AOL tried to wall people in too much and lost? I remember in 1998 connecting to a friend's AOL internet through some proprietary software that had built in chat

AOL tried to wall people in too much and lost? I remember in 1998 connecting to a friend's AOL internet through some proprietary software that had built in chat and a browser. This was on a Windows 95 machine. It didn't use the standard networking stuff on windows, so there was no way to find out my IP address, no way to play Quake II games online, no way to use any internet software that wasn't part of the AOL package really, which made me start looking for an alternative immediately.