AOL dial-up got America online in the ’90s. It’s ending next month.

If you’re using AOL dial-up internet to read this story, you might want to put down your can of Surge and turn off your episode of “ER.” We have some bad news.

The landline-based service, a mainstay of 1990s culture and many Americans’ first exposure to the online world, is coming to an end decades after being supplanted by broadband.

AOL, originally America Online, will discontinue its dial-up service Sept. 30, according to a terse 106-word announcement on its website.

At its peak in 2000, AOL dial-up had 25 million subscribers and occupied a dominant role in American culture. CDs offering free trial internet service were ubiquitous in mailboxes, and the service’s “You’ve got mail” chime and chatrooms were so famous they inspired a 1998 film about online romance starring Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks.

Dial-up taught patience to a generation of internet users. Today’s computers can access a full-length movie in seconds. But children of the ’90s sat through excruciatingly long waits – and a series of electronic whistles, beeps and static as their modems connected – to download photos of rock singer Courtney Love playing her Fender Squier Venus guitar or Bush front man Gavin Rossdale shirtless.

AOL’s forums and chatrooms emerged as a way people learned news. In maybe the most mid-’90s story, the Post wrote in May 1994 about AOL users on the Alternative Rock forum sharing bereavements and poems about the death of Nirvana singer Kurt Cobain, Love’s husband. Even Love’s estranged father joined the chat.

Here’s how the technology behind this internet time capsule works: The modem in your computer “calls” an internet service provider, or ISP, on a landline. Once a connection is made, information is transferred at a whopping 56 kilobits per second – and no one can make calls on the occupied line. (Now, with broadband internet service, computers simply remain connected to the ISP and work at 400 times the speed of dial-up.)

For many users, a lasting memory of starting an AOL session are the unforgettable, jolting beeps as the modem connected.

At its peak, AOL handled half of all consumer internet traffic, former CEO Steve Case wrote in 2015.

Then came broadband and a boondoggle of a merger between AOL and Time Warner. Dial-up cratered and the junk mail CDs that AOL sent out to entice people with free hours of internet access became little more than Frisbees for children to fling at each other.

AOL, which is owned by Yahoo, declined to say exactly how many people were still dialing up.

In 2015, about 2.1 million people were still using AOL’s dial-up, according to CNBC, adding a quote from an unnamed source that it was “in the low thousands” in May 2021.

The month AOL dial-up dies, Apple will release the iPhone 17. A month later, Rossdale will turn 60.