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

221–230 of 279 posts

Re: AOL pretends to be the internet

#221

Post by lbotos »

vel0city wrote: post #199
lbotos wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I've even been to a few restaurants where they go a step further. Each table's QR code is unique and you can see the current tab for the table. You can then split and pay the check straight from that QR code. Pretty nice.

Heh. I just experienced that when I paid at the restaurant above! It was powered by Sunday https://sundayapp.com/en-gb/

Re: AOL pretends to be the internet

#222

Post by _ea1k »

jskakalal wrote: post #208
mike10921 wrote: post #206

Short version via ChatGPT (for the lazy but curious like myself): Between 1994 and 1998, AOL (America Online) emerged as a significant player in the digital landscape. Initially established in 1985 as Quantum Computer Services with a product that connected Commodore 64 computers to an online network, it expanded and rebranded under Steve Case's leadership. Case envisioned a simple, user-friendly online platform, and…

Talk about screwing initial market leadership.

Well, it was difficult as dialup was obviously a fading technology. As that faded, they were no longer able to control the entrypoint onto the network and steadily lost significance.

Re: AOL pretends to be the internet

#223

Post by stuff4ben »

treesknees wrote: post #152
TreeInBuxton wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

not https?

Re: AOL pretends to be the internet

#224

Post by 1123581321 »

vxNsr wrote: post #186
lostlogin wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are ever in a tech support role and have to see how people use computers, it’s actually horrific.

I have an email that is firstname@lastname.tld when I tell it to people, or tech support they always first assume I’m an idiot and really meant to say firstlast@gmail.com The tld isn’t com there’s no g in the entire address, but people have a hard time understanding that such a thing is a real email address. I do happen to have that gmail address also, but my name is uncommon and not the easiest to spell, so as long…

Interesting. I get a ton of others' email at firstlast@gmail.com and never thought of that as an explanation for some of it.

(The majority of it comes from people who forgot they had a middle initial in their email address.)

Re: AOL pretends to be the internet

#225

Post by JohnClark1337 »

treesknees wrote: post #153
pests wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

[dead]

Re: AOL pretends to be the internet

#226

Post by neoCrimeLabs »

fragmede wrote: post #113
neoCrimeLabs wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Sadly I don't remember GetRight had to google it.

That said I remember how happy I was with Z-Modem when it came out.

Before I had an error correcting modem with lots of line-noise I thought Z-Modem with it's built in error correction, ability to resume an interrupted download, and even auto-downloading (not having to tell my terminal to download) felt like magic!

Re: AOL pretends to be the internet

#227

Post by oblio »

giantrobot wrote: post #134
hulitu wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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"?

The AppStore? :-)

The AppStore and the PlayStore are slowly choking off the internet.

Re: AOL pretends to be the internet

#228

Post by ssharp »

SnowProblem wrote: post #35

AOL 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.

AOL offered the ability to connect to it through a 3rd-party internet provider. I did this for probably two or three years before finally giving up on AOL. By that time, the web had evolved quite a bit and AOL's content and communities were no longer worth the extra expense.

Re: AOL pretends to be the internet

#230

Post by xeromal »

jskakalal wrote: post #209
AlecSchueler wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Open camera and point here. Done.

Until you realize grandma has a spam version of camera she installed that doesn't support QR codes
Post reply on HN