Photos:: A brief history of AOL

A man looks at the America Online exhibition at Comdex 96 in Las Vegas, in November 1996.

Catherine Elizabeth Smylie and Robert Harold Norris III are married April 3, 1996, in Times Square by Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani in what was billed as the world’s first digital wedding. The couple met on AOL.

America Online Chairman Steve Case, left, and Time Warner Chairman Gerald Levin announce their companies’ merger in January 2000 at a New York news conference.

The lobby of AOL headquarters in Dulles, Va., in 2004.

The new AOL Time Warner corporate logo on the former Time Warner Building in New York’s Rockefeller Center. The Federal Communications Commission approved the merger of Time Warner and American Online on Jan. 11, 2001.

An ad for free email is seen on the AOL website in 2006. The company began offering free email accounts and software that had previously been available only to paid subscribers.

An old AOL software disc is hung over a garden in Oak Bluffs, Mass., to scare birds away from the plants.

Traders work May 12 at the post that handles AOL on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. Verizon is buying AOL for about $4.4 billion, advancing the telecom’s push in both mobile and advertising fields.