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Beautiful Decay of AOL
- cagenut 11y agoThis is really old fuzzy memory, but at one point there was some kind of administrative or staff plugin for AOL that would let you put in a sub-site-ID and jump straight to some of these things. A bunch of people started using a several-years-old superbowl message board to trade warez. It was like operating out of an abandoned stadium... but over 28.8.
- Alex3917 11y agoIt wasn't a plugin, it was just a search bar with a feature called keywords. Typing in the keyword would take you directly to the page of that section of AOL. I remember the woman who started the astrology page was making money hand over fist.
- Falkon1313 11y agoThere was also a way to automate actions to occur on login. My PC motherboard or RAM went flaky and started crashing after a few minutes in Windows. Not enough time to do much. So I wrote a login script that would go to my email and each of my message boards and newsgroups, downloading any new messages quickly enough before it crashed. Then I'd boot to DOS and take my time reading and preparing responses. Then reboot to Windows and hope the responses all got sent before the system crashed.
- 0942v8653 11y agoReminds me of http://www.xkcd.com/1305/ http://www.xkcd.com/1305/
- buro9 11y agoSounds like Yik Yak
- mcoliver 11y agoIt was called AOHell. There were a few variations under different names. Just found a box of floppies at my folks house. Cant wait to see what the time capsule holds
- briandear 11y agoLots of fun with that one.. Fake (but valid) credit card generator, mail bombs.. I'm surprised users of that didn't get arrested. Luckily the statute of limitations ran out on that a while ago! Not that it would affect me or anything..
- digi_owl 11y agoNot sure if it was here on HN or somewhere else, but that reminds me of a story about someone finding odd conversations in his blog comments. When he inquired the people involved about what they were doing he found them to be school kids that used the comments section of blogs as makeshift chat rooms to get around school site blockers.
- godzillabrennus 11y agoFor some strange reason this reminded me of DeadAIM by Jdennis. Man AOL really handed the modern web to Facebook.
- SwellJoe 11y agoWhat I keep wondering is why do we keep boxing ourselves into these little walled gardens, when the world is so wide and the web so flexible?
- Alex3917 11y agoIt's cyclical. Having one protocol with multiple open clients prevents rapid (if any) innovation, and creates an opportunity for walled gardens to steal the market. And then once the walled garden converges on the local maximum, it creates an opportunity to build a stable open protocol. Which then lasts until someone comes up with the next big innovation that the open standard is too ossified to support. For all the shit that AOL gets, they basically got the entire country on the Internet. Even the biggest unicorns today have nothing on AOL at its peak.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- meddlepal 11y agoPeople don't care about freedom?
- ldarby 11y agoI think (at least hope) people do care about freedom, but they're just not even aware that freedom is an option. So we should at least try to educate them about the option of freedom. I believe a lot of people aren't aware that with AOL internet, you could run a web browser while connected and have access to the normal www. That was the case in the early 2000's - was it different before then?
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- tyoma 11y agoAOL used to have an active hacking scene. Some of that is also still archived: http://mattmazur.com/projects/aol-files-com/ http://mattmazur.com/projects/aol-files-com/
- dewitt 11y agoI don't know why the author's tone is so mean and snarky. Yes, the web won (inevitable and thank goodness), but it's not like many 19-year-old web pages are still around and serving working links either. And for all its fundamental closed-ecosystem walled-garden flaws, AOL brought the first taste of the Internet to millions. We should celebrate the accomplishments and learn from the failings, not dance on the graves of the vanquished.
- Diederich 11y agoFunny you mention that. My home page has been up for going on 21 years now. (: It used to look a lot better than it does now though.
- zaroth 11y agoI didn't read it as 'mean and snarky'. Author sounds genuinely in awe and the quantity of material on there. It's an archiver's dream I imagine.
- ddingus 11y agoAgreed. There is a lot of history here, and it's still working! I call "amazing" on all of that. Wonder if there is still some revenue, or contracts keeping it alive, or just nobody cares, or too much trouble to kill it off... Another AOL legacy is retention. You can't really say no without them just leaving AOL on the table. A coworker years ago used to get on for free just stringing them on... He used to laugh about it, until that tactic worked! He ended up paying them for a while when he ran into hard times. Never without his AOL. That experience turned him into a strange sort of fan. Disliked AOL, but loyal just the same.
- paulddraper 11y agoExactly. AOL was the face of the Internet (ISP, chat, email, web) for years. In relative terms, AOL was arguably the most successful Internet company of all time. And that didn't happen by accident; there are good lessons to be learned. The same goes for Yahoo! when someone writes a blog post about them in eight years.
- true_religion 11y ago
- nickbauman 11y agoThe camo and leather fashion section is interesting as the second US Gulf War was just getting underway. Makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up in a Oceania is at war with Eastasia. kind of way.
- JacobAldridge 11y agoI think this classic Onion piece from 2000 is always worth referencing in these situations - back then, using the internet for movie times and recipes was the subject for humor http://www.theonion.com/article/area-man-consults-internet-whenever-possible-1515 http://www.theonion.com/article/area-man-consults-internet-w... We've come a long way in a short time, but AOL (etc) deserve to be remembered for inspiring what was possible, even if they ultimately failed in the execution.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- eterm 11y agoThey They were mocking his behaviour, but all those things were possible when that article was written, they were mocking him breaking conversation to look to see things up. Society has changed so that it is now acceptable, technology has improved so it is quicker to look those things up but the article wasn't mocking the idea that those things were online.
- eecks 11y agoIt's still not socially acceptable to break convo to do a quick search
- JustSomeNobody 11y agoI so wish you weren't getting down voted.
- hackmiester 11y agoI agree, since a downvote is inappropriate. But I must say that the post does not reflect my experience at all.
- chc 11y agoIt's done all the time with no offense. I'll frequently be talking to friends or coworkers and done point of contention will come up, somebody will offer to Google it on their phone, and everyone will urge them to do it.
- meeper16 11y agoAOL -> geocities -> friendster -> myspace -> facebook, the next AOL.
- anonbanker 11y agoif, in 20 years, we view facebook the way everyone now views AOL, I will be a much happier old man.
- brooklyndude 11y agoMany, many, many years ago, I took over an office space from Matt Goldman, who was one the founders of The Blue Man Group. His full time job, before starting Blue Man, was duplicating AOL disks. Day after day. Just one of those tidbits of AOL history.
- JSno 11y agoAOL is still alive. check out some pics. http://mije.org/files/u426/AOL-Alumni.jpg http://mije.org/files/u426/AOL-Alumni.jpg http://i.imgur.com/rBUUH0x.jpg http://i.imgur.com/rBUUH0x.jpg http://media.glassdoor.com/lst/77/e5/8b/de/welcome-to-our-office.jpg http://media.glassdoor.com/lst/77/e5/8b/de/welcome-to-our-of...
- ZanyProgrammer 11y agoFascinating how the comments here are uniformly praising AOL.
- voltagex_ 11y agoHow do we archive this?
- iNerdier 11y agoThat is a very, very good question. I'm not sure if anyone actually knows right now, in many ways it's a wild west I think. Not important enough for people to struggle over with making money but part of our shared heritage, locked away in an AOL vault that is slowly having concrete poured into it.
- slipstream- 11y agoI was working on this at one time back in late 2014. A bunch of people used scripts I made to start downloading all the file areas. Then... AOL removed the files in January 2015. They also removed support for AOL 4.0 or 5.0 and below last April, and that was the version that a very incomplete Python client was claiming to be. The research I did into archiving AOL helped me find this: http://lizardhq.org/2015/12/05/aol-desktop.html http://lizardhq.org/2015/12/05/aol-desktop.html Hopefully I'll do enough reversing to fix and finish the custom client one day. Newer clients wrap the login and just the login in some form of SSL/TLS. Which I still need to figure out. Maybe people can help. There's a channel at efnet #aohell and plenty of information on the archiveteam wiki.
- TrevorJ 11y agoIt's amazing how differently time move online vs meatspace. Take computing out of the picture and 2007 isn't very long ago at all. Look at a few web pages from then and it feels like 20 years ago.