You no longer have mail: America Online, keyword RIP

It feels like most people I encounter with aol email addresses are wildly successful. People so rich they don’t need to actually use the internet. (That’s the dream, isn’t it?)

I think both LeBatard and Simmons have said they still use an aol email address.

 

What am I gonna do with all of these goddam CDs now?

 

I still remember my UConn email when I was a freshman in 1994 ... bcg94001@uconnvm.uconn.edu. Lot of letters and numbers there. And UConn had a mainframe, so it was all text-based. The dorms weren't hooked up to a dedicated line, so you had to use dial-up in the dorms, yet to go on the internet you needed an internet service provider (or go to the computer labs). So, that was through New England Computer Associates. It seems so archaic compared to today.

Someone uploaded a couple of YouTube videos where it's the commercials from Comedy Central from 1996/97, which I watched a lot of at UConn. Half of them seemed to be AOL/1-800-COLLECT/Geocities, which have all been relegated to the garbage heap.

 

My freshman year at URI was 2002, and even then, they still had ungodly system generated emails. Mine was sgre6768@postoffice.uri.edu - fun times. But it's so ingrained in my brain that I still use some aspects of it as a handle. They didn't switch to @uri.edu and @mail.uri.edu for students fully until around 2010.

 

10-10-220 saved me a lot on long-distance calls years ago, back when you had to pay for those things.

 

When I started college in 1995-96 the dorms had ethernet connections. It was amazing. To think I had to deal with dialup for years after having that to really start my internet experience, not sure how I handled it! I didn't get cable internet until like 2004 or 05.

And to add to the never had an AOL email, I never really used AOL for dialup either. Maybe a quick here or there when I needed a get online fast fix with those free first two hour CDs or whatever it was (in all honesty, I know I did it a time or two when covering games remotely in those days). I think I mostly used MSN. If I hadn't thought to cancel the automatic monthly fee after finally getting cable internet, and unfortunately I didn't do it right away, they may still be charging me for dialup!

 

Vestiges of the early Internet pretty much no longer with us:

AOL (in its original form)
Netzero
Dial-up
Chat rooms
Somehow surviving without WiFi, which changed the game in terms of filing on the go.

 

I've been out of the filing on the go game for a long time. Never got to the point of wifi on the job. In early dialup days I always called ahead to make sure there was a phone line somewhere on site I could get on with and someone available to give me access to it (often going into a school office or something afterward). And even then sometimes you couldn't bypass their lines. Fax lines seemed to be popular ones to use but they didn't always like dialup in my experience. Still had several moments of dictating stories back then. Ah, the memories!

 

Modems.

I’m not even sure who offers them anymore.

 

I must be the only person who posts who had GEnie, a fun place to be introduced to the online world.

 

I read where 1.5 million people still pay AOL monthly for internet. Then again, hundreds of thousands of land-line customers were paying a monthly rental fee on their phones up until the last AT&T merger.

 

At least when I was with Patch.com, when it was an AOL subsidiary, we were told that AOL still had dial-up subscribers in places where it was hard to lay down lots of high speed Internet cable - like, the rugged parts of Canada and Alaska. No clue if that's still the case today.