A moment of reflection, if you will, for AOL dial-up, the service that brought a generation of Long Islanders to the internet, and now is on the brink of its demise .

The service and accompanying software, "which are optimized for older operating systems and dial-up internet connections, will be discontinued" Sept. 30, the company said last week, not in a formal release but in a brief notice that appeared in its help pages. A spokesperson for Yahoo, which used to compete with AOL but now owns it, wrote in an email Monday the number of remaining users was very small.

The same could be said of dial-up in general.

Dialing down dial-up

In 2023 in Nassau County, according to the U.S. Census , the number of households with a dial-up internet subscription only was somewhere between zero

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