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AOL pretends to be the internet

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Re: AOL pretends to be the internet

#81

Post by TeMPOraL »

silisili wrote: post #69
Waterluvian wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. O…

> Like an OS inside an OS, if you will.

So like Emacs, plus the GUI, but minus the ergonomics, but plus the features...

It's not wacky at all, but it's unlikely to be embraced with the market structured the way it is.

Re: AOL pretends to be the internet

#83

Post by TeMPOraL »

jjoonathan wrote: post #31
function_seven wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Hey, Siri. Ask Jeeves what this yahoo dot com thing is"

"Playing Praise Jesus by the Country Yahoos on Apple Music."

> Siri

> Jeeves

> Yahoo

This is one of the main reasons why voice control looks great in Star Trek, but sucks in the real world. I want to be able to say, "computer, ${do something}", but with real voice assistants, I have to say "${brand 1}, use ${brand 2} to ${do something} on ${brand 3}".

Re: AOL pretends to be the internet

#84

Post by ohdannyboy »

icedchai wrote: post #6
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?

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

Yahoo pool was awesome. Being paired with a random player... a/s/l?

Re: AOL pretends to be the internet

#85

Post by TimJRobinson »

jandrese wrote: post #75
superkuh wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you use a VPN you get CloudFlare captchas all the time

Re: AOL pretends to be the internet

#87

Post by MandieD »

They sent out so many free diskettes in the 90s that part of my first summer job in high school was relabeling, formatting and copying WinSock and some other installers onto them for one of my town’s little ISPs.

Re: AOL pretends to be the internet

#88

Post by RNAlfons »

jandrese wrote: post #71
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 unlim…

I've been using AOL CD-codes up until the moment where I got my hands on some Compuserve code generator. The only cost which remained was for the local dial up. Good times. I personally thanked a Compuserve representative for their easy access at some fair. Didn't seem like he understood but I still felt better afterwards.

Re: AOL pretends to be the internet

#89

Post by hulitu »

qw wrote: post #76
silisili wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yahoo Messenger was a very good chat program. Too bad it's gone.

Re: AOL pretends to be the internet

#90

Post by smcl »

jandrese wrote: post #71
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 unlim…

I imagine everyone who was a kid during the dial-up times has a horror story of being confronted with an enormous phone bill by their parents. I remember mine going mental at me for costing us £40 one month (normal service was iirc ~£10)
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