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AOL pretends to be the internet

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Re: AOL pretends to be the internet

#241

Post by kevstev »

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…

Didn't most AOL keywords redirect to AOLs content only hosted on AOL? I don't remember what their "sites" were called, but I used to use keywords to navigate to those areas. I don't really remember using them at all to get to actual websites. I only had AOL for two years before we got a cable modem in late 1998 though, maybe that was more common in the later years when the web started picking up.

Re: AOL pretends to be the internet

#242

Post by rrrrrrrrrrrryan »

Arch-TK wrote: post #205
vxNsr wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

My email is first @ la.st (with the TLD being the last three letters of my last name). People really struggle with this. Websites sometimes reject it on principle that the TLD obviously can't exist.

I have an email of the format:

Foren@meSurna.me

Except it's much shorter (10 chars total). I basically only use it on my resume now, as people that work in tech are the only ones recognize it as a valid email address.

Re: AOL pretends to be the internet

#244

Post by tacticaldev »

I get so nostalgic about AOL. It's why I learned Visual Basic (a natural progression from QBasic in my DOS days). All my friends and I wrote "Punters", "Macros" and "Progz". It really jump started my journey into Software/Programming. A year or so later I installed NetBSD and never looked back, but I often think about those late night hacking sessions writing horrible VB...

Re: AOL pretends to be the internet

#245

Post by BeFlatXIII »

passwordoops wrote: post #132
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 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.

Righteous conclusion: make computers harder to scare the normies off.

Re: AOL pretends to be the internet

#246

Post by KineticLensman »

bdw5204 wrote: post #185
basch wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you were out at all during / after Covid, restaurant menus were all QR codes on tables around me. They are on posters all over. Commonly used for sign-ups and event entrance. It’s a mid assumption to think they are more popular in tech circles, I actually think the reverse is true.

There's a reason why restaurants quickly returned to physical menus: most of their customers hated QR code menus and the restaurant business is extremely competitive so you have to be responsive to what customers want to stay in business. It's only in markets that lack competition that a company can do unpopular changes that reduce its costs without losing customers. For example, stadiums all went cashless "for your…

One issue with QR codes in restaurants is that they force everyone to get on their phones which is sometimes exactly what you are trying to avoid by going out in the first place

Re: AOL pretends to be the internet

#247

Post by NikolaNovak »

basch wrote: post #178
NikolaNovak wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am an it professional. I've used qr codes maybe... 6 times, ever? With probably 50% success rate before I give up. I know for a fact that literally nobody else in my in law family of middle class Canadians has ever used a single one. Anecdata of course, but if we're sharing assumptions... :-)

If you were out at all during / after Covid, restaurant menus were all QR codes on tables around me. They are on posters all over. Commonly used for sign-ups and event entrance. It’s a mid assumption to think they are more popular in tech circles, I actually think the reverse is true.

As I mentioned in another comment:

I see QR codes everywhere too. But I never see them used , and nobody in my circle uses them. And the only times I hear about them is when people complain about them in Restaurants etc.

May very well be different in other locations (I'm in small town in Canada, just outside of Toronto, traveling to Ottawa frequently). I would guess without any evidence that downtown NY or Boston may see more use :).

Re: AOL pretends to be the internet

#248

Post by NikolaNovak »

blamazon wrote: post #181
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…

For 3 years, when confronted with such a scenario, the people in my life who dislike QR codes have theatrically said something like "what are these stupid computer squares! I want a paper menu damn it!" Whereupon the staff and I share a knowing look, everyone rolls their eyes, and a paper menu is brought forth.

FWIW - I wouldn't call them "stupid computer squares", but I would be even more snarky and sarcastic and say "Oh... I thought I visited a restaurant, not fast food / door dash / uber eats. Am I in the wrong place? So sorry!" :P

Seriously - if I want food efficiently and robotically, there are many ways to obtain that. If I'm going to a restaurant with my friends, it's to pay too much money for a modicum of a social experience :P.

I don't want to spend first 5 minutes trying to get QR code to work, then next 10 minutes trying to read a menu on 5" screen (usually with poor scrolling and ads and whatnot, sometimes they make me install an app I'll never use again, etc), then another 5 min trying to order on a phone. I do not want to pay for anti-social experience. I DEFINITELY don't want my kids to try to figure out their food on my phone :D

I may be a cranky old grouch, and you're welcome to roll your eyes at me, but gimme a 20" menu rather than a poorly made bespoke 5" app :-/

Re: AOL pretends to be the internet

#249

Post by lproven »

flerchin wrote: post #203
lproven wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That idle timeout was pretty important when AOL cost $1/hour Let me guess: are you American? Brit here. Our phonecall connection charges were a lot more than that. The ROTW pays for local calls as well as long-distance. $1/hr would have been great. I paid closer to $1/min for dial-up. We all used OLRs: Offline Readers. An app that dials your service provider, posts all outgoing messages, grabs all new messages into…

TIL that Brits used America Online.

AOL UK launched in 1996. My account is a journalist's complimentary one from back then.

It was a worldwide service which is why it rebranded as "AOL".

I don't really use it any more, but one of its half a dozen alternate account names is still my mother's primary email address.

Re: AOL pretends to be the internet

#250

Post by tumblen »

The very first online game I ever played was an amazing multiplayer space shooter called Silent Death Online on AOL Games. It was incredible and I blew through over $100 a month paying $1.99 hour to rank up my character, upgrade my ship, communicate with and eventually lead my clan.

With 56k modems, it took so long for the "shoot weapon" request to make it to the server that if you wanted to kill someone, you had to shoot well ahead of their actual ship. If you wanted to get good, you had to open up the debug console and use your ping to determine how far ahead to "lag shoot".

Suddenly, certain players began becoming well known for stacking up hundreds of kills in a game and ranking all the way up to Commander (max rank) within a few days. Over time, people began learning the secret: those were the first players to get ISDN and DSL and with their super-fast internet connections, it was like shooting fish in a barrel.

Those players were my introduction to the world outside of the AOL internet and I became eager to join it.

Around that same time, EA bought Silent Death Online and folded it into their online gaming services. That brought a new era for SDO which came to an end probably not much more than a year or two later when EA for some reason shut it all down (if I recall correctly, people started running credit card scams through the game).

What a time to be on the internet. I am still longing for someone to buy the rights to SDO and relaunch it.

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