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AOL pretends to be the internet
- mjhay 3y agoKind of an aside, but one mind-boggling decision I never understood was that if the dial-up connection was disrupted, the entire AOL app closed with a "goodbye." If you were reading something, filling out a form, whatever, you're out of luck - despite the fact that you might have been able to quickly reconnect.
- mattl 3y agoWhen was that? I briefly used AOL as a dial-up service in the UK circa 2000 because of the toll-free number and penny a minute billing and don’t recall this.
- mjhay 3y agoThis was probably 1999 and before, and in the US. It was maddening, especially when one's parents might pick up the phone and kill the connection.
- mattl 3y agoOnce I figured out being online for more than 15 mins at a time was preferable I got a dedicated phone line around the same time in late 98.
- hnlmorg 3y agoFrom what I’ve seen and read, AOL in the UK was a very different beast to AOL in the US.
- offices 3y agoI've just been trying to jog my memory of it and it's difficult to find the relevant information among the masses of information about US AOL.
- jaystraw 3y agoGrowing up, I had a best friend (still a good friend though we live very far apart now) his dad used AOL on top of his broadband through the 2000's...I moved away maybe 2006 but couldn't figure out why said dad was waiting for that little yellow running man to get to the right pane
- ineedtosleep 3y agoI 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.
- kylebenzle 3y agoI was the exact same. My mind was blown when I realized you could connect to AOL and THEN open an internet browser and just be ONLINE! I spent way to long thinking AOL was the internet before I think I saw my cousin do this and it changed my world forever.
- pests 3y agoI 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 making websites. Then again when we discovered how to make content go into horizontal columns with this magic called <table> and <td> ! The magic!
- aeno 3y agoAre you me? This was my exact experience back in the early 2000s when AOL expanded to Germany.
- treesknees 3y agoI recall using this method to bypass the strict filtering of my child-level AOL account. I could browse chat rooms and play games on websites I couldn’t access in the AOL browser via IE. Good times!
- JohnClark1337 3y ago
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- pizzafeelsright 3y agoI think I know... AOL did keep state locally. There was caching. To not only keep the content fresh, additional minutes would be used getting back to the previous state and wallah .... more minutes used.
- OldGuyInTheClub 3y agoI remember Usenet pre- and post- AOL. No forgiveness or forgetness.
- jj999 3y agoIf AOL didn't exist, something else would have killed this fragile defense-less network.
- OldGuyInTheClub 3y agoAh, but then I would have hated that thing, instead.
- itsboring 3y agoAn appropriate comment in this, the month of September.
- OldGuyInTheClub 3y agoIt is _always_ September after AOL. Eternally even. ;-)
- jandrese 3y agoAOL's Usenet client was a terrible hack too. It barely worked. They also tried really hard to filter out the porn and warez which was ultimately futile.
- doctor_radium 3y ago[dead]
- analog31 3y agoSomebody had to discover the outrage-engagement feedback loop. It's a law of nature.
- acheron 3y agoMe too!
- silisili 3y agoIf 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?
- icedchai 3y agoYahoo was also like this for a while. Remember Yahoo chat? games? personals?
- silisili 3y agoYahoo 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.
- qw 3y agoYahoo 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
- ohdannyboy 3y agoYahoo pool was awesome. Being paired with a random player... a/s/l?
- mr-pink 3y agoOne of the things I really miss about the 'net in the early days was the tracking of users in order to sell targeted ads.
- superkuh 3y agoAOL pretended but Cloudflare is making actual progress to becoming the gatekeeper for the internet.
- syndicatedjelly 3y agoCan you explain further?
- superkuh 3y agoAOL 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 a whole. It acts as the gateway deciding if your client is on the approved list for access the resource. It has become what AOL always hoped to be. It's almost too big to fail now and likely will enshittify it's business model all the way to AOL levels in time.
- jandrese 3y agoDo you get blocked by Cloudflare a lot? My understanding is that they generally don't block traffic unless you look like a DDOS attack.
- TimJRobinson 3y agoIf you use a VPN you get CloudFlare captchas all the time
- tortue0 3y agoddos as a service providers (aka booters/stressers) proxy L7 request floods via VPN providers. At some point the VPN providers might actually care to kill off those accounts / better tighten up their free tiers, but they don't care at the moment.
- adamgamble 3y agoSo apparently a local Birmingham, Al BBS originally had the name America Online. Steve case purchased the name from him for 10k and that BBS became known as the matrix.
- kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 3y agoPlease tell me he sold the name "The Matrix" to Warner Bros.
- offices 3y agoI imagine Neuromancer predates both
- adamgamble 3y agohttps://www.bhamwiki.com/w/The_Matrix https://www.bhamwiki.com/w/The_Matrix Here is the story.
- soared 3y agoThis era of computers slightly predates me so it’s difficult to understand the context - aol was a desktop application installed via cd that have you connection to other users and access to content somehow, but not via the internet?
- echelon 3y agoI never used AOL, but I got the CDs, used AIM (a standalone version of their messenger), and saw other people using AOL proper. Imagine if AOL, the program, was your browser, chat, email, and internet connection all rolled into one single desktop program. The clunkiness of an IDE, such as IntelliJ or Unreal Engine, that bakes a lot of things into one executable. The embedded browser in Visual Studio. Dialup internet software makes a phone call to an ISP and handles the protocol for the connections all the applications on your machine use. AOL acted as a dialer itself so you could run lots of other non-AOL software, like Internet Explorer, Netscape, and video games. But AOL tried to be all of those things too inside their bloated app.
- helpfulclippy 3y agoYes, exactly. It was a BBS with larger scale and a GUI. You dial into it, and you're in their walled garden -- stuff on AOL was not accessible from the wider Internet, and at first, AOL provided no access to the Internet at large. Eventually they added it, and the Internet grew in scale and quality far faster than AOL could match with their own content. AOL's brand name was huge, in no small part to their constant carpet-bombing of the entire country with CDs and diskettes promising to get you online today with 250 free hours or whatever. I really can't describe how impossible to avoid these things were in the 90s -- they were EVERYWHERE. So even after it became clear that the party was on the Internet and AOL became just a way to get to it, AOL still dominated the ISP business for a while. A number of things eventually did them in, not least of which was broadband.
- SnowProblem 3y agoYep, you'd find huge stacks of their CDs everywhere. I remember always getting a free "frisbee" every time we'd go to Blockbuster. Also, AOL keywords.
- syndicatedjelly 3y agoThose AOL discs made for amazing frisbees as a kid. I would hurl them and they would fly for what felt like a million years, until they smashed back to Earth with the force of a meteor.
- paradox460 3y agoWe'd hang em up in fruit trees to scare away birds
- Ylpertnodi 3y agoPolice radar defeaters.
- offices 3y agoI can't see all that e-waste being accepted today
- cuttysnark 3y agoAOL 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 timer was reset every few minutes. AOL, "progs", Visual Basic—and the "scene" in AOL chatrooms at that time—hold a special place in my heart.
- syndicatedjelly 3y agoThat was a nice slice of history, thanks for sharing.
- demizer 3y agoAOL gave me my love of programming. I learned how to program in Visual Basic because I wanted to write my own "aol prog". I can still remember the "server" in the Warez room listed VB3.0 as the "the software that is used to make progs". Luckily there were people sharing their code so I could study and figure out how to do it myself. Me and my cousin created a yo momma joke spammer. I was a shit head back then, but it paid off being a nerd. But still, I did not learn about linux and free software until many years later because of AOL's shitty walled garden.
- davely 3y agoHah! I remember running decompilers (of questionable utility) on various VB-created progs so I could attempt to reverse engineer them. It definitely got me interested in programming and the early-ish days of being apart of an internet community. An embarrassing aside: my parents used to give me birthday and Christmas presents that was an allowance of AOL minutes.
- ShadowBanThis01 3y agoMore embarrassing: My parents still pay for AOL. $40 a month. My dad is convinced that he’ll lose the 20,000 E-mails he has there if they stop paying. And he worked in IT his whole career.
- Syzygies 3y agoI'm sure we've all had the experience where we went to meet a romantic partner's extended family, and realized our partner was the only one who didn't have seven toes. In one instance, I did meet a family member who was inexplicably rich. He reasoned, "Heck, even I can understand AOL!" and went all in, early enough. I'd be rich if I'd taken the money I spent on storerooms for empty computer boxes, and put it all on Apple. Alas, the success of Microsoft in those days had convinced me I don't have a gift for such picks. The world isn't rational.
- SnowProblem 3y agoAOL lumbered on but what finally killed it was broadband and cable. They just didn't have the pipes and the luster was gone by then anyway. DSL gave it some life support but by 2002 or so everyone I knew had switched to cable. AIM use continued for few more years after that until texting killed that too.
- dangus 3y agoI remember clearly making this transition. The value add of the AOL keyword content and other features like chat rooms just wasn’t enough to make the service make sense after the dial up era. The innovation of AOL was making such an easy dial up program with so many functions. But when I got DSL it was just money for nothing. The major lock-in for me was AOL Instant Messenger, which was free as a stand-alone app. Email wasn’t hard to transition because it wasn’t such a dependency for your life like it was today. So, when DSL came around, AOL was gone. If they could have anticipated something like Discord or Slack, they could have transitioned their users into that free + premium model. Quite understandable that they didn’t see that coming.
- jandrese 3y agoAOL was killed by Internet ISPs. They had to switch to an unlimited usage model, a blow to their bottom line from which they never really recovered. By the time 1995 rolled around there was really no denying it, the Internet and especially the World Wide Web was the place to be and services like AOL were the buggy whip manufacturers of the dot com era. It is interesting that the data silo model they used is sort of coming back with Facebook and other social media.
- Ylpertnodi 3y ago>what finally killed it was broadband and cable. And information. I remember telling so many people that aol was not 'the internet'. Most swapped over to a local isp...with vaguely similar cost but very, very open. Of course, then they all went and jumped on facebook.
- ssharp 3y agoAOL offered the ability to connect to it through a 3rd-party internet provider. I did this for probably two or three years before finally giving up on AOL. By that time, the web had evolved quite a bit and AOL's content and communities were no longer worth the extra expense.
- cutler 3y agoI remember doing local tech support in the early 2000s. One of the most challenging jobs was migrating a client away from AOL. The AOL software was designed to stick to your Windows machine like glue.
- 1970-01-01 3y agoAmerica Online is not dead. It's rebranded into AOL Desktop Gold. https://beta.aol.com/main https://beta.aol.com/main
- yarone 3y agoWow this is surprising
- 8organicbits 3y agoWoah the toolbars! The active list of bug fixes is interesting, although honestly those sound like very basic usability things.
- inquirerGeneral 3y ago[dead]
- CSMastermind 3y agoIt'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 in many ways a much crazier. It seems inevitable in hindsight given how things have played out but with some slightly changed starting variables or decisions made along the way we could have an internet but no web like we do now.
- trollied 3y agoIt worked out for China....
- hulitu 3y ago> 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.
- giantrobot 3y agoWhy is Apple included in that list? What service do they have that pretends to be "the Internet"?
- rhplus 3y agoiOS App Store. Plenty of iPhone users never knowingly open a browser or search engine. The internet is apps to them. Other wall-garden networks offered by Apple include: AirDrop, Find My, iMessage
- sixstringtheory 3y agoThis is my grandmother, I just wanted to add some confirmation to balance out the current downvotes. I’m an Apple fanboy and developer but I’m not in denial that Apple loves their sandbox just as much as the next corporation. Throw iCloud drive, email (doubly so now with hidden email forwarding), Apple pay, TV and Music in the mix too.
- neoCrimeLabs 3y agoAnyone remember the first question their Tier-1 support would ask? "Do you own a computer?" This was due to the fact that most of the people who called for support didn't understand what a CD-ROM was, and tried playing it in their CD music players. That reminds me of one of the most popular questions in their chat rooms by the late 90's: "A/S/L?" While it did bleed over into other services, it was very AOL-centric. I'm happy it has long since faded into obscurity. I completely forgot AOL used to be Q-Link. Related memory: I was using still using a 300 baud modem with my C=64 when Q-Link launched. It was rather disappointing after having used other BBS for free. The same with AOL after having been using Gopher, IRC, Anonymous-FTP years prior. But heck, they got my dad - and a lot of people who never used computers before - to learn how to send email. I did not appreciate the scale of how impressive that was until decades later. I'm also impressed this many random memories popped up. Unexpected.
- neoCrimeLabs 3y agoRandom things this post made me appreciate: Broadband - especially 1+Gbps connections (we are spoiled and I love it!) Latency that can be measured in milliseconds per packet around the world, not seconds or minutes per character. Multitasking not just locally, but across a network Streaming video when I remember a 320x240 image taking FOREVER to download Downloads that actually complete and don't corrupt most of the time. Stateless connections that are easy to restart if something does go wrong And so much more.
- fragmede 3y agoDownloading files used to be such a situation. Remember GetRight?
- neoCrimeLabs 3y agoSadly I don't remember GetRight had to google it. That said I remember how happy I was with Z-Modem when it came out. Before I had an error correcting modem with lots of line-noise I thought Z-Modem with it's built in error correction, ability to resume an interrupted download, and even auto-downloading (not having to tell my terminal to download) felt like magic!
- ChrisArchitect 3y agoThis made me think about how AOL positioned itself alongside the web for awhile with movie promotions and such featuring website URLs www.movietitle.com and then beside/underneath also "AOL keyword: movietitle" and all the duplicate content/properties being created
- doctor_radium 3y ago[dead]
- kristopolous 3y agoI've often called Facebook the modern AOL. It's the same kind of consumption ramp with the same kind of content for the same people
- simonjgreen 3y agoI don't know how it was elsewhere, but the prevalence of free AOL CDs on just about every vaguely tech magazine cover was an amazing marketing move by AOL (and later ditto Freeserve in UK).
- bottlepalm 3y agoWe’re so lucky the internet didn’t become a toll road having to pay crazy prices for domains and having to pay for sites at the ISP level for packages like cable channels.
- mattbgates 3y agoIt was the Internet... until your mom picked up the phone.
- MandieD 3y agoThey 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.
- comprev 3y agoFacebook tried this "we are the internet" tactic with predictable (disastrous) outcomes. https://www.philstar.com/headlines/2015/03/20/1435536/facebook-offers-free-internet-access-phl https://www.philstar.com/headlines/2015/03/20/1435536/facebo...
- Nursie 3y agoInteresting 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 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!"
- dalbasal 3y agoThe AOL story is foundational, IMO, to gain an understanding of the business. To me, the most instructive part is the open web's triumphalism at defeating AOL. AOL thought they could own the internet by controlling the front door... portal strategy, in the terms of the times. They expected to brute force their way to scale with expensive marketing campaigns. etc Once the www "won," everyone knew how foolish AOL was. Information wanted to be free. Open protocols will run circles around a closed kludge. etc. It's very 90s. A sort of peak modernism. Openness wasn't just desirable and effective... it was also inevitable. Maybe we needed to watch for network neutrality, but otherwise things would look after themselves. Freedom isn't just better. It's so much more effective, more popular and powerful than short sighted alternatives that it is inevitable. This optimism was so powerful, we got completely blindsided a few years later. In retrospect, AOL's strategic vision was prophetic. Their flaw was not pushing it hard enough, not having enough belief, giving up too early. Maybe they couldn't own everything, but they could have owned a lot. Even if they had just held onto the lest sophisticated users, chatrooms and news they would have been a goog/fb/amzn.
- zelphirkalt 3y agoAOL was an experience. When one did not know better and only knew one could "go online" via that AOL thing, which one would start on the computer, it could easily seem like AOL was _the way_ to use the Internet or even _was_ the Internet. With so many AOL CD-ROMs flying around with "90 minutes gratis", I wondered, why we did not collect those to get more of that Internet. It took quite some time to understand, that the Internet was not AOL and that there were other ways to visit websites. This is probably similar to how the Internet must feel in countries, where the Internet is only accessible through walled Facebook gardens. With less or less sophisticated surveillance/tracking technology dystopia, I guess.
- grose 3y agoRemember AOL keywords? They basically had their own private DNS alternative. Every commercial on TV for a website would say "AOL keyword <xyz>!" instead of the actual URL. I guess it was a lot less scary for your average internet user to type in "nick" instead of "http://www.nick.com http://www.nick.com". I feel like we still kind of have the "URLs are hard" problem. I've noticed a lot of ads in Japan tell the users to search (presumably Google) for a specific phrase, and buying the adwords for that is more or less the modern equivalent of paying for an AOL keyword. Search was really rough back then (although it's gone full circle into shit again I feel), and the URL bar UX wasn't quite figured out yet. Will users be able to adapt to wacky new TLDs or will we be stuck with .com forever because it's recognizable as a domain name? Do people still type "www."? Is the app store the modern equivalent of AOL channels? Sometimes I wonder if we're stuck in an infinite cycle of reinventing AOL.
- inquirerGeneral 3y ago[dead]
- olig15 3y agoI always assumed that ads that told people to search for the product/company were to raise their search ranking (due to relevancy?). But I’ve got no idea if that would actually make a difference or not, or if it is just so people don’t have to type a URL as you said.
- ShadowBanThis01 3y agoIt was the latter. AOL users didn’t even know what URLs were. The article didn’t have a screen shot of how AOL tacked the entire Internet Internet onto their glorified BBS as a button on their toolbar. Seriously.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Mezzie 3y agoThe heyday of AOL keywords was before SEO or search engine relevancy was anything that any company cared about. Search engines existed, but this was mostly pre-Google and they were not great. A lot of discovery happened in other ways - the AOL keyword scheme was basically their attempt to tie web discovery to their products so people who left AOL wouldn't know what to do.
- ycmjs 3y agoIt kind of sounds like at one point they could have become a successful ISP.
- nonethewiser 3y agoHow did you add people to your freind lust in chat? Was there a registry if screen names, or did you just add whatever screen name you wanted, whether it existed or not?
- acjohnson55 3y agoI remember having AOL back in the very early web days, just after they added the browser. My dad had an "Internet for Dummies" book, which had a directory of websites to try. I, as maybe a 10 year old, could not properly type all the characters in the URL correctly and I gave up on this so-called World Wide Web. It seemed way worse than AOL-proper. Also, at that time, AOL had a much richer user experience than most of the early Web. It was probably only like 6-12 months later that the web started to eclipse my usage of the proprietary AOL network. The ability for people to self-publish meant there was a lot more content for my hobbies of playing Civilization II and Battletech on the broader Web. About 15 years later, I ended up working for AOL, via HuffPost, right through the Verizon acquisition. That was actually an extremely fun time to be there, as the company was attempting all sorts of experimental media projects, like HuffPost Live, Patch, their Aol Originals, etc. Completely coincidentally, my then-girlfriend (now-wife) worked for them through her PR agency, all the way through the Oath era.
- washadjeffmad 3y agoFor many that first went online via AOL, it was revelatory that the web was still accessible even if you didn't use the AOL browser. Most people didn't know what to do with it outside of that, but I suppose that's not any different from today with what Google and Apple are doing with their platforms and apps. Nothing new under the sun, eh?
- JohnClark1337 3y ago[dead]
- grishka 3y agoIt's interesting how differently the internet has developed in different parts of the world. Here in Russia we never had anything similar to AOL. If you wanted to go online, you had to buy a prepaid card with login/password and some hours of internet access on it and figure everything out yourself. Yes, you had to literally "go buy some internet".
- broast 3y agoIf you are nostalgic for AOL, AIM, progs, screen names, and visual basic, look up the AOL Underground podcast. Interviews with prog authors, hackers, and former AOL staffers.
- giancarlostoro 3y agoI used to use their built in browser a lot, and AOL chatrooms. I was maybe 9-10 when I joined the Kids chat and I see the chat moving and ask “a/s/l? Whats that?” To which my mom translated it. Doubt she would translate modern acronyms these days, but I must have spent hours upon hours with people on AOL chatrooms. The ascii pie fights, the wave of A/S/L’s the many friends made and lost. Then I eventually migrated to MSN and IE. It was too many years before I could convince my mom to let me install Firefox so I can block pop ups better… English is my second language and we moved to the states when I was around that age, I learned a lot on AOL chat and MSN. Good times, good times.
- renegade-otter 3y agoDid we forget about this? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eyhdNrUJmOM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eyhdNrUJmOM
- CapitalistCartr 3y agoI had Compuserve instead of AOL. I'd been using BBSs to get to various MUDs before that, but Compuserve seemed to have it all, including email and an Internet gateway. I couldn't see any reason to ever give it up.
- jrootabega 3y agoThis was a fun theme that was ranted about a lot on alt.aol-sucks
- leros 3y agoI got online for the first time with Prodigy. I opened the Prodigy browser, hit the Prodigy start page, and navigated around from there. I didn't realize there was more of the internet until I got a book called something like "100 free cool websites".
- cyrialize 3y agoMy grandparent-in-laws use AOL, and they unfortunately fell for a scam. AOL is what they've always used for everything. When there was an upgrade for something AOL related it all stopped working, so they reached out to a support line. Unfortunately this wasn't a legitimate support line. The person did fix their issue, but they also charged my grandparent-in-laws $250 for it. They called me right after they paid the person, realizing their mistake immediately.
- pram 3y agoI remember if you saved an image from the browser through AOL it was actually recompressing everything into an '.art' file. Nothing on Windows or Mac OS could open these. Completely baffling. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ART_image_file_format https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ART_image_file_format
- mike10921 3y agoShort version via ChatGPT (for the lazy but curious like myself): Between 1994 and 1998, AOL (America Online) emerged as a significant player in the digital landscape. Initially established in 1985 as Quantum Computer Services with a product that connected Commodore 64 computers to an online network, it expanded and rebranded under Steve Case's leadership. Case envisioned a simple, user-friendly online platform, and AOL's chat feature became its most notable offering. While AOL was initially a closed system, unlike the open protocols of the wider Internet, its aggressive marketing campaigns successfully lured millions of Americans into its ecosystem. Ted Leonsis, who joined AOL after the acquisition of his company Redgate Communications, envisioned AOL as an all-encompassing digital entertainment hub. However, as the broader Internet gained traction, AOL felt compelled to integrate certain Internet protocols, eventually even providing its users with browsers to access the larger World Wide Web. By 1997, AOL was the gateway to the Internet for nearly half its users. Yet, its aspiration to be a distinct multi-generational platform faded as it became synonymous with the broader web. This evolution culminated in AOL's acquisition of Netscape in 1998, signaling its full immersion into the wider world of the Internet.
- jwmoz 3y agoFond memories of AOL-it was our first internet provider, in the UK. My Dad would call up the cs and somehow get another free trial extension. Call centre must have been in Ireland as they all had Irish accents.
- jdlyga 3y agoWhat made AOL truly great was instant messaging and chat rooms and focus on "connecting people". They had the vision totally correct, but the implementation details wrong. They should have transitioned from an ISP to a social media site.
- js2 3y agoI'm a little sad this article doesn't mention AOLserver: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOLserver https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOLserver
- tacticaldev 3y agoI get so nostalgic about AOL. It's why I learned Visual Basic (a natural progression from QBasic in my DOS days). All my friends and I wrote "Punters", "Macros" and "Progz". It really jump started my journey into Software/Programming. A year or so later I installed NetBSD and never looked back, but I often think about those late night hacking sessions writing horrible VB...
- tumblen 3y agoThe very first online game I ever played was an amazing multiplayer space shooter called Silent Death Online on AOL Games. It was incredible and I blew through over $100 a month paying $1.99 hour to rank up my character, upgrade my ship, communicate with and eventually lead my clan. With 56k modems, it took so long for the "shoot weapon" request to make it to the server that if you wanted to kill someone, you had to shoot well ahead of their actual ship. If you wanted to get good, you had to open up the debug console and use your ping to determine how far ahead to "lag shoot". Suddenly, certain players began becoming well known for stacking up hundreds of kills in a game and ranking all the way up to Commander (max rank) within a few days. Over time, people began learning the secret: those were the first players to get ISDN and DSL and with their super-fast internet connections, it was like shooting fish in a barrel. Those players were my introduction to the world outside of the AOL internet and I became eager to join it. Around that same time, EA bought Silent Death Online and folded it into their online gaming services. That brought a new era for SDO which came to an end probably not much more than a year or two later when EA for some reason shut it all down (if I recall correctly, people started running credit card scams through the game). What a time to be on the internet. I am still longing for someone to buy the rights to SDO and relaunch it.
- themadturk 3y agoI still have the Q-Link coffee mug I got as our Commodore 64 club's president back in 1986 or so. Faded, but not broken!
- glonq 3y agoI distinctly remember Internet old-timers complaining that after AOL connected its users to Usenet, the collective IQ in most newsgroups dropped.