AOL was an early Internet provider in the U.S. (originally known as America Online), known for offering dialup internet access billed by the hour, with an aggressive marketing campaign that involved mailing floppy disks and later CDs with their software, bundled with a certain amount of free hours of access. As part of the .com bubble they were heralded as the next big thing in media and merged with Time Warner in a move valued at billions of dollars but largely destroyed the value of all companies involved and was ended only two years later.

If someone has an AOL email address they probably got it in the 1990s and by 2010 it was strange if someone hadn’t moved on to a better email service. In 2016 it would be easy to assume it was someone stuck in the past, resistant to change.