You had mail
The classic dial-up handshake sounds melodic, scratchy, and harsh, and is inexorably associated with connection. It’s also now silent. AOL’s decision this week to finally end dial-up service is not surprising, but it still feels like a door closing, one I walked through more times than I can count to step onto the world wide web.
It’s a sound immortalized in the 1998 Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan rom-com You’ve Got Mail, a film in which the then insanely popular AOL service propels the plot forward to its unsurprising and deeply romantic conclusion.
When I first started covering and working online, AOL was one of the chief portals to the new digital world, and the only way to traverse that portal was via a dial-up modem, one connected to your PC on one side and your phone line on the other. (Having a phone line close to your computer was a big deal – kids today are spoiled by ubiquitous, high-speed Wi-Fi. but I digress.)
In today’s always-connected world, it’s hard to conceive of the intentionality of this act. In the 1990s, our phones were dumb, and your computer dealt with local networks and files. We called dial-up “going online” because it was like taking a trip in which the mode of transportation was a little box with the magic code to connect you to the Internet and, ultimately, the information superhighway.
Before home broadband, everyone knew the handshake sound and, yes, millions were dialing into AOL a network of its own – to access the internet.
