I just realized something that broke my brain. We've come around full circle to a point where now having an aol.com E-mail is considered "retro-cool" and shows you've been around a while.
You see, back in the mid-90s, AOL was not the Internet. It was a completely closed off "online service" which you dialed into.
The Internet was still in its early days, mostly a research network that was the realm of nerds and university students.
Then one day, AOL opened the floodgates and let their teeming masses, basically "normies", onto the Internet. We were flooded with new users who had no idea what they were doing. It was insane.
An AOL E-mail address usually meant you were going to be frustrated with that person.
It did get better over time as AOL users learned how to use the Internet, but it still felt like our private little club was being invaded.
But when you look back, these AOL users were still early adopters. The real "teeming masses" would come many years later, leading us to how things are now.
