Washington (AFP) – The ear-piercing beeps, squeals and buzzes of 90s-era dial-up internet will vanish from thousands of holdout American homes in September as historic provider AOL shuts down the service. The raucous sounds of modems establishing their connection to distant servers marked a generation of internet users and still pop up in memes to this day.
It also made AOL one of the biggest tech firms of the era, but in the following decades the dial-up connections were steadily replaced with much faster ADSL and then fibre-optic lines. “AOL routinely evaluates its products and services and has decided to discontinue dial-up internet,” the pioneering internet service provider (ISP) said in a blog post. AOL did not say how many users would be affected by the September 30 shutoff.
CNBC reported that numbers using dial-up had fallen from around 2.1 million in 2015 to just a few thousand in 2021. AOL merged with Time Warner in a 2001 mega-deal worth $162 billion at the peak of the dotcom bubble. After splitting off again, it was sold to Verizon in 2015 for a far humbler $4.4 billion.
AOL was merged with another early internet heavyweight, Yahoo, and sold to the investment fund Apollo Global Management for $5 billion in 2021. Its once widely used chat programme AIM, launched in 1997 and beloved of early-2000s teens, was shut down in 2017.
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