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AOL pretends to be the internet

thehistoryoftheweb.com

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Re: AOL pretends to be the internet

#71

Post by jandrese »

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 idle timeout was pretty important when AOL cost $1/hour (and it was the cheap service! Prodigy, Compuserve, and especially GEnie were more expensive!). Leaving it connected overnight would get you grounded in a hurry when that AOL bill came in the next month.

It was really no wonder that all of those services basically collapsed once dial up ISPs with flat (and low!) monthly fees started appearing. $10 for unlimited (modem speed) data is a steal in comparison.

Re: AOL pretends to be the internet

#73

Post by jandrese »

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 was killed by Internet ISPs. They had to switch to an unlimited usage model, a blow to their bottom line from which they never really recovered. By the time 1995 rolled around there was really no denying it, the Internet and especially the World Wide Web was the place to be and services like AOL were the buggy whip manufacturers of the dot com era.

It is interesting that the data silo model they used is sort of coming back with Facebook and other social media.

Re: AOL pretends to be the internet

#74

Post by davely »

demizer wrote: post #58
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…

AOL gave me my love of programming. I learned how to program in Visual Basic because I wanted to write my own "aol prog". I can still remember the "server" in the Warez room listed VB3.0 as the "the software that is used to make progs". Luckily there were people sharing their code so I could study and figure out how to do it myself. Me and my cousin created a yo momma joke spammer. I was a shit head back then, but it…

Hah! I remember running decompilers (of questionable utility) on various VB-created progs so I could attempt to reverse engineer them.

It definitely got me interested in programming and the early-ish days of being apart of an internet community.

An embarrassing aside: my parents used to give me birthday and Christmas presents that was an allowance of AOL minutes.

Re: AOL pretends to be the internet

#75

Post by jandrese »

superkuh wrote: post #46
syndicatedjelly wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Do you get blocked by Cloudflare a lot? My understanding is that they generally don't block traffic unless you look like a DDOS attack.

Re: AOL pretends to be the internet

#76

Post by qw »

silisili wrote: post #13
icedchai wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yahoo was also like this for a while. Remember Yahoo chat? games? personals?

Yahoo had a lot of the same features, but never did it as cleanly as AOL. Perhaps because AOL provided an actual native client whereas I believe Yahoo was always just web based, which marred the experience quite a bit. I guess the ultimate takeaway is that there's not a lot of money to be made if they're all gone now.

Yahoo Messenger was available as a Windows program. If they had focused more on chat and video calls, we might be using it now instead of Slack and Teams

Re: AOL pretends to be the internet

#79

Post by doctor_radium »

ChrisArchitect wrote: post #64

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

[dead]

Re: AOL pretends to be the internet

#80

Post by trollied »

CSMastermind wrote: post #61

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…

It worked out for China....
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