These days, AOL is an advertiser, publisher, and investment firm, but the company is probably still best known for being America’s most popular internet provider at the turn of the century. So ubiquitous was AOL’s internet service that 1998 romantic comedy You’ve Got Mail used the company’s email client, and its distinctive incoming mail alert, as its central conceit. The film cast Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan as business adversaries who nonetheless become soulmates through then-nascent email technology.
Verizon named its secret plan to buy AOL after Tom Hanks
So when Verizon was putting together a deal to buy the venerable ISP for $4.4 billion — the existence of which was confirmed earlier this week — the carrier’s bankers had a neat name to give the secret plan. They called it “Project Hanks.”
The name acted a sneaky nod to the planned deal without making Verizon’s schemes obvious to anyone who came into contact with it, but the reference to the AOL of the past could also be seen to be a slightly cruel moniker — as The Wall Street Journal notes, the ISP ended 1998 with a market capitalization of $63 billion, more than 15 times the price Verizon paid for it 17 years later.
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