AOL
My family's first internet provider was AOL. The irony wasn’t lost on me that AOL stood for “America Online” yet I was in Birmingham, England.
AOL was everywhere back then. There were these AOL CDs you could put in your computer and get free hours of internet. I’m not sure how that worked. I guess we paid for the internet by the hour back then? The same way you pay for a prostitute.
The AOL discs were everywhere – they were handed to you in the street. They fell out of newspapers. They were posted through your front door like in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets where owls bombard the Dursleys with letters from Hogwarts
As AOL became increasingly desperate for customers, they increased the number of free hours on each CD. It went from 50 free hours...
...to 500 free hours...
...then to 1000 free hours...
...then to CDs with seemingly random amounts of free hours, like 1099 and 1175. I think the sanity of the people at AOL had snapped by that point from the stress of having to make so many CDs.
I’ve done a rough calculation and I think that 1000 hours of free Internet would’ve only lasted me about a week back in the 1990s, when I was using the computer on a near 24/7 basis to play RuneScape and wank to porn.
Connie
There were AOL adverts on TV too. They featured a ginger woman called Connie who would try to get you to sign up to AOL. I will never forget Connie. I saw her face so much that it’s permanently ingrained to my brain, like what happens to your eyes after looking at the sun for too long. She was supposed to be some kind of AI, a bit like Cortana from Halo, only a shit version.
Here's an advert where she tries to sign you to AOL by offering a free trial. She doesn't say anything about what the prices are after the free trial though. Probably because they were so bleeding high.
According to this advert, Connie doesn't know what the word "free" means. Maybe it's because she's never been free herself. She's trapped in the internet. All she wants is freedom from her AOL overlords.
Then there's an advert where Connie temporarily escapes the confines of the computer to help a girl with her homework.
If I was that girl I wouldn't sit there and talk to Connie so calm like that. I'd smash the screen with my fist then run downstairs and call 999.
What happened to AOL?
At some point, AOL disappeared from our lives. It was probably the competition. More and more internet providers were springing up, offering faster speeds and lower prices.
I don’t know if AOL is still around or what happened to Connie. But I’ll always remember her for taking my internet virginity.
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