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AOL pretends to be the internet

thehistoryoftheweb.com

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Re: AOL pretends to be the internet

#41

Post by helpfulclippy »

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?

Yes, exactly. It was a BBS with larger scale and a GUI. You dial into it, and you're in their walled garden -- stuff on AOL was not accessible from the wider Internet, and at first, AOL provided no access to the Internet at large. Eventually they added it, and the Internet grew in scale and quality far faster than AOL could match with their own content.

AOL's brand name was huge, in no small part to their constant carpet-bombing of the entire country with CDs and diskettes promising to get you online today with 250 free hours or whatever. I really can't describe how impossible to avoid these things were in the 90s -- they were EVERYWHERE. So even after it became clear that the party was on the Internet and AOL became just a way to get to it, AOL still dominated the ISP business for a while. A number of things eventually did them in, not least of which was broadband.

Re: AOL pretends to be the internet

#42

Post by pdonis »

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?

AOL existed before direct connections to the Internet of the kind that current ISPs provide were available. In fact, it, like some of the competitors mentioned in the article (such as CompuServe, which I used from the late 1980s to the late 1990s), existed before access to the Internet was available to the public at all (i.e., outside of government and academic institutions). Portals like AOL and CompuServe let you dial in to their servers and do things that today we associate with the Internet and web sites, such as email, chat rooms, discussion boards, news feeds, etc. But you could only do them within the portal using the services that the portal provided. The portals were not connected to each other or to the Internet.

Re: AOL pretends to be the internet

#43

Post by bee_rider »

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 think this is what WeChat sort of is? And what Musk wants Twitter/X to become.

IMO interoperability and standards work better than this sort of all-in-one package. Do one thing, do it well, and play nice with others. Let the best app win. You know the team working on “X news” or whatever is going to be phoning it in, thinking in the back of their heads “we’d really have to do a bad job to get somebody to leave the whole platform.”

Re: AOL pretends to be the internet

#44

Post by pests »

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 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 making websites.

Then again when we discovered how to make content go into horizontal columns with this magic called and ! The magic!

Re: AOL pretends to be the internet

#45

Post by pizzafeelsright »

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 think I know...

AOL did keep state locally. There was caching. To not only keep the content fresh, additional minutes would be used getting back to the previous state and wallah .... more minutes used.

Re: AOL pretends to be the internet

#46

Post by superkuh »

syndicatedjelly wrote: post #40
superkuh wrote: post #16

AOL pretended but Cloudflare is making actual progress to becoming the gatekeeper for the internet.

Can you explain further?

AOL tried to spread the perception it was the internet and so should be the one chosing which internet resources were available for you. It wasn't really wasn't though. It was just a small walled garden in a bigger internet.

Cloudflare on the otherhand, by it's sheer cheap utility, has inserted itself between a significant number of the top websites (and other internet services to a lesser extent) on the internet as a whole. It acts as the gateway deciding if your client is on the approved list for access the resource. It has become what AOL always hoped to be. It's almost too big to fail now and likely will enshittify it's business model all the way to AOL levels in time.

Re: AOL pretends to be the internet

#48

Post by pests »

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?

"somehow" - your computer would make phone calls to remote servers and (mo)dulate and (dem)odularte [modem] the digital signals to analog for transmission. Early modems you had to literally rest a corded landline phone on them.

Some companies built private networks and services to these users before meshing with the internet at large.

Re: AOL pretends to be the internet

#49

Post by pizzafeelsright »

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?

Gray beard says, "It was an everything all in one app". No need to install a browser, configure an email client, setup remember passwords for websites, install IRC or direct messaging apps. And built in profiles.

It was almost bulletproof for the less than tech savvy.

For the audience it hasn't been matched wide since the iPad/iPhone

Re: AOL pretends to be the internet

#50

Post by SnowProblem »

helpfulclippy wrote: post #41
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?

Yes, exactly. It was a BBS with larger scale and a GUI. You dial into it, and you're in their walled garden -- stuff on AOL was not accessible from the wider Internet, and at first, AOL provided no access to the Internet at large. Eventually they added it, and the Internet grew in scale and quality far faster than AOL could match with their own content. AOL's brand name was huge, in no small part to their constant ca…

Yep, you'd find huge stacks of their CDs everywhere. I remember always getting a free "frisbee" every time we'd go to Blockbuster. Also, AOL keywords.
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