LOL! It's funny, I've always felt that AOL was an obvious choice if you wanted to chat online.. though I understand why people dismiss it. We have our reasons though
AOL's chatrooms were much more appealing than IRC, which seemed to attract a lot more script kiddies and silly "i mon h4ck u whats ur ip" uberhackers. AOL had "regular" people, and with us (UKCT people) being mostly older and more "mature" (don't laugh) IT professionals, it was easier to escape the day job in AOL chatrooms than on IRC. When we felt like helping non-techies, there were plenty of people to help in the AOL chatrooms, with many more varied problems, and they'd gratefully receive the help.
So the UKCT team was born.. but not a racing team, but a team of IT professionals. Web devs, graphic designers, ebusiness managers, network security engineers, PC technicians, programmers.. most of it way over my head. We were in the throwes of setting up a workers co-op, we leased our first server, and then some idiot installed a Halo server on it. We instantly transformed into mindless gamers, and that's how we've stuck. LFS is the most played game among the UKCT crowd, but it's not the only one. We occasionally run a UT2004 server, a Battlefield2 server, and a few others too.
There are also a few of the original UKCT members still around who've never yet installed a single game on their machines, so UKCT still remains a group of friends who also play games, rather than a group of gamers who are also friends.
I've had an AOL account more or less since AOL started in the UK, so just about exactly 11 years now. I won't give it up until AOL itself falls into the pits of hell. That's several months away yet