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# A sad day, the lights go out at AOL
- URL: https://www.sweatyspice.com/a-sad-day-the-lights-go-out-at-aol/
- Published: 2025-08-13T12:09:55.000Z
- Updated: 2025-08-13T12:09:55.000Z
- Description: A once mighty giant is finally ending their core business, dial-up internet access. Frankly, I thought it was gone long ago
- Author: Geoff Anderson
- Tags: Tech

I just read in the WaPo that next month, AOL is going to shut down their dial up internet. And with that, the last vestiges of a simpler time, a more casual pace will be snuffed out.

[Link](https://wapo.st/4mahyXZ?ref=sweatyspice.com) (gifted)

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/11/f5/11f5bb9f-30c4-445e-afa3-85a47d260f6e/content/images/2025/08/image-11.png)

I gotta say that at least the writer of this piece has a sense of humor:

> If you’re using AOL dial-up internet to read this story, you might want to put down your can of Surge and turn off your episode of “ER.” We have some bad news.  
>  
> The landline-based service, a mainstay of 1990s culture and many Americans’ first exposure to the online world, is coming to an end decades after being supplanted by broadband.  
>  
> AOL, originally America Online, will discontinue its dial-up service Sept. 30, [according](https://help.aol.com/articles/dial-up-internet-to-be-discontinued?ref=sweatyspice.com) to a terse 106-word announcement on its website.

To me, the surprising thing is that AOL still offers dial up, those rickety 33.6 or 54.2kBPS modems, screeching like a howler monkey. 

I never used AOL myself, but my mother did get online with that before her house was blessed with @Home the early cable experience.

I got online before America Online was a thing, using a janky local ISP (I don't remember the first one I used, but when I upgraded circa 1997 to ISDN, it was Best internet, and I got a Unix shell, two email addresses, a /29 subnet (I think, been a ling time, but I got 4 routable IP's) and a free registration of a domain. That's where I got tralfaz.org!

But AOL was a cultural touchstone, something that many of us olds' remember with fondness. 

Did you know that at one point there were 20 million subscribers? And that they had fully 50% of the internet traffic? Through their banks of modems.

Just wild. 

To be honest, I was surprised that they still had the banks of modems still operational. Talk about the dark ages.

Oh well. I will be sure to pour one out for AOL.