Italia Online - 2020/01/12 - Matteo's T-shirt A Day

Big throwback to 1997/1998: the internet was something new in Italy and Italia On Line (IOL) was Italy’s version of AOL (unrelated to AOL in any way apart from “product inspiration”). IOL ran a TV ad campaign highlighting the usefulness of search. When at the SMAU consumer electronics and technology trade show in Milan I was given this t-shirt which highlighted the catchphrase of the ad campaign.

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This was before the days of established search providers (Google was in its infancy and Bing didn’t exist). Altavista and Yahoo were my search engines of choice at the time, but IOL still covered the internet portal function for me.

Let’s face it, even if you did have an internet connection in 1998, it was so slow you would be bashing your face against a rock face and shouting “Open up you bastard!” anyway. Thank goodness for progression of internet speeds: my current home connection is 750 million times faster.

IOL later folded into Libero and was lost in the innards of the internet. It had a good run and gave us a good laugh with this ad campaign.

Needless to say, I don’t wear this t-shirt in public much. Even in Scotland people know that the southern european word for referee is a rude one…