AOL pretends to be the internet
thehistoryoftheweb.com
thehistoryoftheweb.com
The article didn’t have a screen shot of how AOL tacked the entire Internet Internet onto their glorified BBS as a button on their toolbar. Seriously.
From my experience, yes.
I am getting merried next month - we have a wedding website via "with joy", which had a URL a bit too long to fit on our wedding invites, so I set up a redirect of "wedding.surname.tld" - the amount of people who messaged us saying the website didn't work, and it turns out they were putting "www." beforehand was staggering (until I added that as a redirect too).
The tld isn’t com there’s no g in the entire address, but people have a hard time understanding that such a thing is a real email address. I do happen to have that gmail address also, but my name is uncommon and not the easiest to spell, so as long as they get my last name and tld right I’ll get the email if they send it to my vanity domain.
People really struggle with this.
Websites sometimes reject it on principle that the TLD obviously can't exist.
Foren@meSurna.me
Except it's much shorter (10 chars total). I basically only use it on my resume now, as people that work in tech are the only ones recognize it as a valid email address.
(The majority of it comes from people who forgot they had a middle initial in their email address.)
Also, all internet addresses have to start with 'www', everybody knows that. Otherwise the Internet would be confused and think it was an email address.
> I’ll get the email if they send it to my vanity domain.
Nothing vain about it; it's just a domain name being used as intended.
For people outside our bubble they basically don't exist, though I'll admit this is probably quite location dependant.
For the past 3 years a lot of restaurants switched to QR based menus for obvious reasons. So I’d wager to say that anyone that went out to eat in the last 3 years has interacted with at least a handful of QR scans :)
I’ve also seen hotels adopt “scan this code to get our WI-FI details”. Which is a pretty seamless experience and great
To be clear, the eye rolling is about the theatricality of my family members' behavior rather than the request for a paper menu. I would also add to the benefits of the paper menus that it's much more socially cohesive than everyone at the table sitting around staring at their phones, even if there's a common reason to do so.
Seriously - if I want food efficiently and robotically, there are many ways to obtain that. If I'm going to a restaurant with my friends, it's to pay too much money for a modicum of a social experience :P.
I don't want to spend first 5 minutes trying to get QR code to work, then next 10 minutes trying to read a menu on 5" screen (usually with poor scrolling and ads and whatnot, sometimes they make me install an app I'll never use again, etc), then another 5 min trying to order on a phone. I do not want to pay for anti-social experience. I DEFINITELY don't want my kids to try to figure out their food on my phone :D
I may be a cranky old grouch, and you're welcome to roll your eyes at me, but gimme a 20" menu rather than a poorly made bespoke 5" app :-/
I've used qr codes maybe... 6 times, ever?
With probably 50% success rate before I give up.
I know for a fact that literally nobody else in my in law family of middle class Canadians has ever used a single one.
Anecdata of course, but if we're sharing assumptions... :-)
They are on posters all over. Commonly used for sign-ups and event entrance. It’s a mid assumption to think they are more popular in tech circles, I actually think the reverse is true.
It's only in markets that lack competition that a company can do unpopular changes that reduce its costs without losing customers. For example, stadiums all went cashless "for your safety" and then never brought cash back. Which they can do for the same reason they can charge $5 or more for a bottle of water: they're basically a monopoly with a large captive audience.
I went to a place recently where you ordered on your phone and it kept your tab open until you closed it... I had to race against my phone dying to pay.
I see QR codes everywhere too. But I never see them used , and nobody in my circle uses them. And the only times I hear about them is when people complain about them in Restaurants etc.
May very well be different in other locations (I'm in small town in Canada, just outside of Toronto, traveling to Ottawa frequently). I would guess without any evidence that downtown NY or Boston may see more use :).
Similarly for restaurants - in my area, while there temporarily were big a few years ago - I don't really see any place that uses them now. The exception is when I travel to other cities.
The number 1 reason I don't bother is that, in my experience, they rarely work.
Also time to share one of my favorite shortcuts I use all the time. ctrl enter while in the title bar will add https://www. and the .com bit on the end of any string. Works in firefox and chrome.
I don’t know if I ever go searching for an app to open a QR code.
“.wedding” is obviously some cheeky made up thing…
A shocking (to me) number of people I work with don't know the URLs of websites they visit every day or that they can go directly to a site by typing in the address in "the search bar". And I mean people who use their computers for a living, not the "smartphone generation" or strangers to the web.
Me: Hey checkout <website>.com
Them: type <website> without .com in address bar, click on search results link that may or may not be correct.
We gave people the concept of portable identity with domain names, and they rejected it for another walled garden.
We gave people a messy solution that assumed they would care about implementation details.
And we've gone full circle. We have the same today, just in a form of a #tag.
https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/info/help/aol-ke...
There was a CBC News article within the last while that linked to an earlier article. However, the hyperlink pointed to a Google query for “blah blah topic cbc article”.
It was interesting to see that journalists within large organizations are hacking together their own resources instead of relying on internal tools (likely because they don’t exist).
QR codes.
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.
"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.
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!
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.
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!
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}".
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.
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
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.
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.
It was probably only like 6-12 months later that the web started to eclipse my usage of the proprietary AOL network. The ability for people to self-publish meant there was a lot more content for my hobbies of playing Civilization II and Battletech on the broader Web.
About 15 years later, I ended up working for AOL, via HuffPost, right through the Verizon acquisition. That was actually an extremely fun time to be there, as the company was attempting all sorts of experimental media projects, like HuffPost Live, Patch, their Aol Originals, etc. Completely coincidentally, my then-girlfriend (now-wife) worked for them through her PR agency, all the way through the Oath era.
Nothing new under the sun, eh?
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
With 56k modems, it took so long for the "shoot weapon" request to make it to the server that if you wanted to kill someone, you had to shoot well ahead of their actual ship. If you wanted to get good, you had to open up the debug console and use your ping to determine how far ahead to "lag shoot".
Suddenly, certain players began becoming well known for stacking up hundreds of kills in a game and ranking all the way up to Commander (max rank) within a few days. Over time, people began learning the secret: those were the first players to get ISDN and DSL and with their super-fast internet connections, it was like shooting fish in a barrel.
Those players were my introduction to the world outside of the AOL internet and I became eager to join it.
Around that same time, EA bought Silent Death Online and folded it into their online gaming services. That brought a new era for SDO which came to an end probably not much more than a year or two later when EA for some reason shut it all down (if I recall correctly, people started running credit card scams through the game).
What a time to be on the internet. I am still longing for someone to buy the rights to SDO and relaunch it.
Between 1994 and 1998, AOL (America Online) emerged as a significant player in the digital landscape. Initially established in 1985 as Quantum Computer Services with a product that connected Commodore 64 computers to an online network, it expanded and rebranded under Steve Case's leadership. Case envisioned a simple, user-friendly online platform, and AOL's chat feature became its most notable offering. While AOL was initially a closed system, unlike the open protocols of the wider Internet, its aggressive marketing campaigns successfully lured millions of Americans into its ecosystem. Ted Leonsis, who joined AOL after the acquisition of his company Redgate Communications, envisioned AOL as an all-encompassing digital entertainment hub. However, as the broader Internet gained traction, AOL felt compelled to integrate certain Internet protocols, eventually even providing its users with browsers to access the larger World Wide Web. By 1997, AOL was the gateway to the Internet for nearly half its users. Yet, its aspiration to be a distinct multi-generational platform faded as it became synonymous with the broader web. This evolution culminated in AOL's acquisition of Netscape in 1998, signaling its full immersion into the wider world of the Internet.
Here is the story.
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!"
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.
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.
Then I eventually migrated to MSN and IE. It was too many years before I could convince my mom to let me install Firefox so I can block pop ups better…
English is my second language and we moved to the states when I was around that age, I learned a lot on AOL chat and MSN. Good times, good times.
Unfortunately this wasn't a legitimate support line. The person did fix their issue, but they also charged my grandparent-in-laws $250 for it.
They called me right after they paid the person, realizing their mistake immediately.
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.