AOL dial-up says goodbye. Without Apple, it might not have changed the world

You young whippersnappers out there, pull up a chair and let me tell you about a more innocent time. Way before you could connect to the internet out of thin air, you had to use what was called a dial-up connection. A box called a modem was connected to your computer, and it used a phone line to call a service provider that would give you access to a bulletin-board service (BBS; think of a BBS as an early form of Reddit). It took a few years before the BBS gave way to the web.

There were several dial-up service providers, but there was one that ruled them all: America Online, which became widely known as AOL. However, the days of AOL as a dial-up service provider are now over. According to an AOL support document, the company (it’s now part of Yahoo, which is owned by Apollo Global Management) has determined that the dial-up service will end on September 30.

Now, AOL’s story is a parable in its own right, and you’ll find plenty of stories looking at and analyzing its history. But one overlooked part of AOL’s history is its ties to Apple. (You’re still sitting, you young whippersnappers?) Way back in 1985, Apple had a service for Apple employees and retailers called AppleLink that was a BBS for product support.

Apple teamed up with Quantum Computing Services to create a consumer version of the software, AppleLink Personal Edition, in 1988, which offered a stripped-down version of AppleLink that let users “do such things as read stock quotes, check airline schedules, and hold electronic discussions with other operators.” It’s high price ($15 an hour during peak times and $6 an hour off-peak, with a $35 annual subscription) and disagreements between Apple and Quantum ultimately turned it into a failure.

In the late 1980’s, the two companies split, with Quantum retaining the rights to AppleLink. It renamed the service America Online, though it remained exclusive to the Apple II and Macintosh. In 1991, the first AOL client for MS-DOS arrived and, well, the rest is history. Soon after, everything you bought came bundled with an AOL floppy disk, which you can still buy on eBay if you have money to burn on nostalgia.

Of note, the first message from space was composed on an Apple Macintosh Portable and sent over the AppleLink network: “Hello Earth! Greetings from the STS-43 Crew. This is the first AppleLink from space. Having a GREAT time, wish you were here,…send cryo and RCS! Hasta la vista, baby,…we’ll be back!”

Apple

Old fogies like me may initially react with a small sense of panic–surely, there’s a need for dial-up connectivity, right? Well, not really. In 2023, a survey by the U.S. Census Bureau found that 163,401 U.S. households used a dial-up internet connection. That’s about 0.2 percent of U.S. households. It’s probably safe to assume that a lot of those households use AOL, but it’s not enough to justify the cost of maintaining the service, especially when that number decreases every year.

AOL does plan to continue its other services, such as AOL Mail. (Yes, some people still use an AOL email address. Like my in-laws. That sigh of relief you just heard came for them.)

So, one way to look at the end of the AOL dial-up service is as the end of a service with Apple roots. It joins the realm with other historical Apple products–from the Apple IIe to the Touch Bar–that had their heyday but ran out of time as technology constantly moves forward.