from Hacker News

AOL pretends to be the internet

by janvdberg on 9/6/23, 1:36 PM with 267 comments

  • by grose on 9/7/23, 8:01 AM

    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.

  • by cuttysnark on 9/7/23, 2:44 AM

    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.

  • by neoCrimeLabs on 9/7/23, 5:26 AM

    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.

  • by mjhay on 9/7/23, 2:07 AM

    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.

  • by CSMastermind on 9/7/23, 5:22 AM

    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.

  • by silisili on 9/7/23, 2:13 AM

    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?

  • by 1970-01-01 on 9/7/23, 4:07 AM

    America Online is not dead. It's rebranded into AOL Desktop Gold.

    https://beta.aol.com/main

  • by Syzygies on 9/7/23, 2:45 AM

    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.

  • by dalbasal on 9/7/23, 7:47 AM

    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.

  • by acjohnson55 on 9/7/23, 12:29 PM

    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.

  • by soared on 9/7/23, 2:42 AM

    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?

  • by kristopolous on 9/7/23, 5:55 AM

    I've often called Facebook the modern AOL. It's the same kind of consumption ramp with the same kind of content for the same people

  • by tumblen on 9/7/23, 4:30 PM

    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.

  • by mike10921 on 9/7/23, 2:11 PM

    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.

  • by syndicatedjelly on 9/7/23, 2:43 AM

    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.

  • by adamgamble on 9/7/23, 2:40 AM

    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.

  • by grishka on 9/7/23, 12:37 PM

    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".

  • by comprev on 9/7/23, 7:27 AM

    Facebook tried this "we are the internet" tactic with predictable (disastrous) outcomes.

    https://www.philstar.com/headlines/2015/03/20/1435536/facebo...

  • by OldGuyInTheClub on 9/7/23, 2:12 AM

    I remember Usenet pre- and post- AOL. No forgiveness or forgetness.

  • by Nursie on 9/7/23, 7:40 AM

    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!"

  • by SnowProblem on 9/7/23, 2:49 AM

    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.

  • by ChrisArchitect on 9/7/23, 5:51 AM

    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

  • by zelphirkalt on 9/7/23, 7:59 AM

    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.

  • by giancarlostoro on 9/7/23, 12:41 PM

    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.

  • by broast on 9/7/23, 12:39 PM

    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.

  • by bottlepalm on 9/7/23, 6:30 AM

    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.

  • by cyrialize on 9/7/23, 1:32 PM

    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.

  • by tacticaldev on 9/7/23, 4:00 PM

    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...

  • by renegade-otter on 9/7/23, 12:49 PM

  • by pram on 9/7/23, 1:59 PM

    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.

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

  • by leros on 9/7/23, 1:23 PM

    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".

  • by jdlyga on 9/7/23, 3:29 PM

    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.

  • by CapitalistCartr on 9/7/23, 12:58 PM

    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.

  • by jwmoz on 9/7/23, 3:26 PM

    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.

  • by js2 on 9/7/23, 3:48 PM

    I'm a little sad this article doesn't mention AOLserver:

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

  • by MandieD on 9/7/23, 7:00 AM

    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.

  • by cutler on 9/7/23, 3:03 AM

    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.

  • by simonjgreen on 9/7/23, 5:58 AM

    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).

  • by nonethewiser on 9/7/23, 11:47 AM

    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?

  • by mattbgates on 9/7/23, 6:56 AM

    It was the Internet... until your mom picked up the phone.

  • by glonq on 9/7/23, 8:43 PM

    I distinctly remember Internet old-timers complaining that after AOL connected its users to Usenet, the collective IQ in most newsgroups dropped.

  • by themadturk on 9/7/23, 5:40 PM

    I still have the Q-Link coffee mug I got as our Commodore 64 club's president back in 1986 or so. Faded, but not broken!

  • by ycmjs on 9/7/23, 10:45 AM

    It kind of sounds like at one point they could have become a successful ISP.

  • by jrootabega on 9/7/23, 1:06 PM

    This was a fun theme that was ranted about a lot on alt.aol-sucks

  • by superkuh on 9/7/23, 2:30 AM

    AOL pretended but Cloudflare is making actual progress to becoming the gatekeeper for the internet.

  • by mr-pink on 9/7/23, 2:26 AM

    One of the things I really miss about the 'net in the early days was the tracking of users in order to sell targeted ads.