It was the end of an era that most people probably didn't know they were still living in. On September 30, AOL (formerly America Online) officially discontinued its dial-up internet service after more than 30 semi-reliable years. According to PBS, dial-up represented just .13 percent of homes with internet connections still relied on dial-up as of 2023.
During their heyday in the 1990s and early 2000s, AOL released a blizzard of promotional CDs to American homes — more than a billion, according to Vox. And even though the CDs were notoriously wasteful and annoying as they filled mailboxes day after day, they also worked. Anyone with a decent computer and a phone line could pop in a CD and AOL would shepherd them into the future with just enough free hours to hook them into a paid subscription.
But dial-up internet connections — well, they were annoying after the initial novelty wore off. Slow and easily disrupted when someone picked up the phone, it quickly lost its market dominance once broadband became accessible and affordable for American homes.
While dial-up is officially dead, those millions and millions of CDs are still hanging around in junk piles and landfills and maybe in the corner of your own house somewhere. You can't use them to connect to the internet anymore — but they make great coasters in a pinch.