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…
> AOL keyword ! And we've gone full circle. We have the same today, just in a form of a #tag.
AOL keywords were shortcuts to URLs like bit.ly right?
> 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).
If you are ever in a tech support role and have to see how people use computers, it’s actually horrific.
I think anyone working UX should spend 3-6 months minimum in tech support every couple of years. I imagine the value of those learnings would vastly outweigh any useability studies or testing.
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.
i've backspaced over trying to be nice but i don't think you a) could've made the dtmf tones, b) matched the impedance, c) modulated the serial signal even if you made a connection
It's important to remember that AOL could have been they internet if the succeeded. They offered one view of the world: where the internet would be like a cable package and AOL would be the cable provider of this new world who captures a huge part of the market with its first mover advantage. The idea of a truly open internet where anyone could view anything from anyone else as long as they paid for a connection was…
> It's important to remember that AOL could have been they internet if the succeeded. Well, we now have 4 AOLs: Google, Apple, Microsoft and Facebook.
Why is Apple included in that list? What service do they have that pretends to be "the Internet"?
From what I’ve seen and read, AOL in the UK was a very different beast to AOL in the US.
I've just been trying to jog my memory of it and it's difficult to find the relevant information among the masses of information about US AOL.
Growing up, I had a best friend (still a good friend though we live very far apart now) his dad used AOL on top of his broadband through the 2000's...I moved away maybe 2006 but couldn't figure out why said dad was waiting for that little yellow running man to get to the right pane
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…
Do you remember the people who thought the CD ROM drive of a computer was actually a cup holder?
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.
i've backspaced over trying to be nice but i don't think you a) could've made the dtmf tones, b) matched the impedance, c) modulated the serial signal even if you made a connection please prove me wrong
They’re describing pulse dialing, not tone dialing. Totally doable using a toggleable serial port pin and some basic electronics.
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.
I don’t know if domain names is really that much better a solution—between the messiness of protocols, subdomains, and TLDs (how many kids in school went to whitehouse.com instead of whitehouse.gov back when the former was a porn site?), they can also expire and be replaced with a domain showing very different content. Lidl recently had to recall some kids snacks because the URL was not showing what they wanted it to.
Ha, that scene is how I learned to program. Built a shareware tool called AoLOL! (available by going to keyword "Addon"), $14.95, got paper checks from all over the country! Then I met the ICQ founders...