Do you know something. A walled garden ISP such as AOL could have quite a renaissance in this day in age given that the Internet has exploded and there's so much choice now of where to go and what to do. I imagine there's a large number of users who would benefit from being within the reasonably protected and curated walls of a closed network to go online. If marketed well it could have even worked as an over the top service for young kids for example.
AOL was I will admit, the first way I could get anywhere near online on my old 486 at home (plentiful access at high school thanks to ISDN) as for some reason it was less onerous on the machine than installing winsock and IE from the many discs it came on back then. I couldn't really view any content but the chat rooms kind of worked and I got my very first email address msum328421@aol.com and my first webspace with a members.aol.com address. Ah the memories, shame it has come to this.