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AOL Pretends to be the Internet (thehistoryoftheweb.com)

submitted 2 years ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 years ago (1 children)

The article missed discussing in detail how AOL Keywords and their walled garden of apparent “websites” was huge. So many major companies had pages on AOL and for many, that was the internet.

The story of them losing a grip over the power of keywords to true websites was almost the final blow in transitioning AOL from an internet unto its own, to yet another ISP that had little to differentiate itself from others except price (especially as their all in one chat, email, browsing client aged horribly as countless other upstarts brought efficient and feature-rich clients to market).

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago

Every commercial had the AOL keyword in it. Increasingly available DSL and cable connectivity made AOL useless, I think a some of early Google success was helping people use “keywords” on the real internet.

[+] [email protected] 7 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (2 children)

[removed by mod]

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago

Those AOL email addresses didn’t disappear either. I recently discovered I have an @aim.com address with my crappy high school AIM screenname that was happy to accept new messages. I’m tempted to move some higher value things to it since it has never been published anywhere other than the buddy list.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

and even years after AOL had its market share siphoned off by ISPs like Earthlink, those users continued to use AOL Instant Messenger (AIM). I didn’t retire my handle until the late 2000s.

In Russia ICQ played the same role for an IM (it's the same OSCAR protocol), but it (I think owned by AOL too) killed itself by trying to lose alternative clients.

I used the official one for Windows only, but it was a more civilized age, and what they were breaking included clients for Java phones (it was not so rare to hear the ICQ notification sound in public transport), clients like QIP, Miranda, Trillian which were used by many people, clients for Linux and so on.

Then everybody moved on to Skype. It happened very fast, in a couple of months my buddy list went mostly red from mostly green.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 years ago (2 children)

I always loved getting free writable floppies in the mail from them! Their service was useless to me, but the floppies sure weren't. Then they switched to CDs, which went directly from mailbox to trash, and I was very sad.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago

My roommate and I taped the CDs to the wall as a makeshift mirror. 😄

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (2 children)

Are you sure those CDs couldn't be re-used? I've got some promotional DVD that could still be re-used. It only had like 70MB written. You could just format it, and use the rest. I did that stuff multiple times. (But not all of them are recordable)

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 years ago

Once you get into serious quantity, getting a "plain" (Read-only) CD or DVD manufactured is much cheaper than rewritable. AOL was junkmail-bombing the entire country.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago

At the time, CD writers were not a common thing. Supposedly, CD-RW that could be rewritten debuted in 1997. AOL wouldn't have been giving those out. You paid a premium for them compared to the write-once CD-R, which is what most people I knew who burned CDs at home were using. AOL just sent mass-pressed CD-ROMs.

It would be interesting to know how much waste their CD mailing campaign produced. I think it would be a nice gesture to recognize their accomplishment with a monument: the Steve Case Memorial Landfill.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago

There's one little twist in this story that isn't mentioned, and I've never quite understood. When the NSFnet started to upgrade from the T1 backbone to the T3 backbone in 1990, they formed a company called ANS (Advanced Network and Services) to run it.

When the T3 backbone got shut down in 1995, (most of) ANS was sold to... AOL.

Weird.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Network_and_Services

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago

A early walled garden. Isn't it cute.

Now find me on Facebook using keyword totally not a scam

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago

AOL was 'everywhere' especially in the mid to latter '90's. Their advertising push coupled with so many hours of free Internet access upon installation made them an early titan of Internet service access.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

I've been wondering if the AOL walled garden works as a metaphor for the non-fediverse Internet.

For my friends old enough to remember pre-Internet AOL, I have described the difficulties getting your mind around fediverse concepts as similar to the paradigm shift we all went through when first wandering out from AOL onto the open World Wide Web (ie, HTTP websites).

What do you mean, there's more than one area to talk about the latest episode of Friends?! Isn't that confusing? How do you know where to go for that content?

In AOL, I can just enter a keword. What's this about a search engine? Why do I need to use some unrelated website, like Hotbot, to find out where people are talking about Friends?

For a couple of my friends, this analogy has sparked their openness to digging in a little and learning about Lemmy, etc, and it's made then more forgiving of the fact that certain aspects are not intuitive right off the bat.