AOL

AOL (America Online) has been a popular online service since the 1990s, though getting the derision of "computer geek" types because it had a reputation in the '90s for being the service used by clueless newbies (which has been updated in the 2010s as "the service used by people who were clueless newbies in the '90s and have steadily resisted catching a clue in the decades since then, so they are probably thoroughly ineducable on any computer-related subject"). When AOL gained Usenet access in September 1993, this was noted as "The September That Never Ended", as it caused the next few years to contain a steady "newbie influx" such as Usenet was previously used to gaining annually when freshmen got college accounts.

AOL's predecessor was QuantumLink (also known as QLink) for the Commodore 64, which was later joined by similarly platform-specific services AppleLink and PCLink, before they were all supplanted by the "new, improved" AOL service (for PC and Mac; Commodore and Apple II users were dumped in the memory hole).

Though there are actually still some dialup AOL customers now, most of its activity is now on the Web, with users accessing (usually free) AOL e-mail and instant messaging accounts through other Internet connections.

Related articles

 * AOL Instant Messenger
 * AOL e-mail messages
 * AOL Personal Filing Cabinet
 * ART (AOL compressed image)

Links

 * Official site
 * Wikipedia article
 * Know Your Meme: AOL
 * 101 Uses for AOL Disks
 * AOL CDs sell for a mint on eBay
 * AOL 5.0 trial disk on Internet Archive
 * QLink recreated
 * Early Phishing (from the author of AOHell)
 * AOL 3.0 is Back