America Online—AOL—was the gateway to the internet in the ‘90s. If you were online back then, you probably heard “You’ve got mail” more than your own name. It launched in 1989 as a dial-up service and blew up through the early-to-mid ‘90s with those endless free trial CDs they mailed to literally everyone. AOL 3.0 (1996) and 4.0 (1998) made it easier than ever to chat, email, and dive into forums before most people even knew what a browser was. It wasn’t just internet—it was its own ecosystem: chat rooms, instant messaging (AIM showed up in ‘97), keywords instead of URLs. By 2000, it was huge—over 25 million users—and somehow convinced Time Warner to merge with them in one of the worst business deals ever. But for a solid decade, AOL was the internet for a lot of people.