The history of AOL is absurd in the best way.

[atomicpoet@atomicpoet.org]

The history of AOL is absurd in the best way.

Everyone remembers the dot-com peak, when it was the world’s dominant ISP and carpet-bombed households with discs. At one point, 25% of all CDs manufactured were AOL discs. That frenzy hit its peak with the Time Warner merger, briefly making AOL the largest company on Earth by market cap.

Before that, it ran Q-Link on the Commodore 64. I used it. Chat, shopping, games—on a 300-baud modem. Primitive, but it worked.

Before that, it ran GameLine on the Atari 2600. A modem in the cartridge slot connected to a phone line. And suddenly Demon Attack and Atlantis were downloadable in the early Internet era.

And before that—which shows how old this company actually is—it ran the Home Music Store, piping music to retail locations by satellite. It predicted SiriusXM decades early. Record labels then killed the idea. So AOL managed to be SiriusXM before SiriusXM, and Napster before Napster.

And no—AOL isn’t dead. Verizon sold it to an Italian tech firm called Bending Spoons. They own Vimeo, Evernote, Eventbrite, Brightcove, and a long tail of once-important Internet brands.

Out of all of them, AOL is the one with the most interesting half-life.