>>... and the result is "Oath" ? I guess they mean "solemn promise" rather than "profane or offensive expression"...
>>
>>https://www.engadget.com/2017/04/03/verizon-might-rebrand-yahoo-and-aol-as-oath/
>>
>>Back when AOL was giving away free CDs with their software, one of the users at one of my clients was dumb enough to install it on his work computer. The damage was irreparable and the computer had to be reformatted and everything reinstalled from scratch. Since then that company has always been "AO-Hell" to me.
>
>The only thing I ever got that was useful from AOL was the little tray they sent those CD's in...hahaha

Actually, I remember spending a whole week using AOL dial-in for work, because the bloody Verizon wouldn't deliver the connection in less time, despite me having ordered both phone line and DSL ten days in advance. So I suffered that week, and it took me days to recover. It was nearly unusable, I had to apply some nasty tricks to get even simple FTP or version control check-in or check-out done. Amazingly, the email worked out of the box, even though I was not using their own email (address or client).

It was as tightly closed as one PC I had my hands on, built by IBM, where the shell allowed only the already installed software and nothing else. I had to trick it into booting from floppy to just allow me to fire up an editor (from floppy) to edit config.sys and autoexec.bat (which were nasty to just look at) and it took me a dozen reboots and a whole hour to just get to that point. Ah the things the companies sell to unsuspecting customers...