Remember AOL keywords? They basically had their own private DNS alternative. Every commercial on TV for a website would say "AOL keyword <xyz>!" instead of the actual URL. I guess it was a lot less scary for your average internet user to type in "nick" instead of "http://www.nick.com". I feel like we still kind of have the "URLs are hard" problem. I've noticed a lot of ads in Japan tell the users to search (presumably Google) for a specific phrase, and buying the adwords for that is more or less the modern equivalent of paying for an AOL keyword. Search was really rough back then (although it's gone full circle into shit again I feel), and the URL bar UX wasn't quite figured out yet. Will users be able to adapt to wacky new TLDs or will we be stuck with .com forever because it's recognizable as a domain name? Do people still type "www."? Is the app store the modern equivalent of AOL channels? Sometimes I wonder if we're stuck in an infinite cycle of reinventing AOL.
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).
I think anyone working UX should spend 3-6 months minimum in tech support every couple of years. I imagine the value of those learnings would vastly outweigh any useability studies or testing.
I have an email that is firstname@lastname.tld when I tell it to people, or tech support they always first assume I’m an idiot and really meant to say firstlast@gmail.com
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.
I have a catchall for my domain set up, and whenever I give a contact email to any organization, I offer theirdomain.com@mydomain.com. The amount of regular pushback I get from that (or people thinking I work at theirdomain.com, or that I am some kind of idiot) is insane.
I’ve started using my first name followed by a few letters related to the domain, so jimhn@example.com instead of hackernews@example.com, for exactly this reason. It’s easier to explain to a customer support rep if it’s a more “normal” email.
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.
I got a domain with my first name and my wife’s first name like jimja.ne, but she was not a fan of it at all. I ended up getting jimjane.org instead. Much easier for people to use.
I'm a huge nerd for TLDs and that's is just awesome. My last name is too obscure to have something that cool but it's so neat to have that as an option.
I wanted something like, the ccTLD was available for it, but I couldn’t find a registrar to buy it from, when it finally became available, it appears the country is trying to sell the domain at a premium bec it’s short (3 letters) so I’m sad.
I am starting to move away from gmail to proton and I had someone ask me if proton.me was a personal domain name. I wish! People expect gmail or other common domains and don't know what to do if you give them something other than that.
Agreed. I'm confused why tech geeks would expect normies to understand this stuff. It's like, "I dropped a Ferrari engine into my Toyoto Corolla, and when I brought it to the Toyota dealer, the mechanic was confused--It's so wierd."
I have the same and it's true, some people try tacking @gmail.com at the end.
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.
In Kiwi browser (which after my tests seems to be the best Android browser: chome but with good / old way to scroll cards + ublock) you can make a personalized tab with links to pages.
When you try to add a new page it auto suggests http adress - not httpS. So dont blame it always on users :)
Similar thing happened to us. I had the www redirect but used a .wedding TLD. On the invites I even put the entire “http://<domain>.wedding/“ hoping it’d be clear. I’d say a majority of people didn’t recognize that it was a web address and assumed we didn’t have a website.
I suppose that could also be an indication that they haven't typed in a URL in a very long time.
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.
That's not a terrible approach for some things. If I get a call from my bank telling me to login to my-bank.us or something to deal with a pressing issue, it may well be a phishing attempt, and it's generally a safer approach to google my bank and get to the login page that way instead of using the domain a caller tells you to.
I'm the same. I've been in IT in one form or another 30+ years and have actually scanned a QR code maybe as many times as you have, probably less. I watched my usually brilliant wife spend 10 minutes trying to figure out how to scan a QR code with her Android before she gave up and just typed in the URL.
The number 1 reason I don't bother is that, in my experience, they rarely work.
We've started doing nothing but QR for links and portals. People on the whole don't type in URLs, but they always have a smartphone or tablet. Designing for mobile is the only way to easily allow a room full of people to actually visit a page, and until laptops have cameras that can face backwards, there's not a lot of competition.
If you were out at all during / after Covid, restaurant menus were all QR codes on tables around me.
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.
There's a reason why restaurants quickly returned to physical menus: most of their customers hated QR code menus and the restaurant business is extremely competitive so you have to be responsive to what customers want to stay in business.
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.
One issue with QR codes in restaurants is that they force everyone to get on their phones which is sometimes exactly what you are trying to avoid by going out in the first place
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 :).
That sounds almost impossible to me. I feel like half of everything I purchase which has a manual doesn't ship with a physical manual, but instead comes with a printed QR code to "get instructions". If it's a gadget that comes with an App, there will be a QR code linking to that app.
I know multiple bars/ restaurants which won't send waiters to your table but expect you to scan the QR code on the table and order with your phone.
The last monitor I bought had a QR code to scan for quick start instructions. The QR code went to the wrong monitor! After that I searched for mention of that in existing reviews and only found one person in Amazon who mentioned it. People didn't really read manuals before and I don't think they're scanning QR code manuals nowadays.
But for the qr-code manuals, how often do you refer to them? I see those regularly too, but pretty much never use them.
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.
Tech changes decently quickly so sometimes it is easy to just stick with what you know. Today I was standing in my driveway trying to open the garage door with my phone. After about a min of going thru random menus and whatever I said 'whatever' and just went thru the house and pushed the button. I will figure it out when I am not in a rush. Also you hand me a QR code I am going to be a little annoyed but also grateful at the same time. The annoying part is getting out the app to do it. The grateful part is not having to type something like that into the tiny interfaces we like to use for phones.
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.
And then you point the camera app at the QR code, and then click the link that appears over the QR code. Neither Apple nor Android require a QR code reader app.
I’m sitting here eating a chicken katsu curry in London and each seat at the bar has a QR code to scan and see the menu.
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
I've even been to a few restaurants where they go a step further. Each table's QR code is unique and you can see the current tab for the table. You can then split and pay the check straight from that QR code. Pretty nice.
For 3 years, when confronted with such a scenario, the people in my life who dislike QR codes have theatrically said something like "what are these stupid computer squares! I want a paper menu damn it!" Whereupon the staff and I share a knowing look, everyone rolls their eyes, and a paper menu is brought forth.
I always ask for a paper menu. Why should I trust them enough to visit an unknown URL on my personal device? Why should they trust the 3rd party service they're likely using to not be malicious? Why should I even be arsed to pull my phone out of my pocket? Plus, paper menus are way easier to see and navigate. Of course, most people aren't "theatrical about it", but I suppose there are a few that are.
Very true and valid points! I'm just not that security conscious with my mobile device I guess. I go to all sorts of unknown URLs on this thing all the time. It's practically the only thing I do with this thing.
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.
FWIW - I wouldn't call them "stupid computer squares", but I would be even more snarky and sarcastic and say "Oh... I thought I visited a restaurant, not fast food / door dash / uber eats. Am I in the wrong place? So sorry!" :P
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 :-/
In the UK during lockdown they became quite common as a way of ordering food to your table in a restaurant or pub. I think that's the only time I use them though.
It's possible to create your own AOL keywords in firefox by setting the `keyword` field in `Manage Bookmarks`. Bookmark hackernews, set the keyword to `hn`, then all you have to do in the address bar is `hn<enter>` and you're here.
Instagram usernames are much easier to reason about if you don't understand/care about the differences between domains, subdomains, tlds, protocols etc.
We gave people a messy solution that assumed they would care about implementation details.
I don’t know if domain names is really that much better a solution—between the messiness of protocols, subdomains, and TLDs (how many kids in school went to whitehouse.com instead of whitehouse.gov back when the former was a porn site?), they can also expire and be replaced with a domain showing very different content. Lidl recently had to recall some kids snacks because the URL was not showing what they wanted it to.
Considering the level of computer knowledge and sophistication of most 90s users, this was a genius idea. The fact that it also served as a form of marketing and soft lock-in was also not overlooked
> I've noticed a lot of ads in Japan tell the users to search (presumably Google) for a specific phrase, and buying the adwords for that is more or less the modern equivalent of paying for an AOL keyword.
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).
I always assumed that ads that told people to search for the product/company were to raise their search ranking (due to relevancy?). But I’ve got no idea if that would actually make a difference or not, or if it is just so people don’t have to type a URL as you said.
The heyday of AOL keywords was before SEO or search engine relevancy was anything that any company cared about. Search engines existed, but this was mostly pre-Google and they were not great. A lot of discovery happened in other ways - the AOL keyword scheme was basically their attempt to tie web discovery to their products so people who left AOL wouldn't know what to do.
Sorry, I should have been clearer. I’m talking about modern ads that you see now. They will often say ‘search for Hilton hotels’ or whatever, rather than the domain. I thought that was to help SEO
They could be, but often they launched something on-platform in AOL's walled garden that could not be accessed by a web browser. Basically, windows inside of the AOL application. Screenshots would explain better than I can but I'm having trouble finding a good one. Maybe: https://i.insider.com/53f27f8069bedd317d1c5fb5?width=1200
Not all the time. Many keywords were a shortcut into a curated multimedia portal inside AOL. It could be equivalent to a web site for a brand, but could also be a more general area inside AOL with related articles, chat rooms, etc on that topic. More like opening a magazine than running a web search or typing a URL.
Didn't most AOL keywords redirect to AOLs content only hosted on AOL? I don't remember what their "sites" were called, but I used to use keywords to navigate to those areas. I don't really remember using them at all to get to actual websites. I only had AOL for two years before we got a cable modem in late 1998 though, maybe that was more common in the later years when the web started picking up.
Ah, that's true. Even Google search has used this sort of pattern to try and become a "soft walled garden". Things like widgets that look like they might take you to Wikipedia, but land on Google pages instead.
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.
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.
> 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.
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)
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.
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'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.
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.
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.
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 :)
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...
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.
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!
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 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.
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.
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.
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 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!
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.
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.
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
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!
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?
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 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.
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}".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I remember having AOL back in the very early web days, just after they added the browser. My dad had an "Internet for Dummies" book, which had a directory of websites to try. I, as maybe a 10 year old, could not properly type all the characters in the URL correctly and I gave up on this so-called World Wide Web. It seemed way worse than AOL-proper. Also, at that time, AOL had a much richer user experience than most of the early Web.
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.
For many that first went online via AOL, it was revelatory that the web was still accessible even if you didn't use the AOL browser. Most people didn't know what to do with it outside of that, but I suppose that's not any different from today with what Google and Apple are doing with their platforms and apps.
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?
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.
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
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.
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.
"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.
The very first online game I ever played was an amazing multiplayer space shooter called Silent Death Online on AOL Games. It was incredible and I blew through over $100 a month paying $1.99 hour to rank up my character, upgrade my ship, communicate with and eventually lead my clan.
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.
Short version via ChatGPT (for the lazy but curious like myself):
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.
Well, it was difficult as dialup was obviously a fading technology. As that faded, they were no longer able to control the entrypoint onto the network and steadily lost significance.
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.
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.
It's interesting how differently the internet has developed in different parts of the world. Here in Russia we never had anything similar to AOL. If you wanted to go online, you had to buy a prepaid card with login/password and some hours of internet access on it and figure everything out yourself. Yes, you had to literally "go buy some internet".
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.
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!"
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.
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.
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 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
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.
I used to use their built in browser a lot, and AOL chatrooms. I was maybe 9-10 when I joined the Kids chat and I see the chat moving and ask “a/s/l? Whats that?” To which my mom translated it. Doubt she would translate modern acronyms these days, but I must have spent hours upon hours with people on AOL chatrooms. The ascii pie fights, the wave of A/S/L’s the many friends made and lost.
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.
If you are nostalgic for AOL, AIM, progs, screen names, and visual basic, look up the AOL Underground podcast. Interviews with prog authors, hackers, and former AOL staffers.
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.
My grandparent-in-laws use AOL, and they unfortunately fell for a scam. AOL is what they've always used for everything. When there was an upgrade for something AOL related it all stopped working, so they reached out to a support line.
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.
I get so nostalgic about AOL. It's why I learned Visual Basic (a natural progression from QBasic in my DOS days). All my friends and I wrote "Punters", "Macros" and "Progz". It really jump started my journey into Software/Programming. A year or so later I installed NetBSD and never looked back, but I often think about those late night hacking sessions writing horrible VB...
I remember if you saved an image from the browser through AOL it was actually recompressing everything into an '.art' file. Nothing on Windows or Mac OS could open these. Completely baffling.
I got online for the first time with Prodigy. I opened the Prodigy browser, hit the Prodigy start page, and navigated around from there. I didn't realize there was more of the internet until I got a book called something like "100 free cool websites".
What made AOL truly great was instant messaging and chat rooms and focus on "connecting people". They had the vision totally correct, but the implementation details wrong. They should have transitioned from an ISP to a social media site.
I had Compuserve instead of AOL. I'd been using BBSs to get to various MUDs before that, but Compuserve seemed to have it all, including email and an Internet gateway. I couldn't see any reason to ever give it up.
Fond memories of AOL-it was our first internet provider, in the UK. My Dad would call up the cs and somehow get another free trial extension. Call centre must have been in Ireland as they all had Irish accents.
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.
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.
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).
How did you add people to your freind lust in chat? Was there a registry if screen names, or did you just add whatever screen name you wanted, whether it existed or not?
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.
