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

31–40 of 279 posts

Re: AOL pretends to be the internet

#33

Post by bobsmooth »

silisili wrote: post #5

If I'm honest, I kinda miss the AOL all in one approach. Email, news, stocks, chats, IMs, web search, all just there front and center. Easy to use, no trickery, no figuring out what sites or apps to use, as everyone else(generally) was on AOL. I wonder if an idea like that would work again - was just ahead of its time?

It's still there if you want it www.msn.com

Re: AOL pretends to be the internet

#34

Post by syndicatedjelly »

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…

That was a nice slice of history, thanks for sharing.

Re: AOL pretends to be the internet

#35

Post by SnowProblem »

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.

Re: AOL pretends to be the internet

#36

Post by echelon »

soared wrote: post #25

This era of computers slightly predates me so it’s difficult to understand the context - aol was a desktop application installed via cd that have you connection to other users and access to content somehow, but not via the internet?

I never used AOL, but I got the CDs, used AIM (a standalone version of their messenger), and saw other people using AOL proper.

Imagine if AOL, the program, was your browser, chat, email, and internet connection all rolled into one single desktop program.

The clunkiness of an IDE, such as IntelliJ or Unreal Engine, that bakes a lot of things into one executable. The embedded browser in Visual Studio.

Dialup internet software makes a phone call to an ISP and handles the protocol for the connections all the applications on your machine use. AOL acted as a dialer itself so you could run lots of other non-AOL software, like Internet Explorer, Netscape, and video games. But AOL tried to be all of those things too inside their bloated app.

Re: AOL pretends to be the internet

#37

Post by syndicatedjelly »

silisili wrote: post #5

If I'm honest, I kinda miss the AOL all in one approach. Email, news, stocks, chats, IMs, web search, all just there front and center. Easy to use, no trickery, no figuring out what sites or apps to use, as everyone else(generally) was on AOL. I wonder if an idea like that would work again - was just ahead of its time?

I feel like that everything big online has been an iteration of that same idea for the last 2 decades

Re: AOL pretends to be the internet

#39

Post by kylebenzle »

ineedtosleep wrote: post #24
mjhay wrote: post #2

Kind of an aside, but one mind-boggling decision I never understood was that if the dial-up connection was disrupted, the entire AOL app closed with a "goodbye." If you were reading something, filling out a form, whatever, you're out of luck - despite the fact that you might have been able to quickly reconnect.

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 was the exact same. My mind was blown when I realized you could connect to AOL and THEN open an internet browser and just be ONLINE! I spent way to long thinking AOL was the internet before I think I saw my cousin do this and it changed my world forever.
Post reply on HN