I remember doing local tech support in the early 2000s. One of the most challenging jobs was migrating a client away from AOL. The AOL software was designed to stick to your Windows machine like glue.
AOL pretends to be the internet
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Re: AOL pretends to be the internet
#52AOL lumbered on but what finally killed it was broadband and cable. They just didn't have the pipes and the luster was gone by then anyway. DSL gave it some life support but by 2002 or so everyone I knew had switched to cable. AIM use continued for few more years after that until texting killed that too.
I remember clearly making this transition. The value add of the AOL keyword content and other features like chat rooms just wasn’t enough to make the service make sense after the dial up era.
The innovation of AOL was making such an easy dial up program with so many functions. But when I got DSL it was just money for nothing.
The major lock-in for me was AOL Instant Messenger, which was free as a stand-alone app. Email wasn’t hard to transition because it wasn’t such a dependency for your life like it was today.
So, when DSL came around, AOL was gone. If they could have anticipated something like Discord or Slack, they could have transitioned their users into that free + premium model.
Quite understandable that they didn’t see that coming.
Re: AOL pretends to be the internet
#53So apparently a local Birmingham, Al BBS originally had the name America Online. Steve case purchased the name from him for 10k and that BBS became known as the matrix.
https://www.bhamwiki.com/w/The_Matrix
Here is the story.
Re: AOL pretends to be the internet
#54If I'm honest, I kinda miss the AOL all in one approach. Email, news, stocks, chats, IMs, web search, all just there front and center. Easy to use, no trickery, no figuring out what sites or apps to use, as everyone else(generally) was on AOL. I wonder if an idea like that would work again - was just ahead of its time?
There's some variations of that (like MSN), but I gotta say having messaging tied to a paid service makes me feel a lot more comfortable with using it. I am paying for this! This is how the service works! No weird angles to it
Re: AOL pretends to be the internet
#55America Online is not dead. It's rebranded into AOL Desktop Gold.
Re: AOL pretends to be the internet
#56If I'm honest, I kinda miss the AOL all in one approach. Email, news, stocks, chats, IMs, web search, all just there front and center. Easy to use, no trickery, no figuring out what sites or apps to use, as everyone else(generally) was on AOL. I wonder if an idea like that would work again - was just ahead of its time?
Yahoo was great for that. But apparently it wasn't popular enough (except in Japan).
It's still used as a fairly popular portal in Taiwan as well.
Re: AOL pretends to be the internet
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
When was that? I briefly used AOL as a dial-up service in the UK circa 2000 because of the toll-free number and penny a minute billing and don’t recall this.
This was probably 1999 and before, and in the US. It was maddening, especially when one's parents might pick up the phone and kill the connection.
Once I figured out being online for more than 15 mins at a time was preferable I got a dedicated phone line around the same time in late 98.
Re: AOL pretends to be the internet
#58AOL had a 45 minute idle timeout, meaning you'd be logged out regardless of what was happening on your screen if you weren't moving the mouse or using the keyboard. This was a problem if you wanted to download files and have them in the morning. Making my first "idler" in Visual Basic (which sent a string of whatever song was playing in Winamp to a random AOL chatroom where I was the only person) meant my inactive ti…
AOL gave me my love of programming. I learned how to program in Visual Basic because I wanted to write my own "aol prog". I can still remember the "server" in the Warez room listed VB3.0 as the "the software that is used to make progs". Luckily there were people sharing their code so I could study and figure out how to do it myself.
Me and my cousin created a yo momma joke spammer. I was a shit head back then, but it paid off being a nerd. But still, I did not learn about linux and free software until many years later because of AOL's shitty walled garden.
Re: AOL pretends to be the internet
#59If I'm honest, I kinda miss the AOL all in one approach. Email, news, stocks, chats, IMs, web search, all just there front and center. Easy to use, no trickery, no figuring out what sites or apps to use, as everyone else(generally) was on AOL. I wonder if an idea like that would work again - was just ahead of its time?
Yahoo
MSN
Re: AOL pretends to be the internet
#60This era of computers slightly predates me so it’s difficult to understand the context - aol was a desktop application installed via cd that have you connection to other users and access to content somehow, but not via the internet?
"somehow" - your computer would make phone calls to remote servers and (mo)dulate and (dem)odularte [modem] the digital signals to analog for transmission. Early modems you had to literally rest a corded landline phone on them. Some companies built private networks and services to these users before meshing with the internet at large.
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