Kind 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.
When 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.
Growing 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
I 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.
I 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.
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!
I 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!
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.
AOL'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.
If 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?
Yahoo 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.
Yahoo 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
Same with AOL Instant Messenger. At early startups, we coordinated all our “ops” work in private AOL chat rooms. AOL or Yahoo could’ve built Slack in 1999.
This is one of the main reasons why voice control looks great in Star Trek, but sucks in the real world. I want to be able to say, "computer, ${do something}", but with real voice assistants, I have to say "${brand 1}, use ${brand 2} to ${do something} on ${brand 3}".
There's a lot of these comparisons, and I wouldn't want to reply to all of them, but will on this one.
What's missing on most of these are the social aspect. With Google, you can't just drop into a 'miamidolphins' chat room to discuss the Dolphins. Nor can you instant message folks.
Think of what you'd need to recreate all of it with what we have today. Discord for chat rooms. Whatsapp for IMs. Chrome for browsing. Outlook for email. Steam for games? And there's many more features missing still. All in one application.
Further, part of the 'magic' to me was that the application itself was native and static. So you always had your menu bar to click between. And each clicked thing was its own subwindow. Like an OS inside an OS, if you will. Sounds wacky, but I loved the experience...at least at the time.
That idea is alive in well in China as WeChat. We really don't want or need something like that in the West, even in spite of Musk's attempts to recreate it.
A smartphone would be near the opposite of that. Having to figure out what app others are using and install, and keep switching between them. With AOL if you wanted to contact someone, it was just IM(AIM), for example.
So more like recent trends of Apple and iOS specifically then? Where Apple first party apps are the go to option and the very thought of having to install a separate app is enough to keep people using the Apple solution. Sure there's an option to install other apps, but increasingly the trend is to use the stock apps for everything. Sure AOL didn't give you a choice, but maybe we'll see that one day with iOS too.
I think this is what WeChat sort of is? And what Musk wants Twitter/X to become.
IMO interoperability and standards work better than this sort of all-in-one package. Do one thing, do it well, and play nice with others. Let the best app win. You know the team working on “X news” or whatever is going to be phoning it in, thinking in the back of their heads “we’d really have to do a bad job to get somebody to leave the whole platform.”
There's some variations of that (like MSN), but I gotta say having messaging tied to a paid service makes me feel a lot more comfortable with using it. I am paying for this! This is how the service works! No weird angles to it
Yeah I was just thinking that there should be a service that's like aol, with all the buttons and features just together. Like Google basically has it but it's not all really tied together. The reality is that computing simply used to be a lot cooler.
AOL 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.
ddos 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.
I do. And that second part is false. Most users of cloudflare don't configure it and just run with the defaults. That means any browser that doesn't implement the latest bleeding edge features gets blocked. And it especially means, say, if you're science.org and you've applied cloudflare to your entire domain, that URL endpoints that are supposed to be hit by clients like RSS readers end up covered under the entire domain anti-bot block, and now the RSS URLs are incessibible to native feed readers and only paid feedly accounts are whitelisted and can accesss science.org/aaas hosted blog feeds. True story.
So 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.
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 to other users and access to content somehow, but not via the internet?
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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
Those 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.
AOL 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.
AOL 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.
Ahh good memories. This is how me and a friend got into programming. We would constantly feud though because he used VB, but I used delphi. Clearly, I was using the superior language :)
Aohell is what got me into Windows dev stuff back in the day. Then discovered the warez room. Downloaded a copy of VB 3.0 and bunch of other dev tools. I think Borland Delphi and also Power Builder. Best thing about AOL was that even in the mid-90s, their email system held what seemed like an unlimited amount of multi-part binary files as attachments. So when you requested a warez in the chatroom, your inbox got flooded with like 30-40 emails with rar file parts. Like pretty much everyone back in those days on dialup, I'd start the download at night , so less chance of someone picking up phone and disconnecting my session from AOL. When I was college, it got easier. Because AOL added TCP/Winsock support to their desktop client. So I could just install AOL on unsed Comp Sci lab PC and then download all the email attachments at 1-2mbps.
Ha, that scene is how I learned to program. Built a shareware tool called AoLOL! (available by going to keyword "Addon"), $14.95, got paper checks from all over the country! Then I met the ICQ founders...
That idle timeout was pretty important when AOL cost $1/hour (and it was the cheap service! Prodigy, Compuserve, and especially GEnie were more expensive!). Leaving it connected overnight would get you grounded in a hurry when that AOL bill came in the next month.
It was really no wonder that all of those services basically collapsed once dial up ISPs with flat (and low!) monthly fees started appearing. $10 for unlimited (modem speed) data is a steal in comparison.
I've been using AOL CD-codes up until the moment where I got my hands on some Compuserve code generator. The only cost which remained was for the local dial up. Good times. I personally thanked a Compuserve representative for their easy access at some fair. Didn't seem like he understood but I still felt better afterwards.
I imagine everyone who was a kid during the dial-up times has a horror story of being confronted with an enormous phone bill by their parents. I remember mine going mental at me for costing us £40 one month (normal service was iirc ~£10)
Nah but really the bill wasn't bad enough for that, and honestly I'm not sure that kind of PR move was very common before social media days (total guess). I just remember it because I had to give my parents the difference and as a 12-13 year old that £30 was a lot!
I was a teenager on the tail end of dialup, so no hourly fee, but my parents got awfully mad if I tied up our phone line all day playing online games. They’d randomly call home a few times a day to ensure compliance.
Good times. I built a wardialler out of one of those science fair 150 in one kits and an Atari st using an rs232 data line to bounce a relay. found plenty, but the fun ended when the 400 quid bill came in. Endless paper rounds.
i've backspaced over trying to be nice but i don't think you a) could've made the dtmf tones, b) matched the impedance, c) modulated the serial signal even if you made a connection
Accidently dialing an non-local number for AOL ended up getting me banned from the family PC for a month. Long distance charges were expensive. (US)
Then we were in Germany in the late 90s and even local calls cost money so one had to be wary of how many hours you were online. Eventually we got flat-rate and ISDN 64k and then 128k but it wasn't long after that we moved back to the US.
I discovered that my phone company had numbers in the same area code that were "medium distance". You dialed them like a local call and they were in the same area code, but they would inflate your phone bill in a hurry. It wasn't easy to figure out if a number would be in that zone either. I had to cancel my first ISP after getting the monster phone bill at the end of the month. Luckily they weren't full up long distance or it would have bankrupted me, also lucky that I only joined the ISP in the middle of the month.
> That idle timeout was pretty important when AOL cost $1/hour
Let me guess: are you American?
Brit here. Our phonecall connection charges were a lot more than that. The ROTW pays for local calls as well as long-distance. $1/hr would have been great. I paid closer to $1/min for dial-up. We all used OLRs: Offline Readers. An app that dials your service provider, posts all outgoing messages, grabs all new messages into a file, zips it, downloads it and any pending file downloads, then hangs up.
They were great and all message reading was local, hence fast: no lag at all, even on 14.4kb/s.
But CI$ ones were rubbish and AOL didn't have one at all, 'til it went toll-free in about 1998.
I’m sure we fairly quickly (as in fairly quickly after 56k became a thing) had zero call rate ISPs who just charged a small monthly. We used to use FreeUK (eventually taken over by Clara), and had a second line dedicated to it.
Ha, that reminds me of one of my first useful programs. In the early days of the internet my dad picked up a internet contract which allowed you to dial in on a toll free number; it was pretty cheap per month but the only catch was while dialled in they displayed a banner along the top of the screen with advertising. Using the win32 API in VB I was able to find the handle to the window kill it.
The only problem then was that tying up the land line constantly got on my mum's nerves, being back in the days before land line numbers were redundant for other reasons.
Yep, there were a few of free dial up ISPs that came and went like BlueLight and NetZero. I took a more crude approach to work around the banner and used Internet Connection Sharing in Win98 from a second PC and kept the monitor off.
I'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.
AOL 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.
I 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.
AOL 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.
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.
AOL 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.
I 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.
It'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.
This 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.
Don't focus too much on the word "internet" - it didn't mean to people what it does today.
Imagine if AOL had existed in an "always online" world and built an OS instead of an application. In fact, just imagine a computer that booted directly into AOL, where you could download and manage apps but never delete the "AOL" part.
Isn't Apple's iOS just an abstraction of the environment AOL sought to build - a portal they controlled in between customers and companies to allow and manage exclusive services, media, and (DRM'd) purchases?
, he gasped breathlessly from atop his Peloton, sweat beading beneath his Gucci Bored Ape sweatband as the horror dawned, all too late. Because once seen, there was no unseeing. "No. No. No!"
Could everything he had felt for his iPhone have been a saccharine substitute for what he'd lost along with AOL, his empire built in search of his Rosebud? It had all seemed too familiar, once he stopped to think about it... but how did he miss it, all this time? The differences boiled down to mere organization!
"I was a fool, so blinded by the beauty of my garden that I failed to notice I was a prisoner of it. I wonder if my garden is merely one of many in a larger garden, and that garden, one of..."
"Ding." His buffalo style chicken Hot Pocket was done. After doomscrolling over his cuisine, he felt better - silly, even - for doubting the uniqueness of his iPhone. It had appeared from vacuum, after all, amidst a techless, empty waste of a world, and brought with it an era where even the past was altered in its wake.
An icon of an envelope, not a mailbox, wiggled. "Oh look, I've got mail."
Seriously, they are definitely doing just what you've described, but even more advanced. Not that I think it's intrinsically wrong. It's much more efficient to have protocols for all the modes of interaction that are discovered, e.g. The collection of raw ideas expressible via internet web pages is like a test bed for the possibilities. They eventually graduate into ossified structures under the control of Apple, like Messages reactions, gifs, replies etc. (Even HTML/FTP/etc and browsers are sandboxes with much more restrictions than arbitrary methods of drawing/sculpture/sound/dance and other types of art.)
But with power comes responsibility. I'm not even sure it's possible for a corporation to be accountable to the full extent necessary for such control over so many people's interactions. There're unimaginable quantities personal stuff on their servers and clients.
You "forgot" to state how Apple controls the Web, or to support any of the other hysteria buried in your self-important, technically unsound rant against electronic expression... which Apple did not invent and does not govern online.
You're whining about FTP's malign effects on drawing, sculpture, and dance? Hahaha, seriously? And again, you neglect to establish that Apple is to blame.
How about the flourishing of art forms and appreciation for would-have-been-obscure artists (including sculptors and dancers) who have the means to reach millions of people through, OMG, HTTP! How about the fact that I can look up the best techniques and watch a video about how to construct my own kiln, so I can do pottery at home? Dear lord save us from what Apple hath wrought! If only my spirit could soar into the heavens without hitting my head on a server in the cloud.
They're slowly boiling the frog if you look at Facebook, Reddit, etc.
Also, part of it is a very long game. Younger generations rarely use websites, they mostly use apps.
It's the same thing as Office and Windows being slowly moved away towards a subscription model: done successfully for Office, still trending that way slowly for Windows, where resistance is SUPER fierce.
Just because the loss is happening over decades, doesn't mean the web is winning.
I definitely felt this was happening at some point, but it seemed like it peaked. But, fair enough, maybe I just stopped paying attention.
You should be happy that Reddit just trashed all the apps, then. It would never have occurred to me to look for an app to use Reddit; nor did I ever hear discussion about it.
It seems that people tend to use the same few key applications now: Instagram/TikTok/whatever-flavor-of-the-year-social-media app, messaging, the YouTube app, a browser.
But you're right, in that you do still get hounded to install pointless apps to do a single thing. The other day I needed to download some soccer tickets that were being hosted by TicketMaster. After the TicketMaster-hosted site told me to download them to my wallet but offered no way to do so, the team wanted me to install their own app. Nope.
Another thing that pisses me off is when vendors will make it impossible to do something from A COMPUTER. NO, I am not going to install a goddamned app and dick around on a tiny phone screen when I'm running an event and executing transactions with customers standing in line, Square!
Anyone 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.
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!
I wouldn’t have thought that there were many people using computers who weren’t already familiar with audio CDs. While most portable players were top-loading, I remember the majority of home stereos having the slide-out tray. I would have thought anyone using computers at the time would also have been familiar with home stereo/hi-fi systems (even if they didn’t own one).
Hey, that's not to say that NOBODY believed this. Back in the day I was in a programming class with a bunch of non-tech people (at the Accenture training center).
In those days you could impersonate anyone with the Novell networks' "net send" command, because you could enter the originating user ID by hand. So I would find out the number of one of my classmates' workstations and send a message from the admin: "Keyboard unbalanced. Please adjust."
Sure enough, I look over and she's quizzically lifting her keyboard and tilting it around.
But it was about 30 years later when I discovered that "cup holders" were a real thing that are a standard fixture on American cars.
European cars are tiny things by comparison and there isn't room to drink while driving, and we didn't have drive-through food or drink places in the 20th century, either. Also, they are all manual gearshift, so your hand is too busy to drink.
Some cars have a recess by the gear stick for a bottle or a can of soft drink, but most people use it for small items like garage door zappers or coins for meters instead.
Thus is was about 2015 or 2020 when I first saw a picture of a pop-out cup holder and realised that this was a Thing, a Thing that Americans would recognise, and that optical drive trays do look similar.
Nobody ever bothered to explain that, because Americans tend to assume that the whole world is like America.
Random people would just message you this out of the blue. When I was about 10 or 11 some girl did this and we figured out we lived two hours away from each other. We ended up talking and kept in touch for years. Eventually our family’s had planned a vacation to the same city at the same time and we met up in person finally and had a good time. It never turned into a relationship but we kept in touch until I was in my early twenties. It just seemed like a different world compared to the social networking of today. Things were more innocent and there was a lot more inherit trust between people online.
> I was using still using a 300 baud modem with my C=64 when Q-Link launched.
Wow, that brought back memories for me. Quantum Link was my first "online" experience, and the cost made it very much a "get in, get it done, and get out" kind of experience, but Grolier's Online Encyclopedia helped me with many reports and papers in elementary school.
Once I moved to PC and dial-up BBS, it was all over for Quantum Link.
This 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
I 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).
We’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.
They 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.
Interesting 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 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!"
The 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.
AOL 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.
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 350 ms ] threadI 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!
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.
I wonder if an idea like that would work again - was just ahead of its time?
I guess the ultimate takeaway is that there's not a lot of money to be made if they're all gone now.
> Jeeves
> Yahoo
This is one of the main reasons why voice control looks great in Star Trek, but sucks in the real world. I want to be able to say, "computer, ${do something}", but with real voice assistants, I have to say "${brand 1}, use ${brand 2} to ${do something} on ${brand 3}".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_portal
What's missing on most of these are the social aspect. With Google, you can't just drop into a 'miamidolphins' chat room to discuss the Dolphins. Nor can you instant message folks.
Think of what you'd need to recreate all of it with what we have today. Discord for chat rooms. Whatsapp for IMs. Chrome for browsing. Outlook for email. Steam for games? And there's many more features missing still. All in one application.
Further, part of the 'magic' to me was that the application itself was native and static. So you always had your menu bar to click between. And each clicked thing was its own subwindow. Like an OS inside an OS, if you will. Sounds wacky, but I loved the experience...at least at the time.
So like Emacs, plus the GUI, but minus the ergonomics, but plus the features...
It's not wacky at all, but it's unlikely to be embraced with the market structured the way it is.
Yahoo tried to be that, too. Both are now mostly of historical interest.
https://tw.yahoo.com
IMO interoperability and standards work better than this sort of all-in-one package. Do one thing, do it well, and play nice with others. Let the best app win. You know the team working on “X news” or whatever is going to be phoning it in, thinking in the back of their heads “we’d really have to do a bad job to get somebody to leave the whole platform.”
MSN
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.
Here is the story.
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.
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.
Some companies built private networks and services to these users before meshing with the internet at large.
It was almost bulletproof for the less than tech savvy.
For the audience it hasn't been matched wide since the iPad/iPhone
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.
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.
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.
And he worked in IT his whole career.
It was really no wonder that all of those services basically collapsed once dial up ISPs with flat (and low!) monthly fees started appearing. $10 for unlimited (modem speed) data is a steal in comparison.
please prove me wrong
Then we were in Germany in the late 90s and even local calls cost money so one had to be wary of how many hours you were online. Eventually we got flat-rate and ISDN 64k and then 128k but it wasn't long after that we moved back to the US.
Let me guess: are you American?
Brit here. Our phonecall connection charges were a lot more than that. The ROTW pays for local calls as well as long-distance. $1/hr would have been great. I paid closer to $1/min for dial-up. We all used OLRs: Offline Readers. An app that dials your service provider, posts all outgoing messages, grabs all new messages into a file, zips it, downloads it and any pending file downloads, then hangs up.
They were great and all message reading was local, hence fast: no lag at all, even on 14.4kb/s.
But CI$ ones were rubbish and AOL didn't have one at all, 'til it went toll-free in about 1998.
I am still liamproven@aol.com to this day.
It was a worldwide service which is why it rebranded as "AOL".
I don't really use it any more, but one of its half a dozen alternate account names is still my mother's primary email address.
It was about 15 years or so after the BBS boom in the USA, though, which was driven by free local calls.
The only problem then was that tying up the land line constantly got on my mum's nerves, being back in the days before land line numbers were redundant for other reasons.
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.
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.
It is interesting that the data silo model they used is sort of coming back with Facebook and other social media.
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.
https://beta.aol.com/main
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.
Well, we now have 4 AOLs: Google, Apple, Microsoft and Facebook.
Other wall-garden networks offered by Apple include: AirDrop, Find My, iMessage
Imagine if AOL had existed in an "always online" world and built an OS instead of an application. In fact, just imagine a computer that booted directly into AOL, where you could download and manage apps but never delete the "AOL" part.
Isn't Apple's iOS just an abstraction of the environment AOL sought to build - a portal they controlled in between customers and companies to allow and manage exclusive services, media, and (DRM'd) purchases?
Could everything he had felt for his iPhone have been a saccharine substitute for what he'd lost along with AOL, his empire built in search of his Rosebud? It had all seemed too familiar, once he stopped to think about it... but how did he miss it, all this time? The differences boiled down to mere organization!
"I was a fool, so blinded by the beauty of my garden that I failed to notice I was a prisoner of it. I wonder if my garden is merely one of many in a larger garden, and that garden, one of..."
"Ding." His buffalo style chicken Hot Pocket was done. After doomscrolling over his cuisine, he felt better - silly, even - for doubting the uniqueness of his iPhone. It had appeared from vacuum, after all, amidst a techless, empty waste of a world, and brought with it an era where even the past was altered in its wake.
An icon of an envelope, not a mailbox, wiggled. "Oh look, I've got mail."
Seriously, they are definitely doing just what you've described, but even more advanced. Not that I think it's intrinsically wrong. It's much more efficient to have protocols for all the modes of interaction that are discovered, e.g. The collection of raw ideas expressible via internet web pages is like a test bed for the possibilities. They eventually graduate into ossified structures under the control of Apple, like Messages reactions, gifs, replies etc. (Even HTML/FTP/etc and browsers are sandboxes with much more restrictions than arbitrary methods of drawing/sculpture/sound/dance and other types of art.)
But with power comes responsibility. I'm not even sure it's possible for a corporation to be accountable to the full extent necessary for such control over so many people's interactions. There're unimaginable quantities personal stuff on their servers and clients.
You're whining about FTP's malign effects on drawing, sculpture, and dance? Hahaha, seriously? And again, you neglect to establish that Apple is to blame.
How about the flourishing of art forms and appreciation for would-have-been-obscure artists (including sculptors and dancers) who have the means to reach millions of people through, OMG, HTTP! How about the fact that I can look up the best techniques and watch a video about how to construct my own kiln, so I can do pottery at home? Dear lord save us from what Apple hath wrought! If only my spirit could soar into the heavens without hitting my head on a server in the cloud.
Woe betide us.
Oh, and give yourself a participation trophy.
The AppStore and the PlayStore are slowly choking off the internet.
Apple is not a gatekeeper to the Internet the way Google, Meta, and Amazon are. Lumping Apple in with them reveals ignorance of their core businesses.
Yes, I find those publishers and apps annoying. But how big a deal have they become?
Also, part of it is a very long game. Younger generations rarely use websites, they mostly use apps.
It's the same thing as Office and Windows being slowly moved away towards a subscription model: done successfully for Office, still trending that way slowly for Windows, where resistance is SUPER fierce.
Just because the loss is happening over decades, doesn't mean the web is winning.
You should be happy that Reddit just trashed all the apps, then. It would never have occurred to me to look for an app to use Reddit; nor did I ever hear discussion about it.
It seems that people tend to use the same few key applications now: Instagram/TikTok/whatever-flavor-of-the-year-social-media app, messaging, the YouTube app, a browser.
But you're right, in that you do still get hounded to install pointless apps to do a single thing. The other day I needed to download some soccer tickets that were being hosted by TicketMaster. After the TicketMaster-hosted site told me to download them to my wallet but offered no way to do so, the team wanted me to install their own app. Nope.
Another thing that pisses me off is when vendors will make it impossible to do something from A COMPUTER. NO, I am not going to install a goddamned app and dick around on a tiny phone screen when I'm running an event and executing transactions with customers standing in line, Square!
"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.
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.
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!
In those days you could impersonate anyone with the Novell networks' "net send" command, because you could enter the originating user ID by hand. So I would find out the number of one of my classmates' workstations and send a message from the admin: "Keyboard unbalanced. Please adjust."
Sure enough, I look over and she's quizzically lifting her keyboard and tilting it around.
But it was about 30 years later when I discovered that "cup holders" were a real thing that are a standard fixture on American cars.
European cars are tiny things by comparison and there isn't room to drink while driving, and we didn't have drive-through food or drink places in the 20th century, either. Also, they are all manual gearshift, so your hand is too busy to drink.
Some cars have a recess by the gear stick for a bottle or a can of soft drink, but most people use it for small items like garage door zappers or coins for meters instead.
Thus is was about 2015 or 2020 when I first saw a picture of a pop-out cup holder and realised that this was a Thing, a Thing that Americans would recognise, and that optical drive trays do look similar.
Nobody ever bothered to explain that, because Americans tend to assume that the whole world is like America.
I remember being in Yahoo chat rooms and my 11 year old logic was "I should lie and say I'm older...13 is old enough to be 'not a kid' right?"
Wow, that brought back memories for me. Quantum Link was my first "online" experience, and the cost made it very much a "get in, get it done, and get out" kind of experience, but Grolier's Online Encyclopedia helped me with many reports and papers in elementary school.
Once I moved to PC and dial-up BBS, it was all over for Quantum Link.
https://www.philstar.com/headlines/2015/03/20/1435536/facebo...
Also I love how this write-up ends at 1998. Yet here we are 25 years later 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!"
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.
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.