The World According to Mitch

In the days after the demise of cassette tapes and before MP3s existed there were basically two ways get your music legally: You could listen to the radio of course… but the vast majority of people purchased it on Compact Disc (CDs). Tower Records reigned supreme but there were many other places to purchase them… and they were everywhere.

With that in mind, even for those of us who lived through the era (I was a young adult in the 1990s), it might be hard to fathom that between 1997 and 1999 fifty percent (50%) of all CDs pressed were by America Online (AOL). They did not contain music, rather they were one of the greatest ad campaigns of the era. ‘Here’s a disc that will get you started with the Internet, including X number of hours for free!’

For many years AOL was America’s (and possibly the world’s) foremost Internet Service Provider (ISP). Their dial-up service was available in nearly every area code in North America, and if you were not covered then there were toll-free 800- numbers.

I cannot recall the last time I used a computer modem. From the age of thirteen (1985) until the year 2000 my computer – starting with my Apple //e at 300bps and right through to my last PC-compatible with a 32-bit Pentium processor at 57,600bps – always had one, and I used it to connect my computer to the outside world. I started out with electronic bulletin board systems (BBSes) and would eventually (in 1995) begin dialing into the Internet. In 2000 when I started studying for my Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer (MCSE) certification I made the switch from TotalNet dial-up Internet to a Videotron cable modem… and once I finally experienced the speed I would never look back.

My journey to high-speed internet was, as with many things related to computers, probably ahead of most people. With that said, it would not be too much longer before customers around the world would begin to make the switch from dial-up to DSL or Cable Internet. As I sit here pondering I cannot remember the last time I was even asked to support anyone who had dial-up Internet. I forgot that it even existed.

That is why I was surprised this week to see a headline come across my LinkedIn feed that read AOL to end dial-up Internet service.

Who would have realized that in 2023 (the last time the survey was taken) across North America there were still 160,000 Americans still using AOL’s dial-up Internet. It’s true.

There was no big announcement – why would there be, as AOL has no follow-up to it from which it would profit. Earlier this week they quietly announced that on September 30, 2025 AOL will be shutting down their dial-up service.

It is an end of an era for certain. Commercial dial-up Internet Service Providers (ISPs) were first introduced in 1989, but the World Wide Web (www) only became publicly available on August 6, 1991, and the first browser to display images inline with text (Mosaic browser) was only released in 1993, which is when the Internet as most of us know it was finally beginning to develop. The tipping point was the late 1990s and early 2000s… in 1995 there were about 44 Million users on the Internet, but that would reach 500 Million by 2001 and by 2005 it would surpass One Billion.

I do not know when the balance tipped from dial-up to high-speed Internet, but I would bet that it was long after the year 2001… that’s just around when I stopped seeing it. As I stated earlier, the latest data is from 2003 which had 175,000 users on dial-up (Of which most were on AOL). According to that survey, most of those users were in rural areas where broadband service is unavailable. I wonder what will happen to those users on September 30.

I do not miss dial-up Internet any more than I miss rotary phones. The end of AOL’s dial-up service will not affect me, but like so many other technologies that have come and gone I remember when I had it, and I remember when I stopped using it. I may not miss it… but that does not mean that I cannot be a bit nostalgic about it.

While I did briefly use AOL Messenger, and I used ICQ for well over a decade (from well before the time AOL acquired them), I do not think I ever dialed into AOL. After a couple of ISPs in Israel (both of which I piggybacked off of friends) I came back to Canada and used TotalNet for a few years until Willem convinced me that I should go for the Videotron cable modem. That was twenty-five years ago. It did not occur to me until earlier today that I cannot even remember the last time I had a modem in my computer, let alone a landline to connect it to. It’s been a long time for sure.

I remember getting my first modem for my own computer for my fourteenth birthday. Prior to that, I had only used a friend’s. From that time, I had one in every computer I ever owned through at least 2001… but when did that actually stop? I know that I still wanted to have a modem even after I got high-speed Internet because it allowed me to send faxes and to connect to corporate VPNs (back then RADIUS really did rely on the Dial-In that is part of its name). The import of them just… faded away without my ever realizing it. I guess that happened to most computer users at some point.

Goodbye to AOL’s dialup Internet… I may never have known you, but I was for many years intimately familiar with your cousins in Israel and Canada.