On AOL: good question, and I'm not finding the one I had in mind immediately.
What I recall was a discussion of different elements of Internet culture and what their origin stories were. Very roughly:
The "mainstream" early ARPANET/Internet culture emerged largely from major research universities and had a strongly academic bent.
There was a hobbyist culture that emerged largely out of the BBS and home-computer scene. The Whole Earth Catalogue and The WELL capture and document much of this.
Both these groups tended strongly toward professionals and middle / upper-middle class populations.
Military service members and their families were another large and fairly coherent group. Long-term deployments and frequent moves make communications a priority, and both email and text chat were natural fits for this. Esepcially in the dial-up age, when it might be possible to site a local dial-up point-of-presence at or near a military base (and free local calls). As a consequence, another generally-definable user cohort emerged: less professional, heavy on military (and subsequently law-enforcement) orientation, but also families, women, and children. My understanding is that this largely occurred during the first Gulf War (1991-92), and in assignments / actions in Somalia and the former Yugoslavia during the 1990s.
That said: I'm not turning up the reference, nor am I finding mentions in either the Wikipedia page nor a 1990s Wired profile (Wired itself also being an outgrowth of the Whole Earth community).
Thank you for the reply. I'm aware of how BBSs and on-line services started (CServe, Prodigy, Genie). Most of what you've said in your earlier reply was spot on with the exception the initial audience for AOL (at least in its earliest incarnation). I later thought you might be referring to AIM, but I couldn't find any relation to your claim either. It seemed odd as to how overseas military families would have access to AOL given that:
a) International dialing rates were incredibly expensive at the time. I don't know how someone would be connecting to AOL in a local network in, say, Stuttgart or Mogadishu without paying a pretty penny.
b) Most online communication done by overseas military members would have been done over ARPANET/MILNET with on-premise or remote data terminals attached/networked to minicomputer or timesharing systems (e.g. Honeywell, CDC, Burroughs, etc).
c) The AOL's earlier incarnation, Q-Link, was a C64 only service. AOL only became available for DOS/PCs just as the Gulf War ended (February 28 1991).
d) Anything that couldn't run C/PM, Unix, or PC-DOS was considered a kids toy (an image not helped in Commodore's case with the C64 being sold in Toy's R US, but I digress).
Given these factors, I would think AOL's initial audience would have been the same hobbyists and MUD players that made BBSs popular for a time.
Perhaps you were talking about early flat-fee connection services/ packet networks like Tymnet, BBN Telenet, DATAPAC, Frame Relay, etc ?
Re: dialing rates: the point was that for the cost of a local call (and often free), AOL enabled family members to send email or (text) chat in realtime. That compared against either postal mail (a week or more overseas) or phone calls (expensive, possibly a dollar or more a minute). The service provider (I'm pretty sure it was AOL, might have been others) itself had dedicated backplanes, probably bulk leased lines. Throughput wouldn't have been great, possibly as low as 9600 baud, though I believe 56k leased lines were fairly common (we had a few of these connecting uni campuses in the late 1980s). Where all comms was text, this was sufficient.
AOL wasn't providing military comms services, AFAIU, but personal communications, either between deployed servicemembers and spouses or partners back home, or entire deployed families and their own extended relatives and relations in the US. You're right that official military comms had their own channels. This personal/family element is precisely one of the factors shaping the cohort of AOL users which emerged being one of the major points of the article.
I'm not entirely sure of the timing, but 1991 -- 1999 would have been roughly the right timeline. Keep in mind that broadband was only starting to become generally available in the US by the late 1990s / early 2000s, and AOL continued as a major dialup provider through the mid-aughts.
I'm pretty sure this was DOS or Macintosh. I do recall helping neighbours with Mac-based AOL configurations on a Mac Quadra in the 1993--1995 timeframe.
I'm fairly certain this was AOL specifically. MCI might have been another possibility.
I didn't think leased lines were affordable to anyone outside of megacorps like IBM or top-tier research institutions. Negotiating with local service providers for cheap rates in the early 90s sounds plausible, but I can't say for sure.
I do recall something about BBSs, BITNET, Echomail being used in the Gulf War but I also have to look up that article.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 32.9 ms ] threadMoney for bringing people together, giving them swag and making them feel part of a community.
Time for people to gel and start to care about each other.
Caring because if you, the community organizer (presumably) don't care, people won't care, and the community won't form.
Other things that help include an overarching mission and a way for community members to get to know each other.
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For software: find users who benefit by its use and champion them. Forums, mailing lists, and recognition help in that.
Find an existing community, either with a communications challenge or which might want to benefit by use of a commnications platform.
Usenet leveraged off universities.
BBS leveraged off hobbyists.
Early online services (notably AOL) leveraged off military families on oversees deployments.
Slashdot leveraged off of the open source / Linux movement which was underserved by existing publishing platforms.
Facebook leveraged off of universities again, starting with the most selective (Harvard, Ivys, selective-admission, ...).
HN leverages off the YC community.
Story I recently ran across of a dating app was that it was used in conjunction with a few Hollywood events as a cohort-seeding formation.
Any articles expanding on this story?
>Story I recently ran across of a dating app was that it was used in conjunction with a few Hollywood events as a cohort-seeding formation.
Are you talking about Raya?
The example comes from Andrew Chen's The Cold Start Problem https://www.worldcat.org/title/cold-start-problem-how-to-sta...
On AOL: good question, and I'm not finding the one I had in mind immediately.
What I recall was a discussion of different elements of Internet culture and what their origin stories were. Very roughly:
The "mainstream" early ARPANET/Internet culture emerged largely from major research universities and had a strongly academic bent.
There was a hobbyist culture that emerged largely out of the BBS and home-computer scene. The Whole Earth Catalogue and The WELL capture and document much of this.
Both these groups tended strongly toward professionals and middle / upper-middle class populations.
Military service members and their families were another large and fairly coherent group. Long-term deployments and frequent moves make communications a priority, and both email and text chat were natural fits for this. Esepcially in the dial-up age, when it might be possible to site a local dial-up point-of-presence at or near a military base (and free local calls). As a consequence, another generally-definable user cohort emerged: less professional, heavy on military (and subsequently law-enforcement) orientation, but also families, women, and children. My understanding is that this largely occurred during the first Gulf War (1991-92), and in assignments / actions in Somalia and the former Yugoslavia during the 1990s.
That said: I'm not turning up the reference, nor am I finding mentions in either the Wikipedia page nor a 1990s Wired profile (Wired itself also being an outgrowth of the Whole Earth community).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOL
https://www.wired.com/1995/09/aol-2/
I'll keep looking to see what I can find.
a) International dialing rates were incredibly expensive at the time. I don't know how someone would be connecting to AOL in a local network in, say, Stuttgart or Mogadishu without paying a pretty penny.
b) Most online communication done by overseas military members would have been done over ARPANET/MILNET with on-premise or remote data terminals attached/networked to minicomputer or timesharing systems (e.g. Honeywell, CDC, Burroughs, etc).
c) The AOL's earlier incarnation, Q-Link, was a C64 only service. AOL only became available for DOS/PCs just as the Gulf War ended (February 28 1991).
d) Anything that couldn't run C/PM, Unix, or PC-DOS was considered a kids toy (an image not helped in Commodore's case with the C64 being sold in Toy's R US, but I digress).
Given these factors, I would think AOL's initial audience would have been the same hobbyists and MUD players that made BBSs popular for a time.
Perhaps you were talking about early flat-fee connection services/ packet networks like Tymnet, BBN Telenet, DATAPAC, Frame Relay, etc ?
AOL wasn't providing military comms services, AFAIU, but personal communications, either between deployed servicemembers and spouses or partners back home, or entire deployed families and their own extended relatives and relations in the US. You're right that official military comms had their own channels. This personal/family element is precisely one of the factors shaping the cohort of AOL users which emerged being one of the major points of the article.
I'm not entirely sure of the timing, but 1991 -- 1999 would have been roughly the right timeline. Keep in mind that broadband was only starting to become generally available in the US by the late 1990s / early 2000s, and AOL continued as a major dialup provider through the mid-aughts.
I'm pretty sure this was DOS or Macintosh. I do recall helping neighbours with Mac-based AOL configurations on a Mac Quadra in the 1993--1995 timeframe.
I'm fairly certain this was AOL specifically. MCI might have been another possibility.
I do recall something about BBSs, BITNET, Echomail being used in the Gulf War but I also have to look up that article.
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