Those were my exact thoughts, subscription. Oh yes, they are going down! Check "Freya" Linux distro on my wife's laptop, which has 3 gigs of ram, and used to be extremely laggy with windows 8. Instead of paying fur windows 7 (legality is important here) I installed it right after trying deep in Linux (which didn't recognize display drivers/lagging YouTube). It's faster than my windows 7 laptop with 8 gigs of ram!
It was available in the program AOL (america online). Back then before AOL instant messenger, it was an internet service provider, as people used their software to connect online through dialup, chatrooms were plenty, people wrote punters (used HTML code to freeze, lag, crash the AOL client). Good days, but it was too limiting, and I started to learn about the internet after they got rid of me and I got a real ISP - internet service provider
I'm so old I remember using ICQ, which I believe AOL bought and turned into AOL instant messenger. ICQ was like magic back then.