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Been awhile since I worked at AOL. One of the funnier moments for me was when I started working there, someone referred to the client (the one they shipped via
by rottyguy 12y ago
Been awhile since I worked at AOL. One of the funnier moments for me was when I started working there, someone referred to the client (the one they shipped via CD) as WAOL (pronounced - Whale). IIRC, the executable was waol.exe.
Jokes aside, they had some pretty fierce technology on the backend that, had it seen the light of day of Open Source, would have been the precursor to Docker and Protocol Buffers. All this back in the 90's.
- Ixiaus 12y agoAn interesting thought, I'll bet that many companies if they had published papers or OSS for the technology they built would have advanced the state of the art today by five to ten years...
- bresc 12y agoActually a lot of the services that are now "big" existed already for a long time. I still can't believe that back in 2001 we have been building something like a german Netflix. Also my colleague who sat right next to me thought it would be a great a idea to have something like youtube for music in 2002 (Soundcloud) And he actually had a working service but he gave it up :)
- pjc50 12y agoMusic and video services have been entirely about the licensing, not so much the technology. Remember Napster was launched in 1999.
- chetanahuja 12y agoumm... not so much. Youtube was already a roaring success with user generated videos (which included lots of dvd rips, tv captures etc. etc.) before they started engaging with hollywood on a legal basis.
- pjc50 12y agoYes, and their great success was in not getting shut down entirely (Napster) or soaked with prohibitive licensing fees.
- beagle3 12y agoIdeas are a dime a dozen, execution and luck are what matters. Twitter in various forms was done about 5 times (that I saw) before the Twitter came up. Quite a few social networks predated Facebook.
- twic 12y agoI proposed a user-edited online encyclopedia in 1996, while working at the New Scientist. Everyone agreed it would never work, so the idea wasn't pursued. Two years later, Everything launched, a year after that, H2G2, and two years after that, Wikipedia.
- seanmcdirmid 12y agoWard's wiki launched in 1995 (or 1994, depending on how you count), actually: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WikiWikiWeb http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WikiWikiWeb
- minikites 12y agoThere was "Community Memory" in Berkeley in the 70s: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_Memory http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_Memory
- rcfox 12y agoDon't forget timing. Netflix and Youtube probably wouldn't have been successful in the early 2000s just due to bandwidth limitations.
- waps 12y agoDidn't Netflix have what every other service was missing ? Netflix had a deal that they could stream whatever they had on DVDs for a fixed price. So they had boatloads of streamable content, which was the major stumbling block of everything else.
- madaxe_again 12y agoMan. The only purpose of all for me back in the day was that you could call them up and they'd ship you a stack of 5.25/3.5 floppies so you could "share" "the service" with your "friends". i.e. Punch a hole where the write protect window should be and yay, free, really cruddy, media!
- MichaelApproved 12y agoFor a long time, the stickers they used on the 3.5 floppies would peal off perfectly. No sticker residue at all.
- kirse 12y agoDid you do any work with the FDO language? The world of WAOL.exe was like pure ethanol poured onto the pilot light of curiosity when I was a younger programmer.
- rottyguy 12y agoI never got the pleasure :-). I did see the manuals, which were a couple of binders full of pages, on a colleagues shelf once. I suppose that was the forefather of xul/xaml+scripting language, though I guess we're still trying to sort that out.
- netvisao 12y agoAre we talking about NTK and the SNAC protocol ?