AOL Finally Pulls the Plug on Dial-Up – 34 Years Too Late

Hello everyone. Well, mark your calendars, because on September 30, 2025, AOL will be officially turning off its dial-up internet service. Yes, that AOL. The one you thought had been dead and buried somewhere in the landfill next to E.T. cartridges is still chugging along in the dark corners of America. Apparently, there are still around 265,000 people tethered to it, most likely not because they’ve become hipsters of latency, but because their broadband infrastructure is about as developed as a potato farm running on Windows 95.

And who owns AOL now? Well, it’s Yahoo – because of course, we’re now in the timeline where one tech dinosaur eats another. They’ve decided it’s time to put the old workhorse down. No more AOL Dialer, no more AOL Shield browser – the one they called “optimized for older operating systems”, which is corporate-speak for “designed back when Java was cool and security holes were the size of Death Star exhaust ports.”

A Walk Down Bandwidth-Limited Memory Lane

Let’s not pretend nostalgia won’t drip from every corner of the internet about this. The “You’ve got mail!” greeting, the melody of that screeching modem handshake, the installer CDs so numerous they could have been used to tile the Great Wall of China twice over. You know, those were the days when online multiplayer felt like juggling chainsaws – massive risk, questionable reward. And if someone picked up the phone? Boom – instant disconnect. Game over, thank you for playing.

It wasn’t just an internet connection. Dial-up was a shared survival experience. Households engaged in tactical negotiations over who got online when. It was as much about patience as it was about ping, which in gaming terms was somewhere between “Molasses in January” and “Why even bother.”

The Medical Autopsy of Dial-Up

Let’s diagnose this, shall we? The patient, AOL Dial-up, suffered from multiple organ failure over the last two decades. Broadband pneumonia, Wi-Fi arthritis, and the terminal “Nobody under 40 has a clue how this works” syndrome. It kept going thanks to the life support of isolated rural networks and sheer stubbornness. Now, the plug will be – quite literally – pulled. No heroic resuscitation attempts. Just 34 years of history being carted off to the morgue of obsolete tech.

But like a bad patient file that no one dares delete, it lingered in the records. Part of me suspects if we dug deep enough into conspiratorial thinking, we’d find the remaining subscriber base was three townships in the Midwest, one guy in Miami keeping his 305 number alive for nostalgia, and maybe a bunker full of Cold War internet holdouts preparing for “when the broadband goes dark.”

The Gamer’s Eulogy

From a gaming perspective, this was never a platform – it was a boss battle against physics itself. Lag so severe you could issue a command in StarCraft and see it executed sometime after the next presidential election. Meanwhile, modern gamers complain if they can’t get 144fps at 4K in a free-to-play title that they downloaded over gigabit fiber in under five minutes. Try explaining to them that their online match would once fail because Aunt Linda used the house phone.

Dial-up taught you to treasure milliseconds – by mocking you with their complete absence.

Final Verdict

So, is AOL shutting down dial-up good? Yes. Objectively. It’s long overdue. Keeping it alive at this point was like keeping a floppy disk drive on life support, waiting for someone to actually need it again. The nostalgia is sweet, but practicality has already left the building. It’s time to hang up the modem and let the ghost of AOL drift into the great beyond, right next to ICQ and chain email hoaxes.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is entirely my opinion.

Article source: AOL Dial-Up Internet Service to End After 34 Years, https://www.macrumors.com/2025/08/11/aol-dial-up-internet-ending-after-34-years/