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AOL pretends to be the internet

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Re: AOL pretends to be the internet

#151

Post by lproven »

jb1991 wrote: post #137
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…

Do you remember the people who thought the CD ROM drive of a computer was actually a cup holder?

I do.

But it was about 30 years later when I discovered that "cup holders" were a real thing that are a standard fixture on American cars.

European cars are tiny things by comparison and there isn't room to drink while driving, and we didn't have drive-through food or drink places in the 20th century, either. Also, they are all manual gearshift, so your hand is too busy to drink.

Some cars have a recess by the gear stick for a bottle or a can of soft drink, but most people use it for small items like garage door zappers or coins for meters instead.

Thus is was about 2015 or 2020 when I first saw a picture of a pop-out cup holder and realised that this was a Thing, a Thing that Americans would recognise, and that optical drive trays do look similar.

Nobody ever bothered to explain that, because Americans tend to assume that the whole world is like America.

Re: AOL pretends to be the internet

#152

Post by treesknees »

TreeInBuxton wrote: post #118
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).

Similar thing happened to us. I had the www redirect but used a .wedding TLD. On the invites I even put the entire “.wedding/“" rel="nofollow noreferrer">http://.wedding/“ hoping it’d be clear. I’d say a majority of people didn’t recognize that it was a web address and assumed we didn’t have a website.

Re: AOL pretends to be the internet

#153

Post by treesknees »

pests wrote: post #44
ineedtosleep wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember that as well. I thought that _was_ the internet since that was my first real exposure to home internet. Outside of that it was just my elementary school and the library. When services like NetZero and Juno came out, my mind was blown knowing that I didn't need to have the entire AOL ecosystem load up -- which could take a while with a 14.4k modem and a 133MHz(?) Pentium with 32MB RAM.

I rememebr this era too. I once showed this off to a friend by minimizing the AOL window, opening a folder, and typing some domain into the location bar. Back then IE was intermingled with explorer enough that this opened the website inside the folder window! Thus proving the internet existed outside of AOL! We also had similar discoveries of editing the HTML of the folder itself before discovering .html files for ma…

I recall using this method to bypass the strict filtering of my child-level AOL account. I could browse chat rooms and play games on websites I couldn’t access in the AOL browser via IE. Good times!

Re: AOL pretends to be the internet

#155

Post by AlecSchueler »

flangola7 wrote: post #148
AlecSchueler wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then your tech support simply changes to guiding people in the use of QR codes.

Those numbers have to be very low now that we are post 2020.

Really? I've been in the tech world for over a decade but think I've personally scanned only a single QR code in the wild.

For people outside our bubble they basically don't exist, though I'll admit this is probably quite location dependant.

Re: AOL pretends to be the internet

#156

Post by skizm »

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…

URLs don’t have spell check. I usually just Google most of the time to make sure I’m not getting phished by a site one character off.

Re: AOL pretends to be the internet

#157

Post by Bluecobra »

VBprogrammer wrote: post #98
cuttysnark wrote: post #28

AOL 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…

Ha, that reminds me of one of my first useful programs. In the early days of the internet my dad picked up a internet contract which allowed you to dial in on a toll free number; it was pretty cheap per month but the only catch was while dialled in they displayed a banner along the top of the screen with advertising. Using the win32 API in VB I was able to find the handle to the window kill it. The only problem then…

Yep, there were a few of free dial up ISPs that came and went like BlueLight and NetZero. I took a more crude approach to work around the banner and used Internet Connection Sharing in Win98 from a second PC and kept the monitor off.

Re: AOL pretends to be the internet

#158

Post by n4r9 »

AlecSchueler wrote: post #155
flangola7 wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those numbers have to be very low now that we are post 2020.

Really? I've been in the tech world for over a decade but think I've personally scanned only a single QR code in the wild. For people outside our bubble they basically don't exist, though I'll admit this is probably quite location dependant.

In the UK during lockdown they became quite common as a way of ordering food to your table in a restaurant or pub. I think that's the only time I use them though.

Re: AOL pretends to be the internet

#159

Post by lbotos »

AlecSchueler wrote: post #155
flangola7 wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those numbers have to be very low now that we are post 2020.

Really? I've been in the tech world for over a decade but think I've personally scanned only a single QR code in the wild. For people outside our bubble they basically don't exist, though I'll admit this is probably quite location dependant.

I’m sitting here eating a chicken katsu curry in London and each seat at the bar has a QR code to scan and see the menu.

For the past 3 years a lot of restaurants switched to QR based menus for obvious reasons. So I’d wager to say that anyone that went out to eat in the last 3 years has interacted with at least a handful of QR scans :)

I’ve also seen hotels adopt “scan this code to get our WI-FI details”. Which is a pretty seamless experience and great

Re: AOL pretends to be the internet

#160

Post by fatnoah »

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…

> I was using still using a 300 baud modem with my C=64 when Q-Link launched.

Wow, that brought back memories for me. Quantum Link was my first "online" experience, and the cost made it very much a "get in, get it done, and get out" kind of experience, but Grolier's Online Encyclopedia helped me with many reports and papers in elementary school.

Once I moved to PC and dial-up BBS, it was all over for Quantum Link.

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