I'm actually surprised that it still existed anyway.

Dial-up (not AOL but anyway) nostalgia: I remember the excitement of waiting for hours to download a simple file and watching it go 98%, 99% and 100% as connection drops were frequent and many servers didn't support resuming downloads at that era meaning you had to start over if it failed at any point.

I also remember switching from dial up to a blazingly fast 512 Kbps ADSL, which sometimes (probably due to a bug in ISP) became an "unbelievably fast" 2048 Kbps line, downloading files around 200 KB/s which seemed futuristic.

Good old times.

I remember my first "wow, I downloaded an mp3 song faster than I can listen it" with ADSL.

AOL Dial up was quite profitable for a long time. And was the basis of selling aol desktop.