In the early 1990s, AOL disks were ubiquitous. They had two huge virtues. They were free and they were the internet. AOL owned it. Its competitors, Compuserve, Prodigy and Netscape, couldn’t touch it. The reason was simple. AOL was where the people were.

To get online, one opened the AOL desktop program by typing aol.exe at the C:/ prompt (yes, it was DOS-based back then, before Windows 95 ruined everything) and dialed it in, listening to the painful tones of modems connecting in the hope that you would find an access line that wasn’t overwhelmed. And if so, boom, you were part of the internet.

Last night, just after 9 p.m., my AOL desktop died. About a month ago, a popup announced it would be end-of-lifed, but it didn’t hit home until last night, when a message announced that the AOL desktop was no longer supported, and automatically signed off. Forever.

It’s not that AOL desktop was good anymore. It had been barely functional for years, using an antiquated browser that failed more often than it worked. After AOL went from being a paid service to a free service, unable to compete otherwise with the wealth of options available, the company neglected it, orphaned it to the old-timers.

People make fun of me all the time for still using my AOL email address, SHGLaw, obtained way back in the early days of email when getting a good email address on AOL was still possible. As its popularity soared, the best I could have done was SHGLaw12984. But I was there at the start, and got the good name. And everybody knew my email address, so why change it? For the panache of using [email protected]? My self-esteem wasn’t involved.

The desktop program had everything I wanted, that I placed on the screen, over the past few decades. I had customized it to include what I wanted, making easy paths to the things I used. It had decades of emails easily accessible and links to sites I frequented all placed on the carousel, right where I knew they would be. It was a repository of my history on the internet. It was comfortable, easy and an old friend. Like so many old friends, it creaked and faltered, but was always there for me.

Now, it’s gone.

Many of you never used AOL. When they changed from giving away diskettes to CDs, the closest you came was using them as frisbees or coasters. Only old people used AOL. Only uncool people. It’s true, there was nothing cool about using AOL, and certainly nothing cool about using a desktop program when the “real world” was in the ether. I fully concede that I was not cool. But it worked for me.

Back in the early days of the internets, when everything was new and shiny, nobody mentioned that some day, years from then, decades even, the programs you relied on would die. The phrase “end of life” was never uttered. And so you adopted it, used it, got used to it and spent a ridiculous amount of time tweaking it so that it would be exactly what you liked. And then, with some inane announcement about “to better serve you,” somebody would make a change that turned your finely-tuned machine into a mess. Another round of tweaking would usually fix things, a band-aid sometimes, particularly when they eliminated a feature you relied upon.

But then, as years went by, tech marched on, new-fangled ways replaced old, or somebody figured out a way to monetize what you were getting for free, you were informed that your old buddy would be put to death. It happened with the program that ran the first iteration of this blog, when Go Daddy murdered my original blogging program and forced me to find a new home.

It was a nightmare, and worse, it worked very poorly. The URLs for posts were changed, because Go Daddy used its own proprietary methods, and they didn’t transfer over. Nor did code, nor pics, so old pre-move posts are a mess today, missing pics and pieces, broken links, improper formatting. I could have gone through the thousands of posts and fixed them up, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. And so they still languish, as the flotsam of Go Daddy’s end-of-life decision forced down my throat. I almost quit, but for the aid of Rick Horowitz, who guided me through the move.

Younger users don’t see any of this as a problem. They seem untroubled by the disappearance of sites and programs that were there one day, gone the next. They intrinsically understand that the internet is in constant motion and that everything on it is disposable. Heck, they buy iToys for big bucks and happily toss them in the trash a couple years later when the next flavor of iToy comes out.

For those of us who take comfort in routine, in things being where we put them, easily found, easily used, AOL desktop has been an old, if perpetually troubled, friend. I’ll adapt to the death of AOL desktop. I know I have no choice, as I have no plan to start paying Verizon for its monetized version that replaces its free version.

But after using it for almost 30 years, since the days of GOPHER morphed into the earliest days of the World Wide Web, when it was little more than a vast, empty wasteland of promise, because somebody decided that it wasn’t worth keeping anymore, this morning brought a weirdness to the internet. The old internet is gone. The one here now will be end-of-lifed too someday. As will we all.