Jordan

AOL was very much NOT a dial-up pioneer. That credit goes to Unix developers in the 1970s who started with UUCP and USENET. Before them dial-up services were created by Bell Labs developers who figured out how to acoustically couple serial ports to telephones. If you mean the entities responsible for making Internet access available to the public, that was ARPANET, CSNET, NSFNET, JANET, etc. If you mean pioneering commercial internet service, that was STD, AT&T, GTE, etc. AOL showed up later and didn't even provide real internet access at first. Their initial service was a walled garden. Even with that they were far from first, as those existed for decades in the form of BBSes and dial-in Unix systems.