What Year Is It?

By now you’ve probably heard AOL is shutting down their Dial-Up Internet. If you’re like me, your first reaction was probably “I didn’t even know it was still an option in 2025”. For many of us, it was how we first accessed the Internet in the 90s. It worked through our phone line, and you heard a series of loud SCREECHING sounds when you logged on. Of course, you had to log off if your parents had to make a phone call. Broadband and wireless eventually made dial-up mostly obsolete. Although according to Census data, 160,000 Americans were still using dial-up in 2023. It’s mainly used by people in remote areas. And Dial-up is cheap, mostly because it’s VERY slow by today’s standards. It takes about 12 minutes to download a song. And a high-def movie would take around 170 hours, or just over a week.