Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

AOL pretends to be the internet

thehistoryoftheweb.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 279 posts

Re: AOL pretends to be the internet

#111

Post by kolleykibber »

smcl wrote: post #90
jandrese wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That idle timeout was pretty important when AOL cost $1/hour (and it was the cheap service! Prodigy, Compuserve, and especially GEnie were more expensive!). Leaving it connected overnight would get you grounded in a hurry when that AOL bill came in the next month. It was really no wonder that all of those services basically collapsed once dial up ISPs with flat (and low!) monthly fees started appearing. $10 for unlim…

I imagine everyone who was a kid during the dial-up times has a horror story of being confronted with an enormous phone bill by their parents. I remember mine going mental at me for costing us £40 one month (normal service was iirc ~£10)

Good times. I built a wardialler out of one of those science fair 150 in one kits and an Atari st using an rs232 data line to bounce a relay. found plenty, but the fun ended when the 400 quid bill came in. Endless paper rounds.

Re: AOL pretends to be the internet

#112

Post by navigate8310 »

silisili wrote: post #69
Waterluvian wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What, like google.com ?

There's a lot of these comparisons, and I wouldn't want to reply to all of them, but will on this one. What's missing on most of these are the social aspect. With Google, you can't just drop into a 'miamidolphins' chat room to discuss the Dolphins. Nor can you instant message folks. Think of what you'd need to recreate all of it with what we have today. Discord for chat rooms. Whatsapp for IMs. Chrome for browsing. O…

With so many dedicated services, you could say they are expertise in their field unlike mega-app jack of all trades, AoL was trying to be.

Re: AOL pretends to be the internet

#113

Post by fragmede »

neoCrimeLabs wrote: post #63
neoCrimeLabs wrote: post #62

Anyone remember the first question their Tier-1 support would ask? "Do you own a computer?" This was due to the fact that most of the people who called for support didn't understand what a CD-ROM was, and tried playing it in their CD music players. That reminds me of one of the most popular questions in their chat rooms by the late 90's: "A/S/L?" While it did bleed over into other services, it was very AOL-centric. I…

Random things this post made me appreciate: Broadband - especially 1+Gbps connections (we are spoiled and I love it!) Latency that can be measured in milliseconds per packet around the world, not seconds or minutes per character. Multitasking not just locally, but across a network Streaming video when I remember a 320x240 image taking FOREVER to download Downloads that actually complete and don't corrupt most of the…

Downloading files used to be such a situation. Remember GetRight?

Re: AOL pretends to be the internet

#114

Post by ShadowBanThis01 »

olig15 wrote: post #109
grose wrote: post #104

Remember AOL keywords? They basically had their own private DNS alternative. Every commercial on TV for a website would say "AOL keyword !" instead of the actual URL. I guess it was a lot less scary for your average internet user to type in "nick" instead of " http://www.nick.com ". I feel like we still kind of have the "URLs are hard" problem. I've noticed a lot of ads in Japan tell the users to search (presumably G…

I always assumed that ads that told people to search for the product/company were to raise their search ranking (due to relevancy?). But I’ve got no idea if that would actually make a difference or not, or if it is just so people don’t have to type a URL as you said.

It was the latter. AOL users didn’t even know what URLs were.

The article didn’t have a screen shot of how AOL tacked the entire Internet Internet onto their glorified BBS as a button on their toolbar. Seriously.

Re: AOL pretends to be the internet

#115

Post by tyingq »

grose wrote: post #104

Remember AOL keywords? They basically had their own private DNS alternative. Every commercial on TV for a website would say "AOL keyword !" instead of the actual URL. I guess it was a lot less scary for your average internet user to type in "nick" instead of " http://www.nick.com ". I feel like we still kind of have the "URLs are hard" problem. I've noticed a lot of ads in Japan tell the users to search (presumably G…

Ah, that's true. Even Google search has used this sort of pattern to try and become a "soft walled garden". Things like widgets that look like they might take you to Wikipedia, but land on Google pages instead.

Re: AOL pretends to be the internet

#116

Post by [deleted] »

ShadowBanThis01 wrote: post #114
olig15 wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always assumed that ads that told people to search for the product/company were to raise their search ranking (due to relevancy?). But I’ve got no idea if that would actually make a difference or not, or if it is just so people don’t have to type a URL as you said.

It was the latter. AOL users didn’t even know what URLs were. The article didn’t have a screen shot of how AOL tacked the entire Internet Internet onto their glorified BBS as a button on their toolbar. Seriously.

[deleted]

Re: AOL pretends to be the internet

#118

Post by TreeInBuxton »

grose wrote: post #104

Remember AOL keywords? They basically had their own private DNS alternative. Every commercial on TV for a website would say "AOL keyword !" instead of the actual URL. I guess it was a lot less scary for your average internet user to type in "nick" instead of " http://www.nick.com ". I feel like we still kind of have the "URLs are hard" problem. I've noticed a lot of ads in Japan tell the users to search (presumably G…

> Do people still type "www."?

From my experience, yes.

I am getting merried next month - we have a wedding website via "with joy", which had a URL a bit too long to fit on our wedding invites, so I set up a redirect of "wedding.surname.tld" - the amount of people who messaged us saying the website didn't work, and it turns out they were putting "www." beforehand was staggering (until I added that as a redirect too).

Re: AOL pretends to be the internet

#119

Post by sneak »

grose wrote: post #104

Remember AOL keywords? They basically had their own private DNS alternative. Every commercial on TV for a website would say "AOL keyword !" instead of the actual URL. I guess it was a lot less scary for your average internet user to type in "nick" instead of " http://www.nick.com ". I feel like we still kind of have the "URLs are hard" problem. I've noticed a lot of ads in Japan tell the users to search (presumably G…

Now it's instagram usernames (and the app stores, as you pointed out).

We gave people the concept of portable identity with domain names, and they rejected it for another walled garden.

Re: AOL pretends to be the internet

#120

Post by sneak »

TimJRobinson wrote: post #85
jandrese wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you get blocked by Cloudflare a lot? My understanding is that they generally don't block traffic unless you look like a DDOS attack.

If you use a VPN you get CloudFlare captchas all the time

I browse exclusively with a VPN and this doesn't happen to me much.
Post reply on HN