AOL announced that its internet service by telephone line would be deleted next month.
If you are learning that AOL’s telephone line internet service still exists (you probably read this article through a broadband Internet connection), you are not the only one.
This service, considered by many as a relic of the beginnings of the Internet, will be deleted on September 30, as well as the associated software, said the company. AOL made this announcement discreetly on Friday in a press release published on its aid portal: “AOL regularly assesses its products and services and decided to remove Internet access by telephone line. »»
For many, the most surprising in this news is perhaps that Ool still offered a connection service by telephone model. In 2023, according to data from the United States census office, around 163,000 American households used only a connection by telephone modem to access the Internet, which represents just over 0.1 % of the Internet subscriptions of American households.
But in the 1990s, AOL’s Modem connection tone (a series of beeps, sizzles and deafening screeches) and the alert “You’ve Got Mail” (you have a message) were the soundtrack of many Americans who learned to navigate the Internet.
Memories of another era
This service joins an increasing list of old internet products that have been withdrawn from the market in recent years. Microsoft arrested Skype in May and Internet Explorer in 2022. AOL’s instant messaging service, AIM, which has enabled an entire generation to communicate in particular with its classmates, was closed in 2017.
AOL’s announcement also aroused a wave of online nostalgia for the modem era, while the web pages took to charge for several minutes instead of a second, that winning the fixed phone caused its internet connection to be lost and many saw the World Wide Web as a source of excitement, emergence and possibilities.
AOL was also a key element in the intrigue of the 1998 romantic comedy You’ve Got Mailin which the characters interpreted by Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan fall in love with AOL messages.
The CDs of the company, which offered free internet access tests measured in hours, were a familiar form of spam in the United States in the 1990s. In 2000, America Online, the name of the company at the time, which was then the largest Internet company in the world, launched an advertising campaign in which Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan met on the Internet and fell in love.
PHOTO MARK LENNIHAN, ARCHIVES ASSOCIATED PRESS
CD collection containing promotional software for AOL Internet service
But the service has forgotten when the connections by modem were replaced by high speed lines. In 2004, a modem connection user declared that New York Times that he “brought a newspaper and sat down to read” while he was waiting for the data to download.
(The average speed of an internet connection per modem is approximately 56 kiloofets per second; modern connections in the United States are, on average, several thousand times faster.)
In 2015, AOL’s switched service had more than 2 million users, generating more than $ 40 million in income per month. AOL, which belongs to Yahoo, has not disclosed information on the number of people who currently use its service by switched line.
This text was first published in the New York Times.
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