Old Jokes

I've just finished reading yet another book on the debacle that was the merger of America Online and Time Warner, Kara Swisher's There Must Be A Pony In Here Somewhere. Both Swisher's book and Alec Klein's Stealing Time begin with brief histories of AOL. In each case, when I reached the part of the saga where the on-line service ditched its practice of charging users by the hour and went to a flat monthly fee in 1996, causing a massive influx of users to overload the system and create service slowdowns and difficulty logging on, I am reminded of a joke I made at the time: "If this keeps up, it looks like they'll have to change their initials to SOL."

Well, my older sister thought it was funny. (Which, quite truthfully, should have told me something about how funny it really was.)