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AOL pretends to be the internet

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Re: AOL pretends to be the internet

#61

Post by CSMastermind »

It's important to remember that AOL could have been they internet if the succeeded.

They offered one view of the world: where the internet would be like a cable package and AOL would be the cable provider of this new world who captures a huge part of the market with its first mover advantage.

The idea of a truly open internet where anyone could view anything from anyone else as long as they paid for a connection was in many ways a much crazier.

It seems inevitable in hindsight given how things have played out but with some slightly changed starting variables or decisions made along the way we could have an internet but no web like we do now.

Re: AOL pretends to be the internet

#62

Post by neoCrimeLabs »

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'm happy it has long since faded into obscurity.

I completely forgot AOL used to be Q-Link.

Related memory: I was using still using a 300 baud modem with my C=64 when Q-Link launched. It was rather disappointing after having used other BBS for free. The same with AOL after having been using Gopher, IRC, Anonymous-FTP years prior.

But heck, they got my dad - and a lot of people who never used computers before - to learn how to send email. I did not appreciate the scale of how impressive that was until decades later.

I'm also impressed this many random memories popped up. Unexpected.

Re: AOL pretends to be the internet

#63

Post by neoCrimeLabs »

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…

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 time.

Stateless connections that are easy to restart if something does go wrong

And so much more.

Re: AOL pretends to be the internet

#64

Post by ChrisArchitect »

This made me think about how AOL positioned itself alongside the web for awhile with movie promotions and such featuring website URLs www.movietitle.com and then beside/underneath also "AOL keyword: movietitle" and all the duplicate content/properties being created

Re: AOL pretends to be the internet

#65

Post by yarone »

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 scene is how I learned to program. Built a shareware tool called AoLOL! (available by going to keyword "Addon"), $14.95, got paper checks from all over the country! Then I met the ICQ founders...

Re: AOL pretends to be the internet

#69

Post by silisili »

Waterluvian wrote: post #7
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?

What, like google.com ?

There's a lot of these comparisons, and I wouldn't want to reply to all of them, but will on this one.

What's missing on most of these are the social aspect. With Google, you can't just drop into a 'miamidolphins' chat room to discuss the Dolphins. Nor can you instant message folks.

Think of what you'd need to recreate all of it with what we have today. Discord for chat rooms. Whatsapp for IMs. Chrome for browsing. Outlook for email. Steam for games? And there's many more features missing still. All in one application.

Further, part of the 'magic' to me was that the application itself was native and static. So you always had your menu bar to click between. And each clicked thing was its own subwindow. Like an OS inside an OS, if you will. Sounds wacky, but I loved the experience...at least at the time.

Re: AOL pretends to be the internet

#70

Post by hnlmorg »

mattl wrote: post #3
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.

When was that? I briefly used AOL as a dial-up service in the UK circa 2000 because of the toll-free number and penny a minute billing and don’t recall this.

From what I’ve seen and read, AOL in the UK was a very different beast to AOL in the US.
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