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AOL pretends to be the internet

thehistoryoftheweb.com

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Re: AOL pretends to be the internet

#91

Post by hulitu »

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

Well, we now have 4 AOLs: Google, Apple, Microsoft and Facebook.

Re: AOL pretends to be the internet

#92

Post by krenzo »

yarone wrote: post #65
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...

"Uh oh!" So, what happened next?

Re: AOL pretends to be the internet

#93

Post by euroderf »

smcl wrote: post #90
jandrese wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

Was the bill forgiven the first time (and the first time only) ? Good for customer relations.

Re: AOL pretends to be the internet

#94

Post by euroderf »

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…

And what if they had acquired Altavista (or vice-versa) when Google was just a gleam in the eye.

Re: AOL pretends to be the internet

#96

Post by georgeburdell »

smcl wrote: post #90
jandrese wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

I was a teenager on the tail end of dialup, so no hourly fee, but my parents got awfully mad if I tied up our phone line all day playing online games. They’d randomly call home a few times a day to ensure compliance.

Re: AOL pretends to be the internet

#97

Post by Nursie »

Interesting that it didn't get proper web connectivity until 1995 - they may even have been behind compuserve on that!

Also I love how this write-up ends at 1998. Yet here we are 25 years later https://www.aol.com still exists, you can still sign up for an email address, though at this point it is more or less just a brand that's been passed around between owners quite a bit.

The last contact I had with the org was in the mid 00s when I knew some people who worked in their London office, producing portal content. It was weird even then, in 2005, because from the outside, Aol had been dead for years...

I guess a bit like the time I met some people from Myspace in a bar in London in about 2010 (IIRC). "We work at Myspace" and when they saw everyone look bemused "yeah, we know!"

Re: AOL pretends to be the internet

#98

Post by VBprogrammer »

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 reminds me of one of my first useful programs. In the early days of the internet my dad picked up a internet contract which allowed you to dial in on a toll free number; it was pretty cheap per month but the only catch was while dialled in they displayed a banner along the top of the screen with advertising. Using the win32 API in VB I was able to find the handle to the window kill it.

The only problem then was that tying up the land line constantly got on my mum's nerves, being back in the days before land line numbers were redundant for other reasons.

Re: AOL pretends to be the internet

#99

Post by aeno »

pests wrote: post #44
ineedtosleep wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ma…

Are you me? This was my exact experience back in the early 2000s when AOL expanded to Germany.

Re: AOL pretends to be the internet

#100

Post by smcl »

euroderf wrote: post #93
smcl wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

Was the bill forgiven the first time (and the first time only) ? Good for customer relations.

Nah but really the bill wasn't bad enough for that, and honestly I'm not sure that kind of PR move was very common before social media days (total guess). I just remember it because I had to give my parents the difference and as a 12-13 year old that £30 was a lot!
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