A/S/L? Hanging Out in AOL Chat Rooms

A/S/L was the first question typed in any AOL chat room, and everyone asked it of everyone. Rooms held just 23 people, so busy ones spilled into copies.

current mood: chattycurrently listening to: ♫ a door opening sound as someone enters the room

Written by Claire Donovan · October 9, 202656k: ~2 min

Every AOL chat room held only 23 people, so popular rooms kept filling up and spilling into numbered copies. A/S/L stood for age, sex, location, and in the 1990s it was the question people typed first in those rooms. AOL's chat rooms were part of a section called People Connection, where members joined rooms by topic and typed messages that everyone in the room could see. For millions of people, AOL chat was the first place they talked to strangers online, and it ran for years before closing in December 2010.

Getting into a room

You signed on to AOL with your screen name, the modem screeched and you clicked into People Connection. From there you could pick a room from a list of topics or jump into a lobby. Each room had a little window with the conversation scrolling up, a box for typing and a list of the people inside on the side.

When a room hit 23 people, it was full. AOL made a new one with a number after it, so you'd end up in "Lobby 2" or "Lobby 37," which felt like walking into one of a hundred identical waiting rooms. Members could also make their own rooms, and some were private, which meant you had to know the exact name to get in.

Getting online in the first place was its own adventure, and if you want that part, there's those AOL CDs.

What does A/S/L mean?

A/S/L means age, sex, location. In a chat room full of screen names, it was the quick way to ask someone who they really were. A typical answer looked like "16/f/ohio" or "22/m/cali." People asked it the second someone new entered a room, and some sent it in a private message before saying hello.

It was so common that a 2001 Pew report on teenagers online said teens named it as the most common question in chat rooms. Nobody could check the answers, though. Anyone could type anything, and plenty of people did.

That was part of the appeal and part of the danger. Parents worried, AOL added rules and parental controls, and kids learned early that the person on the other side of the screen might not be who they said.

Rooms for everything

AOL had rooms for all kinds of interests. There were rooms for regions and cities, for hobbies, for sports, for TV shows, for music and for people in certain age groups. Family history and strategy games had their own rooms too. Some rooms were run by guests and events, and AOL would announce special visitors so people could crowd in and ask questions.

Most of the time, though, chat rooms were loud and random. Ten conversations happened at once, and a smiley did half the work of tone, which has its own history in where emoticons came from. Someone was always typing in all caps, a third person kept asking for A/S/L and somebody else scrolled the room with the same line over and over.

If AOL's rooms felt too tame, people with a taste for rougher talk went to IRC channels. To keep its own rooms under control, AOL relied on volunteers. In 1996, about 33,000 community leaders helped moderate chats and message boards. The volunteer program ended in 2005, and a lawsuit from former volunteers over pay settled in 2010.

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How big was AOL?

AOL was huge. A flat monthly price of $19.95, which started in December 1996, brought in a wave of new users. By 1997, about half of US homes with internet access used AOL. In June 2001, AOL passed 30 million members around the world, and the average member spent close to 70 minutes a day online.

A big chunk of that time went to chatting. Instead of the web, which many people still found confusing, AOL gave you a world inside one program. You checked your mail, read news, played games and went to the chat rooms, all without typing a single web address.

AOL everywhere

The chat rooms were only one piece of a company that seemed to be everywhere. AOL's software discs showed up in mailboxes and cereal boxes and at store checkouts, and at one point about half of all CDs made in the world had an AOL logo on them. In January 2000, AOL announced it would merge with Time Warner, one of the biggest media companies around, and the deal closed a year later.

From chat rooms to IMs

Chat rooms were where you met people. Instant messages were where you kept talking to them. If you liked someone's screen name or their jokes in a room, you sent them a private message and the conversation moved to its own window.

AIM, AOL's free instant messenger, came out in 1997 and opened to people who weren't AOL members in 1998. It carried the buddy list idea out to everyone and became the main way people kept in touch, right up until the AIM vs. MSN fight. The chat rooms stayed in AOL, but more and more of the real conversations happened in IMs.

When did AOL chat rooms close?

AOL closed most of its chat rooms in December 2010, when AIM stopped offering access to them because fewer people were using them. Some older rooms stayed around inside AOL's desktop software until December 2020. By then, most people had moved on to MySpace, Facebook and texting years earlier.

AIM itself shut down on December 15, 2017.

What happened after you typed a/s/l

Here is roughly what the room itself looked like.

People Connection_ □ ×

OnlineHost: You are in "Lobby 37".

coolkid8423: a/s/l??

sk8rgrl1987: 15/f/texas

coolkid8423: cool

Talking to people you know

A/S/L made sense when everyone was a stranger. On FriendCrib, you're mostly talking to people you actually know, and you can see their cribs before you ever say hi. Make yours, add a few friends and skip the question completely.

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