America Online, better known as AOL, was the gateway drug to the internet for millions of ‘90s households. Launched in 1985 as Quantum Link and rebranded as AOL in 1989, it blew up in the mid-1990s with those iconic “You’ve Got Mail!” alerts and endless free trial CDs that seemed to show up in every mailbox. AOL 2.0 hit in 1993 with basic chat rooms and email, 3.0 in 1994 brought sleeker graphics, and by 4.0 in 1998, you had buddy lists, instant messaging, and the first taste of a real online community. At its peak around 2000, AOL had over 30 million subscribers dialing in at 56k speeds, dominating the early internet before broadband and modern social media made the walled garden obsolete.