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It's weird that the author mentions the 90s and how the web was not meant to be walled gardens, but then decided to omit AOL from the story. AOL was one big as
by nickjj 9y ago
It's weird that the author mentions the 90s and how the web was not meant to be walled gardens, but then decided to omit AOL from the story.
AOL was one big ass walled garden back in the 1990s. It was pretty popular back then.
The funny thing is, back then, it was popular for 2 groups of people. First were younger kids who wanted to stir up trouble on the network (AOHell, etc.). The second were old people.
My uncle is ~70 and still has an AOL account because he thinks it's "the internet". That's how strong AOL's walled garden / marketing was. Although, it didn't help that back then you would have to dial an AOL phone number on your modem to connect, so I could see how it could be confusing.
- pvg 9y agoAOL and similar services connected to the internet but were separate from it. They predated wide availability of consumer internet service. There's not much of a parallel to what the author is discussing.
- always_good 9y agoHuh? You could access arbitrary websites from AOL. How is that not part of the internet?
- pvg 9y agoWhat if I told you that when AOL started, you could not access arbitrary web sites from it because there weren't any.
- always_good 9y agoI'd say that your core distinction then is nonsensical and I'd wonder what it contributed. What if I said that? Is this hypothetical tense helping the conversation?
- pvg 9y agoI don't think this bit really requires much conversation, you can just read the relevant wikipedia pages for a quick rundown on things like the history of AOL, the internet, the world wide web and the seemingly nonsensical but curiously real distinctions between them over the years. What if you did that?
- robin_reala 9y agoThat’s a pretty US-centric take on things though. AOL didn’t exist in any great form in the UK certainly, and the walled gardens that did (BBSes, CIX, Compuserve etc) pretty much evaporated by the mid-90s.
- isostatic 9y agoMicrosoft got in on the walled gardens with MSN, and that wasn't until 95. I think it's fair to say the first half of the 90s was walled gardens, although by 1995 holes were opening up. A whole generation (or two) wanted to email Terry Wogan and see the webcam, which started in 1996. By the time freeserve launched in 1998 the walls had crumbled -- it was a very fast moving time in the UK - over the course of 5 years we went from a few people on dial-up compuserve to almost the whole country knowing what the internet was, even if they didn't realize it's potential. I'm not sure the internet is much different now than it was in 2013, or even 2008. I suppose the accessibility (always on phones), and the increase in online media (video/audio streaming as the norm) is the biggest change from 08 to 13, but last 5 years?
- nickjj 9y agoIt was interesting to see how it all panned out. A bunch of walled gardens, to openness, and now we're back to some form of walled gardens again.
- DocTomoe 9y agoI vividly remember how big AOL was in Germany in the 1990s. It was that (the easy option) - or the rather complicated "traditional ISPs" which required no small amount of technical expertise to get to work. AOL only really died when they decided to block port 25 to make you use their webmailer.