AOL recently announced that it would terminate its dial-up service. The first two questions that come up: what is AOL, and what is dial-up? AOL apparently still exists as a subsidiary of Yahoo, which itself evokes nostalgia. My first dial-up was an acoustic coupler, which someone gave me for free. They were slow, 300 bit/s, about a millionth of a typical high-speed connection, but ultra-portable. Advertisements showed businessmen connecting their costly portable computing devices in a phone booth to the mainframe at their company’s headquarters. Dial-up speeds eventually went up to 28,800 bit/s, which was ok for browsing text-based websites and small downloads. The last time I used a dial-up was during the blackout on August 24, 2003. We still had a dial-up service for backup purposes, and it became useful to check ConEd’s site to find out that they didn’t have an ETA for power restoration in our area.