Covered Bridge is a Business Blog connecting VISTA Today readers with our take on national stories.

It’s kind of incredible that AOL still manages to make headlines. The company that flooded your analog inbox with CD’s and 3.5″ floppy disks is back in newspapers today after Verizon agreed to buy the early internet pioneer. From the New York Times:

Verizon will pay $50 a share for AOL, a 17 percent premium over the company’s closing share price of $42.59 on Monday. Verizon will fund the deal with cash and short-term debt.

That comes to a total of $4.4 billion and Verizon is paying it in cash.

15 years ago AOL acquired Time Warner for a whopping $165 billion dollars–a deal now widely seen to be the watershed moment of the dot-com bubble. Then in 2009, Time Warner spun-off AOL as an independent company.

Since then AOL’s business has been linking up advertisers with content as they managed a number of smaller properties, the most notable of which, The Huffington Post, was included in the sale. There’s been no announcement on what Verizon plans to do with the publication.

Read more about the string of mergers, acquisitions and other bad moves that have brought AOL to Verizon here.