4 ms·

This 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

• echelon 3y ago
  I 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 ago
  Yes, 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 ago
    Yep, 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.
  • aeno 3y ago
    I remember seeing these CD displays at every corner, from malls to small kiosks. They were everywhere. And so, kids grabbed them and played frisbee with them right on the streets. So, these CDs were lying all over the ground. In every street, at bus stops, playgrounds. Everywhere.
• pdonis 3y ago
  AOL existed before direct connections to the Internet of the kind that current ISPs provide were available. In fact, it, like some of the competitors mentioned in the article (such as CompuServe, which I used from the late 1980s to the late 1990s), existed before access to the Internet was available to the public at all (i.e., outside of government and academic institutions). Portals like AOL and CompuServe let you dial in to their servers and do things that today we associate with the Internet and web sites, such as email, chat rooms, discussion boards, news feeds, etc. But you could only do them within the portal using the services that the portal provided. The portals were not connected to each other or to the Internet.
• pests 3y ago
  "somehow" - your computer would make phone calls to remote servers and (mo)dulate and (dem)odularte [modem] the digital signals to analog for transmission. Early modems you had to literally rest a corded landline phone on them. Some companies built private networks and services to these users before meshing with the internet at large.
  • ChoHag 3y ago
    [dead]
• pizzafeelsright 3y ago
  Gray beard says, "It was an everything all in one app". No need to install a browser, configure an email client, setup remember passwords for websites, install IRC or direct messaging apps. And built in profiles. It was almost bulletproof for the less than tech savvy. For the audience it hasn't been matched wide since the iPad/iPhone