscape and broadband, but I think you didn't put enough emphasis on the rise of web browsers during that time, which made the whole idea of a portal completely obsolete.
Interestingly, AOL remains a small part of my life to this very day. I got a screen name for their messanger, and with it came an email address. I used that email address for certain types of communications. As time passed, AOL became a shell of its former self. No longer used for Internet access. Its messanger eventually died. But that email address was never shut down, and is still in use today. It's not something I really give much thought to, but now that I think about it, its rather interesting that I have a decades old email address from when I was a young girl that to this day has outlived virtually all other aspects of AOL.
Met my wife on AOL, in a "Yo Momma Jokes" chatroom. She couldn't resist my, Yo momma so stupid, that she asked for help to finish completing a tiger puzzle. I said that's a box of Frosted Flakes. Been married 15 years and counting.
Chat room’s used to be lit. AOL was awesome when I would log in and had to put a blanket over the pc tower so my mom wouldn’t wake up and tell me to go to sleep at 3am
Everyone knew each other in the local regional chat. It was like a clique. The random, more friendly channels were the better ones. a/s/l? You had a lot of people getting to know each other through the internet, too.
When the broadband service was connected to a dedicated ISP, that spelled the end of AOL with being the dominant ISP. For those younger people out there: Back in the era of dialup, using existing landline phone connections, an internet user could select among dozens of ISPs. The one I used back then was by AT&T. But with broadband landlines, they connected directly with the ISP the landlines went to, cutting out AOL as a ISP.
Funny you should mention ATT. When I lived in Lewiston ID (Which is a smaller city in the middle of nowhere), ATT took over the local cable provider around, if I remember correctly, '98 or '99. And with it, they brought in Broadband, which meant we were one of the first people in the country to have "High speed internet". Remember all the chats I had around 98/99 with people living in much bigger cities that still used Dial-up.
AOL had "customer retention specialists" who absolutely would not cancel your service no matter how many hours you spent trying, finally had to close our bank account to be rid of them.
@@TheSimba86 it's because they got bonuses whenever they could retain a customer. the department was called "saves". I worked in tech support at the Albuquerque office for six months and when I put in my notice to quite, they took me over to that department and had me sit with them and listen in on calls to see if I would be interested in switching to the saves department. I declined even for a lot more money. They didn't want me to quit lol, it was just as hard to leave the job as it was to cancel your subscription.
I used these when I was a kid. Then call them to cancel and theyd end up giving me 90 days free to change my mind. Rinse and repeat. Didnt pay for internet for almost 2 yrs
I worked for AOL for 10 yrs, when Steve Case was running the company it was a blast..then Time Warner took over and it all changed...I still have my AOL email..thanks for the memories AOL🙂
@@HangTimeDeluxe Ok. . . Some license had to be taken to convert the traditional movie phrase to one more analogous with todays personage. I seriously doubt many viewers of You tube material would scarily even notice. But thank you. . OEG!
They have a steady stream of revenue from people who autopaid on their credit card. Some have forgot to cancel, others think you need it to access the internet out of ignorance.
@@DennisTamayo AT&T buying Time Warner was incredibly disastrous, but the merger with Discovery seems to be helping them recover. David Zaslav knows where the company was crumbling and is busy turning things around.
Great video. LOL I have the "You've got mail" as my text alert on my phone. And as the ringtone, I've got the 56k modem sound. That definitely turns heads when my phone goes off in public. It gives everyone flashbacks of the 90s when my phone goes off.
I use to love the AOL chat rooms. That was the first way I ever met someone online. Online dating was super taboo back then. We’re still friends to this day.
You kind of glossed over their history with Q-Link. The way they shut down Q-Link left a really bad taste in a lot of people's mouths. To this day I use the nickname "redrumloa" online as I have since about 1996 (read it backwards). There was a huge online archive of Commodore software that users begged AOL to allow them to back it up before shutting down, and AOL ignored them. There was a huge amount of Commodore software lost forever due to AOL's col actions. Things like this, along with annoying and wasteful junkmail campaigns, made them have a huge built in badwill (opposite of goodwill). Old school users hated them for what they did to Q-Link. Power users found their platform remedial. Normies got annoyed with the daily junkmail advertisements they got that kept stacking up.
I had a super slow 1200 baud modem I bought for my C64 for $80 when I was 12 so I could go on Q-Link. Parents threw the modem in the trash after I ran up a $200 phone bill, since it costed $5 an hour. I was fascinated with Club Caribe, which was like a prototype of an MMO. Took me forever to save up for that modem at that age.
I remember the cultural hate toward AOL. Supposedly the AOL software on those discs acted as a sort of rootkit of the time as well and bogged down the system forever after being installed.
Yup AOL was the internet to everyone in my area. Chat rooms with strange other kids from other schools and states you could never meet otherwise. The anonymity of it was the best part. No worrying about what you look like and sound like. Having "online friends" that your real life friends didn't know about. Being able to talk to your online friends about things you can't with your real life friends. Talking to your friends without having to be on the phone and talking to multiple people at the same time. You could troll strangers in chat rooms for fun with no consequences and then just disappear because it's time for dinner or to go out with real life friends. Great time to be a kid.
yahoo had chat rooms for awhile that were also great for trolling. literally overflowing with boomer perverts who totally lacked critical thinking skills.
I definitely agree with anonymity being a benefit back then. You could share only what you wanted, and i remember having very real and personal connections with people who you didn't know what they looked like. I also remember the taboo of hanging out with people you met online, and not telling your other friends thats how you met them lol
My dad was a systems engineer, so I grew up with a nerd dad and plenty of computers to tinker with. Perhaps because he worked for a communications company, we were a "local ISP" household rather than an AOL-subscribing one. I don't even think it was around yet, as I remember a number of years of early Internet (well, World Wide Web) use prior to the boom of AOL's popularity. Most of my friends (who even owned computers to begin with) would just stick with AOL. We used to poke fun at it, Internet for n00bs and all that, but I still have really fond memories of the impact it had on late 90s subculture.
And that was the beginning of their demise. I worked at AO Hell from 1999 to 2007 and had they embraced and become a leader in high speed rather than trying to latch onto other providers as an add-on, they'd still be a force today.
@@joecarlo3848 Thanks for confirming. I thought they should have embraced high speed internet and gaming. The Time Warner deal didn't make sense to me.
@@theBSisreal I was there from 95 to 99, trust me, the hesitation to go to broadband was definitely the reason. The merger was just the icing on the exploding cake.
I remember the AOL online games. Those were lit. Chat rooms, AIM. "The good ol' days" as they say. My kids take things for granted when the internet stream dips below 100MB/s lol I tell them we used to only have one online device and we couldn't make phone calls while we were using it. I sometimes wish we could go back to those days just to learn to appreciate life a bit more.
I remember AOL charging by the hour and I was always nervous about going over....I think my grandfather paid for 10 hours a month. HAHA could you imagine being charged by the hour today? SHEEEEEEESH. We are all online to some degree 24 hours a day
True. I don't have cable and I don't use that 50" TV i HAD to have in the living room unless i HDMI it to my laptop. I am on my computer all the time when I am not at work and haven't found anything I can't do or watch online. in 10 years cable will be a thing of the past, right up there with the phone on the wall.
Really? I didn't think anybody ever really paid for it. Every day we'd just get another disk with "2 Million Free Hours", change our account info and move on. I always assumed it was run by the NSA and they didn't really need money.
Maybe if charged by the hour some people would be able to break their cellphone addictions and stop looking at the phones 24/7. Ever watch families dine together? They are all looking at the phones the whole meal.
It's kinda funny... during AOL's time, free browsers already existed. AOL only worked because the internet was so slow, so it was worth paying money to speed up your free slow internet... but, by the time the internet was faster, you could just directly pay for internet to go faster for the same price instead of paying for the browser.... AND you could use your phone at the same time... and it did not have the same slow start up time... *Here is an overview:* AOL: Made slow internet bearable and usable; cost, it started up slowly and whenever you used the landline, the service would slow down. DSL: Made internet speeds bearable, though not originally much faster than AOL, but it didn't have the slow start up time as AOL and it didn't interfere with phones. That was the original reasoning to switch. But eventually, DSL just got faster and faster while AOL was kinda limited in how much they could improve the dial-up speed with their software. Some people at the time tried to use both AOL and Dial up at the same time, and my dad at the time was willing to cancel DSL since he didn't want to pay for both, but eventually, he gave in and quit the AOL service instead and restarted his DSL instead, since he noted that AOL without DSL was lagging drastically, but internet without AOL was not that bad. No matter how much they tried to tweak the software, in the end, the actual internet speed increasing was something they couldn't keep up with and paying for faster internet and using a free browser made more sense than paying for a barely better browser using a free but lagging internet. Plus, it didn't help that DSL was often bundled with phone services and tv services anyways, meaning you can pay the same price, but it would be added with other bills, making paying easier. All in all, AOL was more of a browser you needed to pay for during the era of free internet. But when better internet came and you needed to pay for it, free browsers were fine... and eventually, AOL lagged behind and became worse than the free browsers.
@@Ben-uu7hz Sorta not really; it used the same line that gave you free internet and it only worked with it's own browser. So technically; you could consider it just a browser. Also, when you got DSL, it just used the DSL.
@@Tridd666 Free but super crappy internet... like... really crappy... like, so slow that you wouldn't even want to use it... it's why people paid for AOL though I think there were some free browser cds available, but none were able to compete with AOL's speed.
I was an AOL user when I was a child, but grew up reading AOL published blogs and the like. I think people would be surprised how big AOL was as a internet news publisher.
Who else got excited when a new version of AOL was released and then you had to wait 2 hours for it to update it, but it was worth it to see the new design?
"Here's where things went bad...it started when Time-Warner became involved." AHHH, a story as old as time. I think that's how some of Grimm's fairy tales began, until they changed it to "Once upon a time..." for copyright reasons.
I remember toward the end of AOL that trying to log on was joke. They had so much network traffic that it could take 10 or more minutes just to log on. I cant speak as to the companies wider problems, but I can say for myself that the annoyance of not being able to sign on or it taking stupid long to get online is what drove me to other providers.
I actually met a person in a random chat room one day in the very early days of AOL and we continued meeting online to chat and hit it off. I think I was 12 at the time. We would talk on the phone periodically and when I was a senior in high school I called her up when I was in town. She ended up coming to my graduation that year and that was the first time I had ever seen her. We dated for a short time but it didn’t work out…At first. Fast forward 6 more years and she came to a concert to see me and we hit it off again like we’d never stopped talking. We’ve been happily married 15 years and have two kids together, the oldest being older than me when I “met” my wife. Unreal.
Oddly enough, my first time online wasn't through AOL. My dad was an early computer adopter, so I first used an "acoustic coupler." It's a box you put the phone receiver on it so your computer can literally "talk" to other computers. I'm old.
What I remember most about AOL is how many free months I'd get out of it just by calling to cancel the free trial. Every time, without fail, they'd offer 3 free months to see if I could be happier with the service. I got free AOL for a year and a half before they finally "allowed" me to cancel, lmfao!!
@@Dadplusloans I got fucking aol email that I made couple of years ago with my first and last name because fucking Gmail didn't have my chosen name available.
@@the_uglysteve6933 still got mine too. I created it when I was in 6th grade which was 1998. I use it too. In fact I have the AOL app just to check my email. I also have google but I rarely use it.
I worked for a mail distribution place and AOL was the account I worked on. Each disc had a different purpose…to track what kind of advertising for AOL was most effective. There was a different type # for each campaign, and it had that # on each disc. So like if you got the disc at a store, in a magazine, answered a tv commercial, sent in a mailing flyer, etc. We had a database that kept track of what advertising method was most effective. They kept us BUSY, but I ended up leaving when I had my daughter in 2002. Oddly enough, I never used the service. The only reason I had an AOL id was to communicate with the people we worked with at AOL.
I remember working for the retention team for AOL. It was the hardest thing ever because you had to persuade people to not cancel their paid AOL memberships. There are some people who kept giving AOL money since the mid-90's.
My dad was paying for AOL pretty much up until he passed away a few years ago. I would try to explain to him that you can access all the same features without paying but he wouldn't switch up what he was familiar with lol.
Maybe if AOL was offering a better product more people would have kept it. I kept having trouble with passwords, had to keep changing them because AOL's system wouldn't recognize a password. After dealing with that and the numerous security bugs and the crappy customer service with the latest version, Desktop Gold, I finally had enough and got rid of AOL for good. Outlook and Gmail may not be perfect, but they are MUCH BETTER than AOL.
Back in the beginning days of youtube there was a recorded call where a very unlucky person was trying to cancel their subscription and somebody from that retention team would not let the dude cancel. I bet if you search for it on here you’ll still find it.
You and I probably connected from time to time. I was a guide and upgrade host for a while. I was also a part of observers. I wish that AOL had promoted the free lan based connection offering more than they did. Most people didn't know about it and maintained the dialup monthly fee
I was smart. I had a second line installed just for the computer. I used to give out the number of the second line for any company that asked for my phone number but had no business having it. They could call that number all they wanted, they'd never get an answer.
Mostly because they aren't sure what age they are feeling today, what bathroom to use, and what location? Uhh how dare you ask what country I'm from racist!
I worked for Warner Bros. during the acquisition by AOL and it was horrible. They made is switch from MS outlook to AOL mail, which is definitely not for business/corporate use. I remember there was a pop up asking me if I wanted to order ink cartridges every time I'd print an email. After 5 months of that mail fiasco, they let us switch back to outlook. And many of us were angry that the only reason they were able to buy Time Warner was because of the huge run up in their stock price. Like what did a dial up internet provider know about running an Media Entertainment Company? Worst acquisition in history!!!
With call waiting and a fancy answering machine you could kind of screen the calls. I even had a fax machine that monitored incoming calls and used the handshake to take the call away from the answering machine. The 90s :-)
With call waiting and a fancy answering machine you could kind of screen the calls. I even had a fax machine that monitored incoming calls and used the handshake to take the call away from the answering machine. The 90s :-)
AOL was the start of my internet life. From my early teens using it to escape my home life with websites, to high school where I’d hop onto AIM before it was separated to chat with friends. AOL was the internet for me till it split into AIM and we all moved to MSN messaged.
“Get off the internet we need to use the phone “
But Mom....."You've got Mail"
I heard that alot lol
OMG...you bringing back sum serious memories
Classic!!!
I remember getting in trouble for BBSing, dialing up from my computer to another computer using text-based menus to communicate and play rudimentary text-based games.
The Decline of the History Channel
Theres no evidence that aliens werent at the first thanksgiving...
Decline of cowboy butt sex
Did Aliens influence the Nazis?
Decline of people banging
@@donkeyhobo34 sodameeeee. Sodameeeee.
Dad: "I'll need you to stay off the internet for a while, I'm expecting a call"
I literally heard my dad's voice in my head while reading this lol
That's why I always was on late at night. I would get off of work at 1:00 AM and be on AOL until 3:00 AM as that is when they would shutdown for maintenance. I did end up meeting my wife in there, so it is a fond memory.
We had two phone lines. I paid the phone bills. It was a critical piece of equipment. I used it to download Half Life 2. I'd have it downloading all night. Wake in the morn, start the day. Go to work, come home. Open up the old olive drab Steam platform, pause download. Surf the net for the evening. Get ready for bed, open up Steam, hit the Resume Download button and go to bed. I don't even remember how long it took for that grand and glorious day when it finally said *Download Comeplete* Game Ready to Play.
My parents eventually solved this issue by paying for a second phone line. They got rid of the second phone line in 2002, when broadband became affordable. I do not feel any nostalgia for the days of AOL. It would take two hours to download one normal-length song in mp3 format. A short video would take hours and hours. And if you lost the connection in the middle of a download, well, too bad, you'd have to start all over again. Plus websites would take several minutes to load. Broadband is so awesome, because everything is instant.
@@hamsterama I think the nostalgia people feel is more about what an exciting time it was. No doubt our high speed internet is way better but most of us alive today witnessed the birth of the information age first hand. Nothing like this had happened since the industrial revolution. Entire generations pass between moments like that, so we really are lucky to have been there and experienced it.
AOL will always hold a very special place in my heart. It's where I met my husband 22 years ago. We met in a chatroom one day in June of 2000 by total fate. It turned out that we only lived just over 3 hours apart (within reasonable driving distance), with me living in central Maine and him in Boston. We had a great deal in common as he was a paramedic and I had just become an EMT, which was how we initially connected and bonded. I was only 18 and had just graduated from high school and he had just turned 30, so there was an 11-year age gap, but we instantly connected. Instant messaging on AOL turned into hours long phone calls. Then, about a week after we started talking, he made the trip to meet me and we spent several amazing days together in Acadia National Park and almost instantly fell in love. The rest is history. We had an amazing 22 years together and were rarely ever apart. He was my soulmate and the love of my life, not to mention my rock. If it hadn't been for AOL, we never would have crossed paths and met. Sadly, he passed away exactly 1 month and 2 days ago very suddenly and unexpectedly and I miss him so, so much. 😥 Thank you, AOL, for leading me to the love of my life.
I'm sorry about your loss. I hope you'll find peace and comfort as time passes. ❤
Thanks for sharing 💕
Wow, awesome story!
That's a wonderful story. You never know where you'll find love, often in the most unexpected places.
Amazing story. I’m sorry for you loss, but I’m happy you found your true love.
Somehow the excitement of "you've got mail" faded to "ughhhh 46 emails I have to delete."
All of it spam too
Why I stopped caring years ago hello spam goodbye time wasted
Ugh my Gmail inbox currently has 9967 emails and I’m always at risk of running out of storage…mostly from spam 😑
I’ve got wayyyy more than that.
I have 8000 msg unread from 5 gmail accounts…💀
Chatting on AIM during high school years is a fond memory.
Haha yeah, I remember using Trillian so I could talk to my friends on MSN and AIM at the same time without having to run both separately. That and good ol ICQ. Man the 90/early 2000s were awesome
And ICQ, MSN, and mIRC.
Yes!! Take me back 😩
Back in middle school me and my friends went around and stole everyone's CDs got hundreds of them and had a huge frisbee fight in a field
@@Rumple. lol!
I was a teenager during AOL's boom years, having graduated in 2001. Everything shifted culturally in 2000. The moment broadband hit the market everyone my age jumped on it immediately. I remember my friend getting a cable modem and canceling AOL at the same time. Everyone I knew did the same. At that point our landing page for the internet became Google or some other search engine. It was all about AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) from that point on. Also, a lot of people used ICQ or Yahoo messenger. This was also when message boards really took off in popularity.
Really though, what drove broadband was Napster, and later Limewire. If you wanted a ton of music and movies you had to drop AOL and get broadband.
Remembering ICQ's interface and sounds makes me incredibly nostalgic.
aim and limewire sum up my childhood
Same here Class of ‘01. I remember our shitty little neighborhood got Comcast broadband in ‘98-99. A friend of mine was lucky enough to have a It and good computer. We would use it to play Quake and CS at blazing speeds. Not to mention it was a godsend for school reports. And was about 80% cheaper then it is today. Comcast you’ve become the villain.
I graduated in 07 and I think i was 15 or 16 when we got broadband. It was amazing. My mom and I used to watch Foamy the Squirrel videos and we would let it load and go do other things and come back a half hour later and the video was finally loaded. When we got broadband it would load up in like 10 minutes and then the world of music theft became known to me. I miss the early, wild ass days of the internet. But AIM was where it was at. Like you get home from school, get in the computer and chat with your friends about what moody song lyrics to put up for that day because Amy was a totally f-ing B, in science class.
Also a 2001 high school grad, funny how this is nostalgic lol
I miss AOL, the chatrooms, the icons, the sound effects, and the folks I met through AOL. Crazy, things are not the same unfortunately.
I don't miss dial up but the rest yes.
A shame AOL couldn’t adapt to changing times with faster internet technologies.
Man the chat rooms
@@prettypuff1every day after school I'd go to my library just so I could use the official Sum41 chatroom. Man I miss those flame wars, so many "your mom" insults were thrown around
I remember IRC type chat rooms being very popular in that era...
I miss that modem noise...yes being able to access the internet in two seconds is nice, but that noise made every log-in feel epic, like opening the Stargate or something.
I don't miss dial-up at all. Slow, noisy, and bulky.
@meaturama Stargate is a sci-fi franchise where the then-contemporary US Air force conducted off world exploration using an ancient teleportation device called the Stargate, a giant ring that can connect to other such ring via a wormhole. The original series' earth gate had to be physically dialed like an oversized rotary phone, with an inner ring being spun around to dial a gate address. The original series Stargate SG-1 was quite good. I highly recommend it
That sound ruled.
@meaturama I know what a Stargate is...but WTF is a 'sargate'?
you're likely the only one who thinks of that sound in nostalgia.... bahaha >.
At some point, most of us have logged out of aol and heard that, “Goodbye!” for the very last time...
Something to think about.
Nope! The voice still exists lol! So does the “ you got mail” voice.
I'm too high for this
Remember the option to change your "Welcome," "You've got mail," and "Goodbye" greetings? I had Garfield as mine when I was ~10. AOL was great.
I got mail, i got mail, i got mail, yayyyyyyyyyy
My childhood! 🤯
I'm old enough to remember when those free disks AOL mailed out were floppies.
3.5 BABY
LOL...we never ran out of floppies. Those bad boys kept coming. It kinda sucked when they switched to CD's (and was neat to see the mini-CD's), but it didn't take too long before floppies were made irrelevant. But man, those were the days.
I remember getting floppy disks from all of my friends so that I could get enough to install Linux on my system.
Yup
jw11432 it took a very long time. Starting with 5 1/4’s, I was using floppies since the late 70’s
As a teen during the burst of AOL, the reason for its death among everyone I knew was the rise of broadband. Online games were becoming more mainstream, and when a technology became more mainstream that allowed people to browse the internet or game and not take up the phone line (DSL), everyone flocked to it. My family went to DSL ~2003-2004. Side note, I lost count of how many times I heard "WHO IS ON THE INTERNET, GET OFF I NEED TO USE THE PHONE" haha
Yup this. I see alot of other people claiming other things but it was honestly this.
I remember trying to play Tony Hawk Underground online on dial up lol. It was atrocious. DSL got a little better and then when broadband hit, AOL couldn't keep up with the tech advancements. Or they just kinda gave up really.
Instead of advancing they just threw in the towel and said "good run".
@@alec57 fyi DSL is broadband, even that bog slow 128k was broadband in its day, i remember getting DSL in 2005, my family where late to the party, but we finally got it, and OMG i so loved 1.5MB/s downloads vs the earthlink we had that said it was like having a 96kb/s connection lol
@@candle86 Holy crap I remember Eathlink... that service was so bad. We had Netzero too for a while lol. Couldn't connect half the time.
@@alec57Why couldn't AOL have just offered broadband access through the phone companies?
I remember AOL offering broadband at some point, I wonder what went wrong.
Can't forget when one time my dad wanted to use the phone. He picked it up, heard that funny dial up sound and was very confused. He said, "What's that noise?!" It was too funny 😂
I use the AIM chat message sound for my text messages. Every once in a while, I love when someone will hear it and see them perk up like "Wait, I know that sound."
Same lol
I’m inspired by this
That makes me happy
Not AOL related, but I do the same thing. My iPhone ringtone is the old Nokia tone.
I can remember the sound in my head. Ca ching!
My dad still has an aol email. The "You've got mail!" sound still plays.
No way
For real?
@@undermoonlightglow I have one as well and I can confirm. It does still play
My father-in-law still does, too. He's 75 and he won't get even use gmail even though he has an account through his android phone.
@@honolulublues5548 I don't blame him, I dont use my gmail either
When most Americans could get faster internet connectivity at a cheaper price through their cable provider...that doomed AOL
What about Canadians too ?
ISP's used to provide email and webspace. Now they charge more and provide neither. A lot of 'standards' have changed. That's why I avoided AOL because I could have a free webpage and multiple email accounts for the same price as AOL.
I worked at an aol tech support call center, I knew they were doomed when people who had roadrunner started asking me if they could connect to the internet by simply using their browser. Once people realized that they didnt need the aol junk software it was done.
@HI BYE lol no.
Didn't help that, if memory serves, AOL were much better salesmen than providers of a quality product.....The family was subscribed to AOL for a week or so sometime before 2000...And that was long enough.
I remember signing up in 1996 and just trying over and over to actually go online, because I was always getting the busy signal. Then they came out with the redialer and it would do the work for me. Just hearing that electronic modem sound after it connected followed by "Welcome! You've got mail!" was like winning the lottery.
Hey ! Can you reply if you're available
@@akashsingha4368 Okay
@@ralphus44 I had a college project based on aol case study.
“Free trial” but you could keep signing up with a new CD. So many CDs used for hours of online age of empires.
Bruh that was my game. Did you play AOE1 or 2
Do you remember when they came out with Juno and net zero free dialup
I would just call them to cancel but they would always give me three more months of free service if I'd stay with them. It went on like that for like a year.😆
That's what boosted their user account numbers drastically. People creating several new accounts helped pad their numbers
Age of Empires is still so amazing.
Gameline, requires expensive hardware, has questionable game choices, relies on being online....
So basically Stadia?
We didn't start the fire...
@@HeavyMetalMouse swap expensive hardware for expensive internet and your super correct
Too soon?
You also forgot Sega Channel. It's also the same but uses cable TV that pioneered the cable internet.
Those that forget the past...
AIM was everything back then
Tru
@Trantor The Troll 😂😂😂😂
@Trantor The Troll Tell me about it. I met so many friends on ICQ. I even had a long-distance girlfriend, and me and all my ICQ friends would get on Furcadia and make cool maps (aka Dreams) and roleplay as furries before it was cringe. Ah, those were the days.
AIM made me who I am today and the wild success of my high schools years and my 20s.
Icq
At my last job, AOL was a client of the company I worked for so I got the chance to visit the AOL headquarters once, which I did not know was in my area (DC). This was probably 2017/2018, it was weird because they have pretty tight security, like metal detectors, gates, and all. And the updated logos on the outside made me think they were making or getting ready to make a comeback. But once inside, it was sad. Like one of those dying malls. Broken lights, damaged walls in areas, etc. All while being an active workplace. It was a pretty big campus and wonder what it was like during its hey day. I grew up on AOL and anyone born in the 90s have some nostalgia towards it. I still remember the last time I used it, we had just got Verizon DSL and the AOL program changed from blue to gold. I was finally able to watch videos. Thanks AOL for being such an important part of my life growing up, but like most technology, RIP.
It seems like most mergers are failures. I guess they do it because it increases the shareholders' stock prices, even for a brief moment.
@@adaywithoutdonald64I don’t think it was because of the merger. It’s just a result of technology constantly changing. Look at cable/satellite tv or blockbuster. Great products during its prime but eventually if they don’t innovate, they’ll be phased out. I mean look at TH-cam for example. It was on its way out before it was bought by Google. AOL wasn’t able to provide an alternative to dial up and ultimately failed because of that. But I bet if they had become a leader in internet providers, they’d be a big company now like Google or Facebook.
Lol tf I did aol tech support in 2012.... They still going old ppl rely on it
Everyone got so psyched when they heard "You've got mail"
HOLY HOLY!!! I can proudly say that I have the two HOTTEST women on this planet as MY GIRLFRIENDS! I am the unprettiest TH-camr ever, but they love me for what's inside! Thanks for listening san
@@AxxLAfriku HOL UP you have two? If so then your a god damn pimp.
My first email was spam lol
@@AxxLAfriku why is this a response to my comment? Frankly I don't think anyone cares how many gfs u have. Hard enough to please one good woman.
I need. It was great hearing it when I went on years ago.
*They may have lasted longer if they would NOT have sent all those damn CDs* I received at least 200 of them!
Lmaoo ikr
Those cds is what drove their growth. But at some point reached saturation. I guess it was the only way they knew and couldn't adjust
Only 200? But what did you use for insulating your house and attic after your coaster and frisbee collection was complete?
UMM...
OK THEN.
I hear you. I literally had internet for free for years due to those free trials. Why pay for it when I could just get anther free trial? That may of helped in their downfall. The free trial CDs may have helped with name recognition, but I doubt if it helped with revenue.
No joke: I knew a guy who collected so many AOL discs that he made a coffee table out of them.
Aaron Clift Now THATS art. Lol
So he scooped up like one week's worth of mailed out discs to his immediate neighborhood, lol.
Seriously, I think we had more AOL discs than all other spam mail combined.
That's dedication. I got felt for the bottoms of the discs and made coasters. LOL
My late grandfather used them as coasters in his house
I still have a few AOL discs left! Time to use them now I guess....
As a trucker back then and still, I'd have my phone cord in my laptop bag so I could plug in to the phone lines at the truck stop. back then, all the booths in the restaurants had phones.
When booting up AOL, it'd give you a list of phone numbers to select from. If one didnt work or took too long to load, you'd have to click a different one and start over. It was a PIA and slow, but technology was in its infancy, that's just the way it was.
I was impressed it worked at all, and even more impressed that we do the same thing now with a hand held phone! Incredible!!!!
The sounds of "you got mail!" and dial up loading is like music to my ears!
Rusty Shackleford Good times! 😂😂
I can't believe Gameline was doing that in '83. It seems like they were maybe a bit too ahead of their time but were kind of part in helping pave the way to what we have now.
My parents considered getting it for our 2600 but it was pretty expensive, along with a whole bunch of other Atari stuff that was getting churned out that turned out to be junk so they probably figured it wasn't worth the cost. I remember the '83 crash vividly too because of how annoyed I was after spending $40-$50 per game right before it and how junky a lot of the titles were. It seems cool in hindsight but at the time it was percieved as overpriced and overhyped junk.
I had one as a kid. The problem was I didn't know you couldn't just switch games so I went through my monthly limit in 3 days, then the decline happened.
does anyone remember something called the SEGA channel? This was kind of similar, except it was in the '90s, and it went through the cable company instead of the phone lines. Basically, for a flat monthly rate, it had a device that plugged into your Sega Genesis console, and each month you'd get a selection of games you could download and play. Each month it would change to different games. There were dozens each month to choose from. Very similar to what this guy tried to do, except more successful.
@@GregNixon was there lag in those titles? We didn't have SEGA channel. Was it like PlayStation Now or Google Stadia where games were streamed onto the console or home system?
Easier to see why some intelligentsia , such as Eric Weinstein, say we are innovatively stagnant and have been for decades.
LOL, I was on the computer while watching this and legitimately thought my internet had cut out with that last AOL “goodbye”. XD I guess that ingrained panic response has yet to extinguish.
Yeah my first thought was "CRAP!!!!" and my heart skipped a beat there. I recall my Dad who would use WebTV in his home theater, often kicking me off when he tried to connect. Wasn't a big deal, I would switch to the other phone line and redial. We had a phone line switcher for the PC just for this reason! Good times!
I joined AOL back in the 90’s because it seemed to be the most bang for the buck. CompuServe and others was around before AOL but just seemed to be too expensive, so I never tried the others. AOL’s campaign to let users try it out for free for a trial period was a good move and is why I even tried it. Once on, I was hooked. It was only after cable came out with broadband, that I left AOL, but I remember using AOL messenger for some time after switching to broadband so that I could chat with all my friends how were still putting up with the slow dial-up method.
Broadband killed it. You didn't need AOL to get access to the Internet. Is was good for e-mail, but the other features were poor compared to those then being offered by others directly on the Internet.
@@hewitc But but but Slingo!!!
It was frustrating many times using AOL, but man, when you heard the “You’ve got Mail” voice, that was the best.
If only that guy got a dollar each time it used his voice he be rich .
I met my wife on AOL, married 21 years. Still have my AOL email as my primary service.
Happy to hear that! My dad still has his aol email too after all these years.
Ha ha I met my wife on AOL too back in 1997. Still together as well. AOL email is long gone though. Have had Yahoo since the early 2000's, I don't think it has the same parameters as regular accounts do today.
I remember we would down load wav files of music bits, and go to chat rooms and talk, and play these music bits for how we were feeling. Only a few seconds long of course, but it was great, but each person had to have the file or the other couldn't hear it when you did the command in the chat room ha ha.
Dogs Life Don no way?! Lol! Wow!
Me too. I use mine every day.
Not many things really get me nostalgic, but the old AOL interface really hit me like a truck. I know it was anarchic by today's standards, but I have fond memories of having a bunch of windows of sites I browsed opened and the same time and splitting my focus between them all lol
I think you meant to use the word archaic.
@@theenzoferrari458 Yeah, I know the internet was/is a lawless place, but at least the interface has some semblance of order...
@@theenzoferrari458 Personally I think they both fit. Script kiddies roamed the chatrooms and there was little to no moderation many places. The internet is too controlled by algorithms and Puritans these days as well as being tuned to the lowest common denominator.
I still like the old AOL interface. It had some personality, which you don't really see on today's browsers.
Does anyone remember WebTV...where when it was dialing in and connecting, you saw a visual of little car riding on a road while it was connecting, and that bland music lol.
I was in high school marching band in the early 2000s (I know, need alert). We would use those AOL CDs as place-markers on the ground when learning our marching sets. My first year we used poker chips, but AOL CDs turned out to be cheaper and more readily available.
Haha then one day they were gone
I remember AOL when they were sending out floppy discs, way before CDs. Those floppies could be formatted and used as actually useful storage media.
Same, it was great getting free floppy disks.
Same. I just got done posting a comment that we'd grab as many as the store would allow and re-format them.
I used to cut up the CDs and use them to scare critters out of my garden! I was cleaning out a bunch of stuff in a storage locker recently and found about 30 of the old discs.
wow i did this too!!!
The expansion of the internet was ultimately AOLs downfall. Their early niche was having local dialups all over the country - traveling business people could get their email anywhere (this was prior to the wide availability of internet access). Once the internet became available (and freely accessible in many locations), AOL lost its market edge. Their core services were easily replaced by other websites. It was a business model that ironically relied on a lack of internet access to succeed. The availability of ISPs would spell their end.
Yup. DSL was the first nail in the coffin that I remember.....
Your missing the point. Had aol combined with TWs Road Runner Service, the internet would be different than what it is today, maybe, but they missed out by letting TW hoe them out like that
How so? AOL was just a bunch of chat rooms and very basic content. Even with high speed access there was no reason for consumers to subscribe to AOL when they could get email and more expansive content from the broader internet
@@alant759 That's pretty much what I stated above. Their core services were easily replaced by other websites
Truer words have not been spoken. The non-technical people were led to believe that their only access to the internet was by way of services, Gopher, AOL, etc. Once people figured out that these services were nothing more than a bridge, they turned to other services provided by ISP's not reliant on front-end (or GUI) supported technologies.
Not going to lie, that AOL environment in the late 90s is super nostalgic for me
Same and I wasn't even alive back then
I got my first computer in 1998 and just loved AOL and everything about it. I loved the chat rooms and made many friends locally here with real people in my area and actually got together with them. I miss AOL and enjoyed the computer so much more during the AOL days
Facebook destroyed everything
Same. Bought my first computer in 98 and AOL was my internet access until the early 2000s. Still use their e-mail
I hated when they went to CDs…. Before that it came on floppies…. They were a great source of free storage after you taped the read only hole
I thought I was the only one doing that
I still have a few kicking around. Worked like a dream
First Aol, 286 using DOS disk... hdd's werent even a thing.
I never used floppies. What's the "read only" hole? I'm guessing something that was suppose to stop you from using for other purposes.
@@456puff it was a standard thing they put on cassette tapes, vhs tapes and floppies to name a few. They usually had a tab that covered the hole so u could break it off if you wanted to make something read only…. But on official software from any company they didn’t include the tab….
Those damn discs were attached to everything: Books, magazines, cereal boxes, toys, you name it, there was an AOL disc attached. It was like they were multiplying in retail environments...
amen it was truely abusive lol
What I remember from AOL that irritated EVERYONE was the massive push of their AOL disks. As you stated, they were EVERYWHERE! It seemed that if you opened a can of Beans or your doctor performed surgery on you, there's an AOL disk inside! People were so fed up with these mass quantities of AOL disks that a group got together, rumored to have collected millions of disks, and then took them to AOL and dumped them at their doors. This was the public proclaiming 'ENOUGH ALREADY!' and from there AOL seemed to disintegrate into oblivion!
I remember going online for the first time in AOL at my mother's house on dial up over our landline phone. I also remember always receiving the AOL disk in my mailbox about once a week until it was over taken by cheaper broadband internet in the 2000's.
I was a user, it was my intro to the internet. I most remember the dial up sound, "youve got mail" and having to get off after only an hour or two because my mom needed to make a call. In high school, my friends and I all used AIM. It seemed like we had better conversations there than thru Facebook and all that came after
this is so true!
I've have this screen name for my childhood during those days.
I still have my old screen name since I was 19. Time flies...and yes, chatrooms were more lively back then. Now it is just simple emojis and abbreviated conversations.
You briefly mentioned Netscape and broadband, but I think you didn't put enough emphasis on the rise of web browsers during that time, which made the whole idea of a portal completely obsolete.
You could still use other browsers with AOL but it was very inconvenient to have that resource hog AOL software running and not use it
Web Crawler 👈
@@a7x5631 yes it was simpler to just browse through AOL. Otherwise you'd still have to open AOL to connect, then go to your other browser.
Broadband allowed you to use those browser without an ISP like AOL.
@@hewitc So did pretty much every dial up provider that wasn't AOL
Interestingly, AOL remains a small part of my life to this very day. I got a screen name for their messanger, and with it came an email address. I used that email address for certain types of communications. As time passed, AOL became a shell of its former self. No longer used for Internet access. Its messanger eventually died. But that email address was never shut down, and is still in use today. It's not something I really give much thought to, but now that I think about it, its rather interesting that I have a decades old email address from when I was a young girl that to this day has outlived virtually all other aspects of AOL.
Met my wife on AOL, in a "Yo Momma Jokes" chatroom. She couldn't resist my, Yo momma so stupid, that she asked for help to finish completing a tiger puzzle. I said that's a box of Frosted Flakes. Been married 15 years and counting.
Yo momma so bald that when she takes a shower she gets brainwashed.
Yo mamma must be proud. I know, it's lame, but probably true.
Damn
One of my favorite chatrooms 🙌🏾
This is the most wholesome story I've read on the internet recently.
"You may not even know what the Commodore 64 was..."
Oh, I know. It was awesome for its time.
Sorry I had a TRS80 Radio Shack
Lunar Lander
Chat room’s used to be lit. AOL was awesome when I would log in and had to put a blanket over the pc tower so my mom wouldn’t wake up and tell me to go to sleep at 3am
Everyone knew each other in the local regional chat. It was like a clique. The random, more friendly channels were the better ones. a/s/l?
You had a lot of people getting to know each other through the internet, too.
@North Star Ken
Yes, I made a LOT of friends on AOL!
I liked playing the annoying sound wavs, lol. Especially the welcome wav coz it played so long & everyone had to hear it.
When the broadband service was connected to a dedicated ISP, that spelled the end of AOL with being the dominant ISP.
For those younger people out there: Back in the era of dialup, using existing landline phone connections, an internet user could select among dozens of ISPs. The one I used back then was by AT&T.
But with broadband landlines, they connected directly with the ISP the landlines went to, cutting out AOL as a ISP.
Funny you should mention ATT. When I lived in Lewiston ID (Which is a smaller city in the middle of nowhere), ATT took over the local cable provider around, if I remember correctly, '98 or '99. And with it, they brought in Broadband, which meant we were one of the first people in the country to have "High speed internet". Remember all the chats I had around 98/99 with people living in much bigger cities that still used Dial-up.
I remember getting the AOL floppies. Was awesome cause you could erase them and use them as regular floppies (aol be damned, i was on msn)
Lol, I remember feeling like such an elite hacker after figuring out how to punch a hole in the disk cover in order to allow you to overwrite them :D
Yup!
I still have a few in a shoebox back at my mom's place. They will be antiques someday.
@@InfectedChris they're antiques now!!
i remember how hard it was to cancle AOL and having to wipe your computer to get the AOL software off it
Word. Took my mom 3 times to finally cancel our service. They were the absolute worst when it came to just cancelling the damned thing.
I had AOL from 1998 to 2009 & it only took 1 phone call & it was done 100%. Guess I was lucky.
AOL had "customer retention specialists" who absolutely would not cancel your service no matter how many hours you spent trying, finally had to close our bank account to be rid of them.
@@TheSimba86 it's because they got bonuses whenever they could retain a customer. the department was called "saves". I worked in tech support at the Albuquerque office for six months and when I put in my notice to quite, they took me over to that department and had me sit with them and listen in on calls to see if I would be interested in switching to the saves department. I declined even for a lot more money. They didn't want me to quit lol, it was just as hard to leave the job as it was to cancel your subscription.
So McAfee?
I used these when I was a kid. Then call them to cancel and theyd end up giving me 90 days free to change my mind. Rinse and repeat. Didnt pay for internet for almost 2 yrs
Lol I remember that
Lmaoo
Wait....how old were you at the time?
Did they ever realize what you were doing?
@@tktru 17. This was early 2000s
I worked for AOL for 10 yrs, when Steve Case was running the company it was a blast..then Time Warner took over and it all changed...I still have my AOL email..thanks for the memories AOL🙂
"...For many people watching this, the first time you ever went on the internet was through AOL."
I'm a little late for that train.
*laughs in 2600 baud modem*
@@Raskolnikov70 *beep boop bi duu sckrrrrrrrrr bi duu bi duuu shhhhhrrrrr*
Also, some people were smart enough to use superior alternatives, even at the time.
Comcast, masquerading as Earthlink, here (2000).
many, not all...
You got MAIL!
No, today it is YOU GOT SPAM! (Out the ass!)
@@HangTimeDeluxe Ok. . . Some license had to be taken to convert the traditional movie phrase to one more analogous with todays personage. I seriously doubt many viewers of You tube material would scarily even notice. But thank you. . OEG!
AOL UK was "You have email"
@@goodfeather16 Mine was Joanna Lumley saying "You have email"
AOL Time Warner was one of the most disastrous mergers to ever happen. Hard to believe AOL still exists to this day.
They have a steady stream of revenue from people who autopaid on their credit card. Some have forgot to cancel, others think you need it to access the internet out of ignorance.
AT&T's takeover of Time Warner (now Warner Bros. Discovery) back in 2018 gets even worse.
Due to that merger we lost WCW
@@DennisTamayo AT&T buying Time Warner was incredibly disastrous, but the merger with Discovery seems to be helping them recover. David Zaslav knows where the company was crumbling and is busy turning things around.
AOL is one the email services people still use today
It's fascinating to look back at where we've been so far in technology.
I remember having 1000 AOL email address because we couldn’t afford to pay for the subscription🤣
Did you ever use AOL Hell to create fake banking account and credit card numbers?
Great video.
LOL I have the "You've got mail" as my text alert on my phone. And as the ringtone, I've got the 56k modem sound.
That definitely turns heads when my phone goes off in public. It gives everyone flashbacks of the 90s when my phone goes off.
I use to love the AOL chat rooms. That was the first way I ever met someone online. Online dating was super taboo back then. We’re still friends to this day.
zonefour same here
A/S/L ?
Shotzy Brown lol
I never used an AOL chat room but AIM was a big thing back then even when you met people on other sites.
Cool
You kind of glossed over their history with Q-Link. The way they shut down Q-Link left a really bad taste in a lot of people's mouths. To this day I use the nickname "redrumloa" online as I have since about 1996 (read it backwards). There was a huge online archive of Commodore software that users begged AOL to allow them to back it up before shutting down, and AOL ignored them. There was a huge amount of Commodore software lost forever due to AOL's col actions.
Things like this, along with annoying and wasteful junkmail campaigns, made them have a huge built in badwill (opposite of goodwill). Old school users hated them for what they did to Q-Link. Power users found their platform remedial. Normies got annoyed with the daily junkmail advertisements they got that kept stacking up.
I had a super slow 1200 baud modem I bought for my C64 for $80 when I was 12 so I could go on Q-Link. Parents threw the modem in the trash after I ran up a $200 phone bill, since it costed $5 an hour. I was fascinated with Club Caribe, which was like a prototype of an MMO. Took me forever to save up for that modem at that age.
I remember the cultural hate toward AOL. Supposedly the AOL software on those discs acted as a sort of rootkit of the time as well and bogged down the system forever after being installed.
I thought people moved on from the c64 by than
Yeah, the company was souless and thats why they ultimately failed. They were fake and stupid.
I used AOL from their start and never even heard of Qlink before today
"You got mail!" "Goodbye" - AOL
Good times
I totally remember that so well and by Heart. I was just a Little Toddler when I Discovered all of that.
Yup AOL was the internet to everyone in my area. Chat rooms with strange other kids from other schools and states you could never meet otherwise. The anonymity of it was the best part. No worrying about what you look like and sound like. Having "online friends" that your real life friends didn't know about. Being able to talk to your online friends about things you can't with your real life friends. Talking to your friends without having to be on the phone and talking to multiple people at the same time. You could troll strangers in chat rooms for fun with no consequences and then just disappear because it's time for dinner or to go out with real life friends. Great time to be a kid.
yahoo had chat rooms for awhile that were also great for trolling. literally overflowing with boomer perverts who totally lacked critical thinking skills.
I definitely agree with anonymity being a benefit back then. You could share only what you wanted, and i remember having very real and personal connections with people who you didn't know what they looked like. I also remember the taboo of hanging out with people you met online, and not telling your other friends thats how you met them lol
AOL chatrooms was lightspeeds ahead any social media outlet
I preferred IRC at the time.
Fr people could spill the tea way faster by just going on aol then any person on social media could AOL chat was chaos 😂
😄 Yeah right, surely that's sarcasm. Nothing but a/s/l and random gibberish.
@@technomage6736 Not at all. Your freedom of speech wasn't infringed on
It’s humorous that most of the texting slang we use nowadays seems to have originated in aol chat or contemporaries.
My dad was a systems engineer, so I grew up with a nerd dad and plenty of computers to tinker with. Perhaps because he worked for a communications company, we were a "local ISP" household rather than an AOL-subscribing one. I don't even think it was around yet, as I remember a number of years of early Internet (well, World Wide Web) use prior to the boom of AOL's popularity. Most of my friends (who even owned computers to begin with) would just stick with AOL. We used to poke fun at it, Internet for n00bs and all that, but I still have really fond memories of the impact it had on late 90s subculture.
You a nerd just like your Dad.
AIM was a fundamental part of my childhood.
Welcome!
You've got mail!
Goodbye!
Texting before we all had cell phones
Of course used AOL like everyone else . Problem was it was known as 90's dial up internet and never advanced with the times
I would have AIM and MSN Messenger on at the same time.. 😉
Remember those buddy icons?
I thought they dropped the ball when they didn’t embrace high speed Internet.
And that was the beginning of their demise. I worked at AO Hell from 1999 to 2007 and had they embraced and become a leader in high speed rather than trying to latch onto other providers as an add-on, they'd still be a force today.
@@joecarlo3848 Thanks for confirming. I thought they should have embraced high speed internet and gaming. The Time Warner deal didn't make sense to me.
@@theBSisreal I was there from 95 to 99, trust me, the hesitation to go to broadband was definitely the reason. The merger was just the icing on the exploding cake.
@@iammojo75 What was their reason for not going with broadband?
@@theBSisreal absolute conviction that dial up would not ever go away entirely
I remember the AOL online games. Those were lit. Chat rooms, AIM. "The good ol' days" as they say. My kids take things for granted when the internet stream dips below 100MB/s lol I tell them we used to only have one online device and we couldn't make phone calls while we were using it. I sometimes wish we could go back to those days just to learn to appreciate life a bit more.
lit.?
I remember AOL. The dial up sound and you’ve got mail.
Omg that “Good-bye” scared me lmao
Last time I was this early, I was still receiving AOL discs in the mail.
oh the amount of those that were in circulation
*Floppies
@@timotheus2003 I remember those too!
nothing like a free coaster in the mail
Ah yes, the free shuriken you used for playing pretend ninja turtles.
Good times.
the late 90s-early 2000s was a very fun time to be a kid. this brings back some good memories of using AOL and AIM to talk to my friends.
Lv1 bbl
I remember AOL charging by the hour and I was always nervous about going over....I think my grandfather paid for 10 hours a month. HAHA could you imagine being charged by the hour today? SHEEEEEEESH. We are all online to some degree 24 hours a day
True. I don't have cable and I don't use that 50" TV i HAD to have in the living room unless i HDMI it to my laptop. I am on my computer all the time when I am not at work and haven't found anything I can't do or watch online. in 10 years cable will be a thing of the past, right up there with the phone on the wall.
Really? I didn't think anybody ever really paid for it. Every day we'd just get another disk with "2 Million Free Hours", change our account info and move on. I always assumed it was run by the NSA and they didn't really need money.
Maybe if charged by the hour some people would be able to break their cellphone addictions and stop looking at the phones 24/7. Ever watch families dine together? They are all looking at the phones the whole meal.
They still have a future in the drink coaster business.
It's kinda funny... during AOL's time, free browsers already existed. AOL only worked because the internet was so slow, so it was worth paying money to speed up your free slow internet... but, by the time the internet was faster, you could just directly pay for internet to go faster for the same price instead of paying for the browser.... AND you could use your phone at the same time... and it did not have the same slow start up time...
*Here is an overview:*
AOL: Made slow internet bearable and usable; cost, it started up slowly and whenever you used the landline, the service would slow down.
DSL: Made internet speeds bearable, though not originally much faster than AOL, but it didn't have the slow start up time as AOL and it didn't interfere with phones.
That was the original reasoning to switch. But eventually, DSL just got faster and faster while AOL was kinda limited in how much they could improve the dial-up speed with their software.
Some people at the time tried to use both AOL and Dial up at the same time, and my dad at the time was willing to cancel DSL since he didn't want to pay for both, but eventually, he gave in and quit the AOL service instead and restarted his DSL instead, since he noted that AOL without DSL was lagging drastically, but internet without AOL was not that bad.
No matter how much they tried to tweak the software, in the end, the actual internet speed increasing was something they couldn't keep up with and paying for faster internet and using a free browser made more sense than paying for a barely better browser using a free but lagging internet.
Plus, it didn't help that DSL was often bundled with phone services and tv services anyways, meaning you can pay the same price, but it would be added with other bills, making paying easier.
All in all, AOL was more of a browser you needed to pay for during the era of free internet. But when better internet came and you needed to pay for it, free browsers were fine... and eventually, AOL lagged behind and became worse than the free browsers.
AOL was not just a browser, it was also a Internet Service Provider.
@@Ben-uu7hz Sorta not really; it used the same line that gave you free internet and it only worked with it's own browser. So technically; you could consider it just a browser. Also, when you got DSL, it just used the DSL.
"free internet"
Uhh
@@Tridd666 Free but super crappy internet... like... really crappy... like, so slow that you wouldn't even want to use it... it's why people paid for AOL though I think there were some free browser cds available, but none were able to compete with AOL's speed.
@@TheDeathmail how could the internet be free though
Didn't you need to have phone service
I was an AOL user when I was a child, but grew up reading AOL published blogs and the like. I think people would be surprised how big AOL was as a internet news publisher.
Who else got excited when a new version of AOL was released and then you had to wait 2 hours for it to update it, but it was worth it to see the new design?
I know this is 3 years later, but heck yeah! Even the discs were cool. Truly good times. Funny how standards changed so drastically
@@swagmuffin9000 Yeah, there was some fun and style to it.
"Here's where things went bad...it started when Time-Warner became involved." AHHH, a story as old as time. I think that's how some of Grimm's fairy tales began, until they changed it to "Once upon a time..." for copyright reasons.
I remember toward the end of AOL that trying to log on was joke. They had so much network traffic that it could take 10 or more minutes just to log on. I cant speak as to the companies wider problems, but I can say for myself that the annoyance of not being able to sign on or it taking stupid long to get online is what drove me to other providers.
That and getting booted when they got too busy to let someone else on, then you had to try to get back on yourself for who knows how long... OL J R :)
I was fortunate to be gone from AOL to broadband in 2001. I was 14.
Thanks for trip down memory lane. A huge thing I remember about them is those chat rooms. That was a unique thing for everyone.
A Gaming Historian and Company Man video within the same hour? I'll take it!
It feels like Verizon has bought ever company you have talked about in the downfall series.
I do agree that AOL & Time Warner merge was a disaster. I know that from WCW’s failure.
The worst thing about that merger to me
Still sore till today
I actually met a person in a random chat room one day in the very early days of AOL and we continued meeting online to chat and hit it off. I think I was 12 at the time. We would talk on the phone periodically and when I was a senior in high school I called her up when I was in town. She ended up coming to my graduation that year and that was the first time I had ever seen her. We dated for a short time but it didn’t work out…At first.
Fast forward 6 more years and she came to a concert to see me and we hit it off again like we’d never stopped talking. We’ve been happily married 15 years and have two kids together, the oldest being older than me when I “met” my wife. Unreal.
Oddly enough, my first time online wasn't through AOL. My dad was an early computer adopter, so I first used an "acoustic coupler." It's a box you put the phone receiver on it so your computer can literally "talk" to other computers.
I'm old.
“That crappy dial-up thing? I thought that was for nerds.” - Quagmire
This channel is so underrated man. I can easily see it hitting 10 million subs. Descriptive, informative, and entertaining. Keep it up bro 👍🏽
What I remember most about AOL is how many free months I'd get out of it just by calling to cancel the free trial. Every time, without fail, they'd offer 3 free months to see if I could be happier with the service. I got free AOL for a year and a half before they finally "allowed" me to cancel, lmfao!!
Free internet for a year and a half?! You are freaking genius! LOL 🤣
I did the same. Sirius XM is the modern day equivalent now.
When I ask for an email at work and someone says “@aol” I’m like 😮🤨
This is gonna be a long e-sign. Had one the other day: Barbara@aol.com THE FIRST BARBARA
@@Dadplusloans I got fucking aol email that I made couple of years ago with my first and last name because fucking Gmail didn't have my chosen name available.
Hahah I still have aol.com my dad setup for me 20 years ago
@@the_uglysteve6933 Really? That's very cool
@@the_uglysteve6933 still got mine too. I created it when I was in 6th grade which was 1998. I use it too. In fact I have the AOL app just to check my email. I also have google but I rarely use it.
I remember spending hours on Ask Jeeves.
I remember those discs, the mail, the instant messenger.. but yeah, they fell hard and I'm glad you did this video
I worked for a mail distribution place and AOL was the account I worked on. Each disc had a different purpose…to track what kind of advertising for AOL was most effective. There was a different type # for each campaign, and it had that # on each disc. So like if you got the disc at a store, in a magazine, answered a tv commercial, sent in a mailing flyer, etc. We had a database that kept track of what advertising method was most effective. They kept us BUSY, but I ended up leaving when I had my daughter in 2002. Oddly enough, I never used the service. The only reason I had an AOL id was to communicate with the people we worked with at AOL.
I remember working for the retention team for AOL. It was the hardest thing ever because you had to persuade people to not cancel their paid AOL memberships. There are some people who kept giving AOL money since the mid-90's.
My dad was paying for AOL pretty much up until he passed away a few years ago. I would try to explain to him that you can access all the same features without paying but he wouldn't switch up what he was familiar with lol.
Maybe if AOL was offering a better product more people would have kept it. I kept having trouble with passwords, had to keep changing them because AOL's system wouldn't recognize a password. After dealing with that and the numerous security bugs and the crappy customer service with the latest version, Desktop Gold, I finally had enough and got rid of AOL for good. Outlook and Gmail may not be perfect, but they are MUCH BETTER than AOL.
Back in the beginning days of youtube there was a recorded call where a very unlucky person was trying to cancel their subscription and somebody from that retention team would not let the dude cancel. I bet if you search for it on here you’ll still find it.
You and I probably connected from time to time. I was a guide and upgrade host for a while. I was also a part of observers. I wish that AOL had promoted the free lan based connection offering more than they did. Most people didn't know about it and maintained the dialup monthly fee
@@muzikmyke3008 the guy who tried to cancel AOL was Vincent Ferrari. That was one of the early "viral videos" before that term existed
People picking up the phone while you were in the middle downloading 1 song that took 2 hrs....good ole days
I was smart. I had a second line installed just for the computer. I used to give out the number of the second line for any company that asked for my phone number but had no business having it. They could call that number all they wanted, they'd never get an answer.
I felt this
Kids these days have no idea what “a/s/l?” means
Mostly because they aren't sure what age they are feeling today, what bathroom to use, and what location? Uhh how dare you ask what country I'm from racist!
Age, sex, location, easy. Nobody uses it, but we all know what it means.
Bingo the Pug well you sure know nothing about younger generations then, because nearly everyone uses it when talking to people online.
People still use it in omegle.
@@t900badbot how original
I worked for Warner Bros. during the acquisition by AOL and it was horrible. They made is switch from MS outlook to AOL mail, which is definitely not for business/corporate use. I remember there was a pop up asking me if I wanted to order ink cartridges every time I'd print an email. After 5 months of that mail fiasco, they let us switch back to outlook. And many of us were angry that the only reason they were able to buy Time Warner was because of the huge run up in their stock price. Like what did a dial up internet provider know about running an Media Entertainment Company? Worst acquisition in history!!!
AIM was the reason I can type fast to this day. My chat game was strong, thanks AOL.
"It was seen as the worst corporate merger ever."
At&t: Hold my beer
Daimler Chrysler: Hold my Lowenbrau
@@jamesstuart3346 Fiat Chrysler- Hold my Peroni
@@slowstang88 Chrysler - Bankruptcy: No drinking in the courtroom
John oliver would agree with this.
MciWorldcom buying UUnet screwed it all up! I was a very happy UUnet dude back in the day!
Remember when you had to have two lines, and if you didn't you couldn't receive calls when you were on the net? lol
I had internet call waiting instead of a second line
My got two phone lines my brother and I would dual modem when she wasn't home , to have a faster connection speeds. lol
With call waiting and a fancy answering machine you could kind of screen the calls. I even had a fax machine that monitored incoming calls and used the handshake to take the call away from the answering machine. The 90s :-)
With call waiting and a fancy answering machine you could kind of screen the calls. I even had a fax machine that monitored incoming calls and used the handshake to take the call away from the answering machine. The 90s :-)
Remember aol mail my use iPhone iPad iPod touch mc book
Right now at my house point
AOL was the start of my internet life. From my early teens using it to escape my home life with websites, to high school where I’d hop onto AIM before it was separated to chat with friends. AOL was the internet for me till it split into AIM and we all moved to MSN messaged.
I still use Aol as my primary email and my boyfriend constantly picks on me about it 😂
Me too. But I can’t get anyone to use my other email. So I gave in.
I still use my aol email too, had this bad boy since ‘97! 😂
@@ZapdosVz same here
@@ZapdosVz 24 years, jeeez I'm not even that old yet
So does Hilary Clinton don’t worry about it
Worst corporate merger of all time ?
* laughs in AT&T Time Warner *
I wonder what AT&T would have done with AOL if it were still part of Time Warner when they bought them?