And for all its fundamental closed-ecosystem walled-garden flaws, AOL brought the first taste of the Internet to millions. We should celebrate the accomplishments and learn from the failings, not dance on the graves of the vanquished.
Define many.
mysql geocities
Welcome to the MySQL monitor. Commands end with ; or \g.
Your MySQL connection id is 93532573
Server version: 5.0.45-log Source distribution
Type 'help;' or '\h' for help. Type '\c' to clear the buffer.
mysql> select count(*) from master;
+----------+
| count(*) |
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| 44366377 |
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1 row in set (0.01 sec)
mysql>
Yes, old pages do die permanently, but achive.org is doing an absolutely outstanding job at capturing it. The bigger cause of information mortality is not neglect but outright murder, and murder on 'the open web' is a lot harder than murder in a walled garden.
AOL is a special case, and facebook is trying very very hard to be the new AOL. Don't underestimate the risks of not learning from the past, the author is in my opinion not so much dancing on the grave of AOL as they are warning us about our possible future.
To someone who didn't experience it first hand, a lot of 90s trends seem utterly ridiculous, and unlike the silly trends of the 60s/70s... 90s trends are well preserved and available for everyone to see and poke fun at.
The same goes for Yahoo! when someone writes a blog post about them in eight years.
Another AOL legacy is retention. You can't really say no without them just leaving AOL on the table. A coworker years ago used to get on for free just stringing them on...
He used to laugh about it, until that tactic worked! He ended up paying them for a while when he ran into hard times. Never without his AOL.
That experience turned him into a strange sort of fan. Disliked AOL, but loyal just the same.
It used to look a lot better than it does now though.