Title: Farewell, AOL Dial-Up

Matt Katz: For the end of today's show, and the end of my three-day stint in Brian's seat, I wanted to share a bit of news that you may have missed. AOL's dial-up internet service, a defining feature of my teenage years and that of other young Gen Xers and older millennials, is shutting down. You will not be able to use a phone line and AOL software to get on the internet anymore. That means this iconic sound will fade deeper into our memories. [dial-up sound]

If that sound is familiar or nostalgic to you, listeners, please give us a call and share your AOL memories with me. What do you remember about being on AOL? What was your screen name? How would you react when someone in your house picked up the phone and cut off your internet? Give us a call. 212-4433-WNYC, 212-433-9692, or send us a text. As a writer at Inc.com put it, that ]dial-up sound] was "the sound of the future arriving." When I first got online in 1995, four years after AOL's service first debuted, I was 17 at Great Neck South High School. It took at least a minute, maybe longer, to log on the internet.

AOL came on CD-ROMs back then. They allotted you a certain number of minutes online each month. You would get this CD-ROM mailed to you, you would put it in the computer, you would download the software, you would plug in your telephone cable, and you'd hope to get online. Imagine not being online all the time, every day, and then carefully metering out how many minutes you use because the CDs only gave you a certain number of minutes a month.

Kids, gather around and tell me about the old days. Tell me about those CD-ROM discs that were mailed to millions of Americans. Tell me about how sometimes you couldn't get online at all. Sometimes it just didn't work. God forbid, you got a phone call or someone left a phone off the hook, because it wouldn't work, so once you got online, you were very thankful and you hope to hear what one more sound.

AOL: You've got mail.

Matt Katz: It was instant messaging. Not that email, though, that may have really presaged our online age. More akin to texting than anything else back then, our AOL Instant Messenger screen names were really our first online identities. Those of us of a certain age could even remember getting an AIM name without numbers after it. That means you were like an original AIM user. Do you still remember your AIM name? Give us a call. 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. You could also send us an instant-- I mean, a text. We'll take your calls right after a quick break.

[MUSIC - They Might Be Giants: The Brian Lehrer Show Theme]

Matt Katz: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Welcome back, everybody. Matt Katz here, filling in for Brian today. We're talking about our nostalgia for AOL since the company announced it's shutting down its dial-up internet service on September 30th. Enoch in Huntington Beach, thanks for calling in.

Enoch: Hey, what's going on?

Matt Katz: Huntington Station, excuse me. Sorry, I said the wrong town. Tell me about your AOL memories.

Enoch: Yes, my AOL memories, man. Listen, I was born in 1998. Dial-up was popping then. My first screen name, my mom actually picked my screen name out. It was PlayBasketballE. Crazy, man. Yes, I don't even play basketball now, man. It's great.

Matt Katz: That's great. You would come home from school and you're on there right away, messaging your friends?

Enoch: Yes, not even. I wasn't even old enough for that. I was on there if my mom allowed me to, man.

Matt Katz: That's great. You've got to do the E at the end to PlayBasketball because, obviously, PlayBasketball A, B, C, and D was probably taken.

Enoch: Yes.

Matt Katz: Thanks so much for calling. Jembe in Harlem. Hi, Jembe.

Jembe: Hey. Hi, Matt, how are you? Welcome back as well.

Matt Katz: Thank you. Appreciate it.

Jembe: Listen, I remember my first experience with email with AOL, my first email, and my former lover. Well, actually, it wasn't him. It was really our friend, Virginia. She built us a computer. Not him. Enrique was more of an-- how do you say it? An instructor or told her to do this, and he wanted that. Anyway, I got the email and I got my first email. I didn't have anybody to email, but there was a couple of people. I kept calling people. "Do you have email? Do you have email yet? Do you have email? You should get email." I had my first name, my name, I was like, "Oh, I can name my own email, too."

I'm a photographer, so I named it JTrueImageofLife. I found like, "Why did I pick all these words? What? Whoa, I have to--" People were like, "What kind of name? Well, how come you're so long? Why is--" [laughter]

Matt Katz: That's a great email address. Then you would hope that when you logged on, you would hear, "You've got mail."

Jembe: Yes, I did. Eventually, it kept coming. Eventually, I shortened the name. I got to shorten the name.

Matt Katz: That's great.

Jembe: I keep that address, that particular address, for junk mail, like contests and chances and corporations. "We'll send you coupons." "Here's my address. Here's my email."

Matt Katz: A point on that, Jembe, you should know that the AOL email addresses will not go away. It is just the dial-up service. Thanks so much for calling and bringing us down memory lane. Cheryl in Park Slope. Hi, Cheryl.

Cheryl: Hi. It's nice to hear your voice, Matt. That's first of all.

Matt Katz: Thank you, Cheryl.

Cheryl: Okay. I haven't used AOL in many, many years. My husband and I joined at about the same time, and we chose names that were not our names but which were linked to each other. I'm not going to tell you what my name was because I still use that handle in a lot of different places. It's an unusual name, so I have to worry about getting copied, and it has no numbers. No numbers.

Matt Katz: Very good. That means you're an OG when it comes to the internet if you have no numbers at the end of your AOL name.

Cheryl: Pretty much. I'm a little older than your previous caller.

Matt Katz: Got it. Thank you, Cheryl. Thanks for calling. Sandra in New Rochelle. Hi, Sandra.

Sandra: Hi. It's fun to reminisce about the good old days. My uncle, he had the only computer in our house, and so we had an allotted time, my brother and I, we were probably around 12 or 10, each week to sign on. My first screen name was Kittty because I like cats. 123s. I remember months later at school when my friends were trying to find me, they said they couldn't find me. I realized I misspelled Kitty. It had three Ts. It was fun to know that I had misspelled my own screen name, but it was so fun to log in and to see if your friends were online, then later on to have away messages. Yes, people leave messages and kind of like a profile, I guess. Precursor to Facebook.

Matt Katz: That's right. Those away messages were like proto profiles that you'd get later on social media. Oh, that's cool.

Sandra: Yes, exactly. It was fun.

Matt Katz: Thanks for calling, Sandra. Appreciate it. Tom in Brooklyn, you're on the line. Hey, Tom.

Tom: What's up, Matt? Great show, man. This is a fun segment. I was born in 1985. I remember getting the CDs and going to Keyword: Nick and going to Kid Zone, sitting at my dad's computer. The last caller said the away messages. I remember being in high school and college and putting some emo lyric on there, hoping some crush would read it. Another deep cut. Remember the buddy icons that you could put on your little thing on Instant Messenger? I remember that was the early days of making little GIFs. You can put your [unintelligible 00:09:04] or whatever.

Matt Katz: Yes, there were different ones. Right.

Tom: Yes, yes, yes. You could make those in Photoshop or whatever it was, Adobe PhotoDeluxe back then, but then the ultimate one was if you're chatting with a crush or chatting with somebody, and then you heard that door closing sound.

Matt Katz: Oh, they left. That's right.

Tom: When the door would close and they were logged off, and you're like, "Wow, I must've said something."

Matt Katz: Absolutely, or their mom picked up the phone somewhere in the house, and they got kicked offline. Yes, that door closing was a dramatic and sudden end to your online experience at that moment. How about that, Tom? Thank you for reminding me of that. Totally forgot about that. We have some great texts coming in. Here are some screen names from folks who are writing into us who remember their AOL Instant Messenger screen names. LonelyLobster, DeathOnTheLine, GregGuerrero. I mean, these are great.

We got a text from somebody. "OMG. My brother and I had so many fights about who could go online first because that was a thing. You couldn't have more than two people in the house if you only had one phone line to connect to." Another text here. "I remember logging on for the first time, typing my first initial and full last name, feeling suddenly grown up. I grew up in a rent-controlled Brooklyn apartment with my single mother. We didn't have much, but she got me a second phone line so I could connect to the internet, knowing it would open the door to my future." Oh, that's beautiful. I mean, really, this AOL is what opened the World Wide Web, as we called it back then, to everybody.

Amazing memories. Totally forgot about that last sound. This end of the service, end of AOL's dial-up service, will be a loss to many. According to the 2022 census, approximately 175,000 American households were still connecting to the internet through dial-up. It's a thing. There's some other services out there. People might need to get broadband. That's all for me today. Thanks for sharing your AOL memories. My screen name? No one asked. MattKatz20. Thanks, everybody. This has been The Brian Lehrer Show. Alison Stewart is next.

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