cross-posted from: https://lemmy.capebreton.social/post/497698
In 1994, Ted Leonsis was the head of the new media marketing firm he created, Redgate Communications, spun out six years earlier from a CD-ROM based computer shopping business. Redgate dealed in digital media—sometimes called new media—new territory in the marketing world. And he was pretty good at it. That year, he went out to lunch with one his investment bankers, Dan Case. Case mentioned that his brother Steve was working at a small internet company looking to bring internet services to the mainstream. They had only just finished rebranding to a new name, with a new purpose, America Online.
To be honest, if I could go back in time for a day or two. I would go back to 1994 and find a nice cozy internet Cafe to log into AOL and chat with my friends. The interface is super dated for today’s standards but I miss it so much. I still use their sound notifications on my phone
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You and I lived in very different 90s.
What was yours like?
As another commenter mentioned, the 90s as peak Reaganomics, the war on drugs were destroying poor neighborhoods, and prescription drug abuse was skyrocketing. Reaganomics were robbing the middle class of what little wealth they had. The war on drugs was ensuring that poor families were being destroyed. Prescription drug over prescription as feeding families directly to the war on drugs.
That’s the 90s I remember. The entire system had been broken to make as many people as possible poor, and keep them there.
Very different…
90s “prosperity” was entirely fake, still being driven by the “reaganomics” of the 80s, and were the peak before the long, drawn out collapse you’re seeing now that actually started in the 70s but we had managed to stave off. 9/11 was the beginning of the end.
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I miss AIM, met some really rad people from all over on there
The interface is super dated for today’s standards but I miss it so much.
I still remember “AOL for DOS,” which was really just the core functionality of the Windows alternative “GEOS,” nerfed to only allow the AOL app to run. Teenage me had a guild on Neverwinter Nights and everything. Topped out at 8 people, IIRC.
Is that it? No article?
yeah they should at least mention how allowing America to easily get Online caused a dramatic downturn in the quality of online discussion at the time.
only if you visited those places. no aol users were jumpin to usenet or irc
au contraire, mon frere. There were plenty of AOL users on Usenet, stinking up the place.
Would that be what is referred to as Eternal September? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
I discovered it only a few weeks ago and I am sad to say that 1994-1995 was when I went online for the first time. With an AOL “Free 20 hours access”. I undoubtedly contributed to degrade the quality of discussions, not mentioning choking several dial-accesses with the freakinig 50x50 pixels pictures I uploaded on my very first homepage.
Sorry, I’m so sorry…
That was Usenet, IRC and BBSs didn’t integrate into AOL iirc unless AOL added support for them later, you had to dial into them specifically
Fixed it … The image url appears to have overwritten the actual URL when I posted
https://thehistoryoftheweb.com/postscript/aol-pretends-to-be-the-internet/
meh, these bundled access terminals were required back in the day for internet access. those applications started out dialup, no internet providing inter-system communication… and then added the internet connectivity until eventually that feature was the only reason to use it. see also; prodigy,msn
Yeah, the reason this is reposted so much today is the younglings don’t know what it was like back in the day.
Trying to look at online porn while everyone slept was like mission impossible.
Nothing beats the thrill of watching those images load line by line!
Nipple!!!
Local BBS’s were wild.
Ha, literally no one under thirty has any idea. Imagine trolling a bunch of faceless people online and then you actually get to meet them. Good times.
A/S/L
God, I remember the commercials where some dumb kid would push this narrative: “AOL is the Internet!” They would just directly say the lie outright. And after polluting the world in AOL CD-ROMs, it worked for a time.
Such a scummy corporation. I’m glad Time-Warner got burned when they bought them for a high price, right at the peak where they were going to drop like a cliff in popularity.
Sure it was marketing speak, but Usenet’s eternal September started in late 1993, and that’s also about when AOL opened up their email to the internet. By late 94 there was a functional browser and they were effectively an ISP with extra stuff (that no one wanted anymore). In some ways, the “AOL is the Internet” angle was an admission that “the Internet” was what people wanted, and AOL itself was redundant. It probably did cause people to spend more on internet service than they needed, but it was already a rear-guard action, whether AOL knew it or not.
I remember the CDs, they were everywhere lol. Luckily my brother was tech savvy and when I got my first PC, I asked what the deal was with AOL links and he laughed saying no one uses “AOL internet”. I remember they all but died in a year.
I remember a very specific commercial where they were listing stuff that was “on” AOL, most or all of which was just on the broader actual Internet , and then closed with some pitch like, “AOL has things you can’t get anywhere else,” clearly implying everything they just listed was exclusive to AOL. I couldn’t understand why every other ISP wasn’t suing them into oblivion for that crap.
AOL even made its way to the UK. Free CDs all over the place, even accompanying paid coputing mags.
I’m glad it went away.
