Can you play "Danny Boy" over a phone modem? After 34 years in operation, AOL is finally ending its dial-up service. The news is sure to come as a shock to internet users around the country, plenty of whom are probably asking themselves "AOL still had dial-up?" But if you live in a rural area, it's not quite as surprising. As someone who has to resort to DSL whenever I visit my in-laws, and who had to fight to get my mom to swap from an AOL browser to Chrome when I was in college, I can see why AOL's dial-up lasted so long. According to a 2019 US Census, 265,000 people in the United States are still on dial-up, and AOL's brand in particular came with a certain veneer of familiarity.

The company was known for making easy-to-use products with an emphasis on personality, so it's funny how li

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