Glory Days at AOL?
by
wo1verin3
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· Score: 3, Funny
When the hell did they reach glory?
In fact, I didn't even know they've reached tolerable!
Re:Glory Days at AOL?
by
ctrl-alt-elite
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· Score: 5, Funny
Feh! You young whippersnapper! You wouldn't know glory if it bit you on the foot! Why, in my days of being on AOL, you could make a username WITHOUT appending a long string of numbers to the end. And you could jump in a chat room WITHOUT getting hit on by 48 year-old marines. And spam was still the name of a canned 'meat' product!
That was true glory, not the stuff in that article...
</grandpa simpson>
Re:Glory Days at AOL?
by
Faust7
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· Score: 4, Funny
Those were the glory days. A new floppy disk in the mail every week. Unlike those crappy cd-roms in tins we get now. I mean what the heck do we do with them.
Re:Ah yes....
by
wo1verin3
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· Score: 4, Informative
>> I mean what the heck do we do with them.
We could do these of if it really bothers you join up here.
These guys have collected 150000+ cd's already to forward to america....:)
What to do with them? Dude, the solution has been here for 20 years! The MICROWAVE!
That and put them in your hand and squeeze next to somebodys face. A facefull of AOL shards, huzzah!
A buddy of mine grabs a handfull every time he goes to the store and saves them up for when he goes shooting. See he has rigged up a skeet launcher to fling these little circles of evil into the air and [shuck-shuck] BOOM.
-- --
Some days you're the dog; some days you're the hydrant.
They have a goal to collect 1 million CDs. Once they reach their goal (or some subset therof), they're going to pile the CDs on some trucks, drive them across the nation in a big media spectacle, and give them back to AOL.
-- "Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
Re:Ah yes....
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
I save my bullets to snipe white trashes like the buddy of yours who leave broken CDs in the wild.
Re:Ah yes....
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Queue the redundant posts with links to webpages informing on what novel things to use AOL discs for.
One new floppy disk a week!? I remember when I used to get 5. I'm on a lot of mailing lists. But worth it, being I've only ever purchased one box of floppy disks since 1993!
What do you do with the cd's? Coasters! I worked at an ISP and we had them all over, cheap and easy to replace.
But the best thing to do is to wrap a slinky around a can (Dr. Pepper in my case). Then use each of the openings to put cd's in. put it on top of a monitor and people won't wave there hands around in your office for fear of knocking 100+ cd's across the room!
In 1998, AOL chairman Steve Case and his wife, Jean, gave over $8 million to a Christian school that, according to its own Web site, is a division of a virulently anti-gay church that seeks to "cure" homosexuals.
I guess this is why there are no more glory holes at AOL.
Re:Glory Holes?
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 2, Insightful
And what is wrong about that? The way you describe the church ("virulently anti-gay") conjures up a negative image, damning them from the start.
Look, people have a right to believe that homesexuality is wrong. Christians believe homosexuality is a sin, just like having sex with anyone other than your wife is a sin, just like lying is a sin.
No no no, you're completely wrong and have a deviant concept of 'politically correctness'! Deep within your conscience you're free to think everything you wish and eg. if you condemn homosexuality face the personal dilemma if you actually have the inclination, but you cannnot under any circumstance interfere with the self-determination or dignity of anyone. Also, you're trying to put the blame on your parent post accusing it of negative bias to give a broader minded light to your position; it's like nazi arithmetic asking to compare funds thrown away for a loony-bin rather than invested on building homes for young, prolific arian families. To put it into current events perspective: - Infibulation: should western civilization interfere with a long standing culturally identifying practice? - islamic fundamentalism: should we recognize the right for some to beleive the west is the devil and must be annihilated in order to install a holy theocratic society? - jews: inferior race, a threatening menace to the healthy arian descendancy... - negroes: lesser humans... etc... etc...
-- Mi domando chi à il mandante di tutte le cazzate che faccio
- Altan
Re:Glory Holes?
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Some homosexuals would like to be hetero, if they thought it was possible. Apparently, it is. I've met a couple myself.
People could baldface lie about such things I suppose, but it seems equally likely to me that for at least some % of gays it's 'curable'.
Who knows, maybe your porn habit can be cured too...;)
Re:Glory Holes?
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
I hope you have a horrible life.
Re:Glory Holes?
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
"Some homosexuals would like to be hetero, if they thought it was possible. Apparently, it is. I've met a couple myself."
Right, and this is called homophobia even when the homophobe is gay and talking about themselves. They're also known as self-hating gays.
Re:Glory Holes?
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Well, 'glory holes' are and were a cultural aspect of anonymous and promiscuous gay sexual behavior.
Hopefully there aren't many 'glory holes' left; if there are, they tend to be self-cancelling, i.e. it's one of those Darwin Award practices.
The way you describe the church ("virulently anti-gay") conjures up a negative image, damning them from the start.
Surely this only "damns them from the start" if you think being "virulently anti-gay" is a bad thing...
Re:Glory Holes?
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
You can believe what you want, but being able to "cure" homosexuality is nonsense. Anyone who claims to be able to do so is lying, or at very least deluding themselves. You can stop a homosexual from having sex, of course, but that doesn't "cure" their homosexuality anymore than wearing a blindfold cures myopia. Sexual attraction isn't just a conscious lifestyle decision that somebody can make - homosexuals' brains are wired in such a way that they are aroused by the same sex rather than the opposite sex, as with heterosexuals, or either sex, as with bisexuals. Sexual arousal isn't just subjective either - it CAN be objectively proven by looking at which areas of the brain are activated when looking at pictures of the appropriate subject matter.
Also, some people would say that a group which thrives on inciting hatred against another group for no other reason than because believes that it is "evil" despite not harming anyone in any way should be viewed in a negative light.
Re:Glory Holes?
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Some homosexuals would like to be hetero, if they thought it was possible. Apparently, it is. I've met a couple myself.
No kidding, considering how much shit they take from the rest of society for being different, not to mention from their erstwhile "spiritual instutions".
People could baldface lie about such things I suppose, but it seems equally likely to me that for at least some % of gays it's 'curable'.
That's okay, it's also possible for people to be cured of the influences of a backwards, irrational church. The difference is that one represents your true nature based on biological fact and the other requires enough willing suspension of belief and mental gymnastics to make one's head explode.
Re:Glory Holes?
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
I don't know or think homosexuality can be "cured". Can heterosexuality be cured? Of course not.
Christians believe that you should not act on your temptations. I, as a heterosexual male, try not to act on my temptations to have sex with as many women as I can. If someone has the desire to have sex with a person of the same gender, they should control themselves. Yes, people may be "wired" from the start to be homosexuals or bisexuals, but they must fight the temptation to act out their sexuality. Just as I fight my temptation to everyday to eyeball the hot girl sitting right next to me.
Unfortunately, there are many organizations that spread hatred towards gays (and pro-choice people, too). This is clearly against the nature of Christianity and Jesus Christ. The only people Jesus ever used force on were the money changers in the temple of God. I suspect Jesus would do the same if he saw "Christians" inciting hatred towards gays.
Just because I disagree with someone does not mean I hate them.
David Colburn's stature at AOL grew to such epic proportions that he earned a nickname: God.
Hey. That's reserved for sysadmins.
Not so. According to the infamous job description sheet:
http://neil.franklin.ch/Jokes_and_Fun/Find_Your_Ro le.html
(there are many versions of that sheet, with anything from executive secretaries to programmers to users being the ultimate end-point. Having dealt with executive secretaries, they're not far off the mark, they wield the most amazing power- and abuse it handily. Hell hath no fury like a pissed off executive secretary.)
what, you don't like september? but halloween's right around the corner!
Re:Glory days
by
LucidityZero
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· Score: 5, Interesting
AOL is to computer culture what Little Boy was to Hiroshima.
Oh, come on! I hear stuff like this constantly, and it's just complete and total BS.
Sure, I kinda miss the days when "The Internet" was "our" thing. But you have to realize that is already over. So stop dwelling on it.
In the mean time, the Internet-boom happened. And overall this has been a good thing. It was provided us with wonderful conveniences (like web-retailers), wonderful innovations (like Java), wonderful social impact (Instant Messaging and being able to email even your grandparents in Europe), and holds in store plenty of new possibilities. We have IPv6 around the corner, imbedded systems are popping up everywhere, and wireless technologies are ushering in a whole new era of connectivity.
Without companies like AOL, we may have never seen the explosion that we have seen, and concepts that we now take for granted that enrich our lives every day may have never seen light.
We all get nostalgic sometimes, but don't go belitteling a company for "ruining" the internet as you are attempting to imply, when they may very well have been one of the most important players period in the construction of what many of us now base much of our lives around.
AOL is to computer culture what Little Boy was to Hiroshima.
Actually, AOL was to the Internet what Fat Man was to Little Boy:
1. Second.
2. Slightly more powerful.
3. Unnecessary.
-----
--
Believe me, I'm as surprised by my comment as you are.
Re:Glory days
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Are you kidding?!
I remember reading a transcript between Robert Kahn and Vint Cerf back in '72:
Rob> The net is cool... but I cant wait til it gets fasster!!! Vint> ROTFLMAO!!! Vint> Me too. Vint>:)
Re:Glory days
by
Smidge204
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· Score: 4, Insightful
I think you missed the intent of the parent post, and the original Hiroshima analogy was rather appropriate...
It's not so much that AOL made the internet popular (as in a lot of people use it), it's that it made it 'popular' (as in the hip and trendy thing to do). This created a whole (and by now, several) internet-aware but still functionally illiterate people.
Specifically: "netspeak"
Now, if you're not typing in your native language, even some severe deviations in grammar and spelling are forgivable. Personally speaking, if I can understand what you're trying to say then that's good enough. This also applies to native speakers who make the occasional "topy" and spelling error (expecting everyone to run their text through spell and grammar check every time just isn't reasonable!)
However, since the internet became "popular" you have an entire culture of people who can't use punctuation like commas and periods, proper capitalization, can't (or won't?) use full words, (Though some "alternative spelings" are commonly acceptable - I can't see, for example, how "u" is a suitable replacement for "you"...), can't be bothered to proofread what they type (even a quick glance), and at worst can't even form coherent thoughts.
So it's not that there are more people are using the internet - that's a very good thing - it's that far too many of them can't understand why they get kicked out of chatrooms and forums for typing "hi a/s/l plz how r u k 10x lololol!!!1! u r gay ass i h4><0r j00"
=Smidge= "I really like it when a site calls it a 'Message Board' instead of 'Forum'. 'Forum' suggests some semblence of order, respect and maturity." -braedan51
Re:Glory days
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
I been to see Hiroshima, and what you dumb yank pigfuckers did there is fucking despicable. And now you try and lighten the tone?
Fucking disgusting my son. Go wash your mouth out with soap.
Re:Glory days
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Well, I'm half Chinese. They had it coming. Should have nuked them twice. Oh, wait...we did! Happy day!
Re:Glory days
by
LucidityZero
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· Score: 2, Insightful
It's not so much that AOL made the internet popular (as in a lot of people use it), it's that it made it 'popular' (as in the hip and trendy thing to do). This created a whole (and by now, several) internet-aware but still functionally illiterate people.
This is another thing to upsets me. People that get so very upset about any sort of evolution of language.
Last time I checked, the point of language was to convey thoughts. Does it really make any difference what so ever how this is accomplished if it's accomplished?
Reminds me a lot of those people that used to bitch about the Millenium thing. "No, no! That's not 2000! It's 2001! See, like, there was no year zero and..."
Yeah, yeah. Shut up.
Point is does it make any difference if I spell it "u" our "you"? You still know what I mean.
Does it make any difference if I wanted to party New Year's Eve 2000 instead of 2001? None at all, really.
People have to remember that although facts obviously matter, it is the intention and meaning behind someone's actions that actually count.
I don't personally do this, but if I use "u" instead of "you", you damn well know what I mean. Therefore, I am accomplishing what language was intended to do: convey thought. If anything, I would be a more efficient person if I always used "u" instead of "you".
Are we as geeks going to help stop progression by becomming so stuck in our roots that we have to automatically dismiss anything that is different...
Isn't that exactly what many of us spent our youth rebelling against in the first place...?
"I would be a more efficient person if I always used "u" instead of "you""
Not really. Although you would type faster, you would make it much harder to parse (both from a program perspective and a human perspective). There are many times when it is truely incomprehensible. However, I've grown to just silenty dislike it rather than actually say something, so long as the person is nice enough (eg, if someone is talking trash in a game of counterstrike, I'm not above saying "atleast I can spell 'you'"). What really made me change was really getting to know some great people who happened to use 'u', causing me to realise that not everyone that uses 'u' is an immature uninteligent being (Though most are, from what I've seen.).
-- Pain lasts, kid. Its how you know you're alive.
Sometimes I think this growing up thing is just pain management-TheMaxx
Re:Glory days
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
if someone is talking trash in a game of counterstrike, I'm not above saying "atleast I can spell 'you'
Yeah, but you still suck at punctiation.
Re:Glory days
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
-- I blame perl.
I sometimes get CDs in DVD-type cases
by
Radi-0-head
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Which are always nice for homebrew DVDs...
AOL needs to back off on the marketing. I think everyone knows who they are by now.
Re:I sometimes get CDs in DVD-type cases
by
Cyph
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· Score: 1
I think they should continue with the marketing, I really like those cases. They're much better than the snapper-style crap cases WB sells with their DVDs (Matrix, Animatrix). I do hate peeling off that big-ass sticker AOL puts on the back of their DVD cases, though.:(
Re:I sometimes get CDs in DVD-type cases
by
bloxnet
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· Score: 1
You don't understand marketing.
The point isn't that everyone knows who they are...AOL is aware that goal was acheived.
They don't want anyone to forget.
Re:I sometimes get CDs in DVD-type cases
by
BrainInAJar
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· Score: 1
Go to the smoke shop, get a bottle of zippo fluid. That shit'll get anything off anything else
Ah, the good old days...
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 5, Funny
Ah, the glory days of AOL. The slowness. The service drops. The browser functionality that was always just a generation behind what non-idiots were using. Those were the days...
*weeps*
Re:Ah, the good old days...
by
sharkey
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· Score: 1, Funny
Ah, the glory days of AOL. The slowness. The service drops. The browser functionality that was always just a generation behind what non-idiots were using. Those were the days...
Yesterday?
--
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
what about MY glory days?
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 2, Funny
i've been waiting for 3 weeks now to hear if i have a job with them... i've gotten the thumbs up, but it's caught up in "finance"...
bleh.
Re:what about MY glory days?
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Shit, you got a reply from them? They post at least 50 openings about every 3 days for *nix admins, network engineers, etc. but I'm lucky to get even a form letter back from them.
dont consider the days of inflated prices, wasteful spending and endless accounting shenanigans and lies the glory days. And don't think AOL didn't do it. HealthSouth/Freddie Mac are the tip of a putrid iceberg. We don't even know how much thievery happened back then, but it wasn't honest and we are paying for it now and will be for a long time to come.
Kids these days are spoiled. Back in the good 'ol days when we all had 14.4 modems and we had to walk fifty miles in snow and ice just to pick it up. If we wanted to talk on the phone, tough luck!
Too bad today's internet sucks!
14.4? Man, 300 baud was all we had... the perfect speed to read text as it came across the wire!
MadCow.
-- I used to have a sig, but I set it free and it never came back.
Re:Back in the days
by
zoobaby
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· Score: 2, Informative
" Kids these days are spoiled. Back in the good 'ol days when we all had 14.4 modems and we had to walk fifty miles in snow and ice just to pick it up. If we wanted to talk on the phone, tough luck!
Too bad today's internet sucks!"
Ha...hell my first modem was a 900...I thought that screamed at the time. I remember upgrading to 14.4 and thinking it was the shiznit. There will be others who remember having a 300 modem.
Before too many people bag on AOL, they did do something right. They gave us unlimited access for $9.99/mo. (Too bad their networked crashed!) But this did drive competition to offer unlimited access for a fair price.
Kids these days are spoiled. Back in the good 'ol days when we all had 14.4 modems and we had to walk fifty miles in snow and ice just to pick it up. If we wanted to talk on the phone, tough luck!
14.4 modems! Why back in my day we had 1200 baud modems, and it was a shame too, because telephones hadn't even been invented yet. Just the thought of the whole family huddling around the 8086 for warmth during the depression days... brings a tear to me old eye...
Re:Back in the days
by
thynk
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Kids these days are spoiled. Back in the good 'ol days when we all had 14.4 modems and we had to walk fifty miles in snow and ice just to pick it up. If we wanted to talk on the phone, tough luck!
BAH! You yourself was spoiled! I remember hooking up to a BBS at 300baud, and my first AOL experience was on a 1200baud modem. And this was HIGH tech stuff! I remember using my 720k 5.25" floppy to store ALL my programs on, and looking at the BIG 8" floppies that fit the machine in the corner, thinking - wow - if they are that much bigger, I wonder how much more data they hold.
When we got the "new" IBM-AT (286, 40Meg drive, 640k ram) - I remember saying "This is all the computing power I will ever need". Then I went to college, and they had HPUX green screen machines, where the best pr0n you could find was dirty stories, or images for the NEW Xterm machines - AND you had to find a way get it past the schools filters, and then keep it hidden from the school admins, AND you only had 4 meg on your account, so you could never keep more than a few files active at once. NO one at our school had heard of HTTP or Mozillia, mosiac or anything of the sort, tho I understand it had been out for a year or so.
Yesterdays internet sucked too, you just didn't realize it.
-- Good judgment comes from experience, and a lot of that comes from bad judgment.
Re:Back in the days
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Hmmph. Think you had it rough?
Digital computers
are for sissies!
We had to bang rocks together to
get one and zeroes.
BAH! You yourself was spoiled! I remember hooking up to a BBS at 300baud
300 Baud? Talk about spoiled. That was probably on a CRT too!
We used to love the comforting sounds of a 110 baud TeleType. Ch-Thump! Ch-Thump! The Bzzzt Bzzzt Bzzzt of the 300 baud dot matrix version just wasn't quite the same, and you couldn't make it sound like a slot machine by sending a bunch of nulls to it: Ch-Ch-Ch-Ch-Ch-Ch-Thump! Ch-Ch-Ch-Ch-Ch-Ch-Thump! Ch-Ch-Ch-Ch-Ch-Ch-Thump! Ding! Ding! Ding!
Playing music and printing pictures on the line printer --- now those were the days!
Playing music and printing pictures on the line printer --- now those were the days!
I remember doing some of that on a LP too. Infact - our computer lab was decorated with the several ASCII pictures of AL and the NCC-1701. Around Christmas every year we'd save the sides of the tractor fed paper for a few days to decorate the tree and windows. I also had a program that made the C64 floppy drive play a tune.::Sniff:: that was one of the best times of my life. No job, no women, no kids, no worries. Well, it was good except for the no women part.
-- Good judgment comes from experience, and a lot of that comes from bad judgment.
Ahhh, the memories. Pay per minute for CServe on top of the long-distance phone call from my rural town, USA to the big city that had the nearest PoP. Thank GOD those days are gone.
I feel like such a younggin'... I started with a 1200baud modem. I used it to connect to BBS' (no ISPs for miles around when I was a kid) on an IBM-clone 8088.
The C64 had MIDI and stereo sound and you used the slow-ass floppy drive to play music. Barbarian!
Hey, not all the time. I used to pump it to the TV. Didn't have a stereo TV, but that really didnt' seem to matter, I used to load up all sorts of MIDI files and play them. Heh, kind of the pre-MP3 machine. Had 3 seperate voices and several programmable "sprites" that made it very powerful for gaming.
I'll even admit that my favorite games are still C64 ones (like M.U.L.E.) - I still crank up the emulator and fire up the old classic games. I used to let the intro screen for MULE load over and over again playing it's funky music until it drove my parents insane.
-- Good judgment comes from experience, and a lot of that comes from bad judgment.
My first computer was a C64 and it didn't even have internet. 300 Baud, psssh, i'd be lucky if i had any! Yet alone a hard disk. psssh, back in those days a floppy was actually floppy.
--
----
Go canucks, habs, and sens!
Re:Back in the days
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
I had a 1200 baud teletype by GTE. Not so advanced as dot matrix, but rather had 120 hammers and a spinning train track of letters. Actually I liked it much better. But I guess that's what you get for getting involved with the technology at a later date.
Friends don't let friends surf at 110 baud.
-- There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary.
SHUT UP!
There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
Actually, they did do something good for the Internet world. Remember that they made it the standard to charge people for access to the internet instead of charging per minute. Several smaller ISP's had the idea first, but AOL took it mainstream and did it nationwide.
This of course was humanities first encounter with busy signals and paying for service you can't actually connect to, but hey, at least they had decent intentions...:D
Actually I believe netcom was the first nationwide ISP with a flat monthly rate. I believe I had my first netcom account in 1993. Even if they were not the first, I know they had a flat rate long before AOL did. AOL only did it because they had to.
Heck, I remember downloading Mossaic on it not to long after I signed up.
Re:Well
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Small ISPs did this, AND made it mainstream. The Corps only responded after it was a lost battle. The first being AT&T Worldnet. Netcom and MCI had 40 hour and 50 hour plans before that, respectively.
Thanks for informing me. All I remember was that AOL was the only one that made it to my side of the world (NW Indiana) with any decent form of advertising.
the glory days, like when...
by
rock_climbing_guy
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· Score: 3, Funny
someone wrote a little-known program called "AOHell?"
You got to use the *Serial* port? Man, you kids had all the goodies. We had to manually switch the bits using our fingers on a LOOM... and computers used to run on 10K volts back then too.
-- Good judgment comes from experience, and a lot of that comes from bad judgment.
You got to use the *Serial* port? Man, you kids had all the goodies. We had to manually switch the bits using our fingers on a LOOM... and computers used to run on 10K volts back then too.
You had fingers!?
-- But then again, I could be wrong.
Re:That's nothing
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
We had to manually carry our packets through the snow and hand-deliver them to the other computer(s). Didn't even have "baud."
the only times I could login was between 11:00pm and 5 AM. Those were the good ole days....
Alternative Altoid container
by
Atario
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· Score: 2, Funny
No one will look in there to steal your Altoids.
However, the possibility of someone unknowningly throwing all your Altoids away in a fit of anti-AOL hostility is distinct.
-- "A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
Re:Alternative Altoid container
by
Squidgee
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· Score: 1
Oh dear lord..not my Altoids!
Noooooooooooooooo! My presciousessss...not the presciousess...
Re:Alternative Altoid container
by
maxume
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· Score: 1
Altoids aren't meant to last long enough that you should need to hide them. Whenever I buy a tin(I sort of try not to now), I end up going through the entire thing in about 4 hours.
Of course, wintergreen is the only good flavor of the damn things.
-- Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Re:Alternative Altoid container
by
Squidgee
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· Score: 1
Hey, the sours rock!
And so do the Cinnamons!
Haha, but same here. Mine tend to die within a day. If I'm lucky they survive 3.
Re:Alternative Altoid container
by
red+floyd
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· Score: 1
Whatchu talkin' 'bout Willis?
<HIGHLANDER> There can be only one Altoid </HIGHLANDER>
-- The only reason we have the rights we have is that people just like us died to gain those rights. -- Cheerio Boy
Re:Alternative Altoid container
by
Doug+Neal
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· Score: 1
No one will look in there to steal your Altoids.
No one looks in your Altoid tin to steal your weed, either. Bonus!
Re:Alternative Altoid container
by
maxume
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· Score: 1
If I remember right, peppermint were just as overrated as wintergreen are. I like to take like six of them and just chew em up. My mouth at least tingles a little bit then.
The problem is that they are not available in extra strength. Luck has nothing to do with it...
Obviously AOL is misplacing their resources. They're falling way behind the version war - remember how revolutionary 8 is compaired to 7, or hah hah... I laugh at the thought _6_? Hell emacs is in the 20s and I'd sure as hell rather use emacs (tough sell considering I'm a vi(m) user). AOL needs to move on to version 15 or so to totally blow away MSN. They can then add super championship turbo edition for power users, maybe give redhat kernel versions a run for their money.
About 3 years ago in Northern VA I saw a Honda with a license plate that said "AOL 50" with a AOL bracket around it. A quick check of the VA DMV plate selector shows that it is available again but "AOL 80" is taken, HAHAHAHA. I tried "ME TOO" but it's taken also. If you truely have no social life and you're quick you can probably get lifetime moderator by grabbing "VA LINX"
-- Bad boys rape our young girls but Violet gives willingly.
Re:More versions needed.
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Well, I never! I'm upset since you young guys hijacked television..
err...wait
no...you can have it, changed me mind.. keep on hijacking it lads! Used to be we had one fuzzy channel that only ran to 10 or 11 or midnight, then went off the air and showed nifty test patterns, and programs that mostly sucked, now we have hundreds of programs that mostly suck! Now THAT's tech progress!
Not!
Radio! errr... no... wait......
Newspapers!...rats..... hmmmm
Movies!....uhhh... nooo.... hmmmmmm
Girls! There ya go, still exactly the same as the "good old" days! And now with even *less* clothes!
And now you can definitely tell that the internet has improved the world. Before the internet, the geeks of the world (now, collectively known as slashdot) wouldn't have even known about the last item. Quality sites such as www.hooters.dk have definitely improved our lives!
HAHAHAHAH! Al Bundy-->"Hey! who took my copy of Big 'Uns?"
The net is pretty cool. I remember having an almost vision thing, like an intense daydream when I was like 13 or 14, I was staring at the wall, I had a screen in front of me and all kinds of blinkenlights, I could communicate with anyone on the planet, find out anything I wanted to, never really thought I'd see it though, I only thought mainframes would just get bigger. It's just an amazing invention combined with peecees.
Instant Message excerpt when i was 15 yrs old back in 1997 (Seriously!)
My SN: Oh yeah baby that was good did you like it?
Sexychick: Yes you hunk!
My SN: You want to do this again next time? =)
Sexychick: HAHAHA You F*G I'm a guy AHAHA you loser AHAHAHA!
My SN: haha I knew that! was trying to trick you too! Hey man, this is neat, let's do this to other losers just to screw them up.....
Sexychick: shutup. bye
I remember back in the 90's everyone used AOL (version 3.0), on an old 14.4k modem, yet! I remember after a few years we bought a 56k modem for a whopping $100, but it was a huge improvement. Just shows you how quickly times can change.
Re:The Good Old Days
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
You still leave in your parent's basement after all those years.
AOL has millions of subscribers. Recently they posted losses in the *BILLIONS* of dollars. This is incomprehensible to me. How does a company lose thousands of dollars per subscriber? It would be better if they just gave free internet access to everyone and banked the billions lost in advertising and whatever it is that cost them *BILLIONS* of dollars.
Re:Losing BILLIONS
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
IT LOST MONEY IN BECAUSE IT WAS IN STOCK VALUE, ACTUAL LOSSES WERE MUCH LOOSER
<P>did you know that when it snows, my eyes become blind to the sea
baybe, i been kissed by a rose on the nose with some hoes whoahoahoahoa
How many rabis does it take....
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batura
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· Score: 1
I think AOL/TW would need about a 100,000 Rabis praying simultaneously to raise their sinkhole of a stock now!
Re:How many rabis does it take....
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Won't work. The rabis can't pray because they are busy at the glory holes......
I think I had subzero.. you had a roombuster and punter and fake account creator?
seriously learned a lot making aol proggies because of all the "necessary" features.
right away you had to learn how to subclass windows from another process, intercept and send windows messages. how many windows programmers got in at such a low level?
I object to the whole 'cowboy' terminology used throughout the article like it was some sort of derogatory term. So this clown wore cowboy boots around the office: big deal. That doesn't make him a cowboy, and he certainly wasn't emulating cowboy behavior. Cowboys are straight-shooters and laid back. These AOLers are more like manic jackasses. Furthermore, anyone who emblazons their cowboy boots with the AOL logo seriously ought to have themselves checked by a psychiatrist--that's just not right.
All the ToSSeRS, MaSSMaiLS and l33t hacking proggies!
Did AOL Cause The Dotcom Depression?
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Babbster
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· Score: 4, Interesting
As I was reading the article (something few so far seem to have done), it was mentioned that the goal of AOL Business Affairs was to get as much of the venture capital possessed by a potential "partner" as possible. This makes me wonder if, even more than poorly thought-out ideas, fancy chairs and expensive office space, AOL caused - or at least hastened - the end of the dotcom boom. If they were siphoning ridiculous amounts of money out of these new companies before they even got their businesses moving, there would clearly be little left to actually make the businesses work. While association with AOL could be an asset, wouldn't losing a third or more of the available start-up capital making the AOL deal have given executives pause?
I'd be curious to see some figures on how much of the aforementioned venture capital AOL managed to scoop up during the boom and what percentage of the total VC spent on Internet startups that number represents.
Of course, this doesn't change the fact that if people were busted out because of AOL it means the executives of the busted company were making bad decisions...but it might make even happier those on the sidelines (particularly those who got out of AOL/TW stock before the bottom dropped out and those who AOL squeezed out of business) who are now watching AOL seemingly reap what it sowed.
Re:Did AOL Cause The Dotcom Depression?
by
DrSbaitso
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· Score: 1
I think that might indeed be one of the causes. The way the story is frequently told around here, there are a few reasons all the dotcoms collapsed. First, they had zt00pid business plans that sought to increase brand awareness and generate cash flow, not look to profitability. (The joke goes something like "1. Start dotcom 2. Spend millions on building brand awareness 3. ??? 4. profit!)
Second, and somewhat related, many of the dotcoms relied on advertising dollars as their primary source of revenue. When the bottom fell out of the banner ad market, these companies lost their revenue stream and had to fold.
Now, how does AOL's behavior come into that picture? Well, as the article says, they tried to get 50% of any VC money a dotcom raised just for an advertising deal! This did two things: crippled dotcoms cash position and preventing them from ever reaching profitability due to the high burn rate, and eventually led to a fallout for ad revenue, as companies started to notice the extremely crappy returns from spending tons of money on advertising deals.
I wonder what AOL did with all of that cash? I guess Turner gave it to the UN:P
-- beware the jabberwock, my son! the jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Re:Did AOL Cause The Dotcom Depression?
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komissar
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· Score: 1
that's exactly what i thought. that $ could have been placed to a more productive use. who knows what types of innovations we were all deprived of because of those money grubbing a$$hole$. what about the companies that survived, but have been weakened by the lack of capital? what about the hard working folks that could have had a job for another year if they hadn't been bled dry by the leaches at AOL?? all so that these guys could throw $1M bat mitzvas. DISGRACEFUL.
I remember reading about AOL guys selling their stock and retiring in their 30s back around 1999 or 2000. The article was "why are they doing this? they must be nutty!"
I wonder what happened to those crazy kids who sold the stock and retired. Probably living on an island accessing slashdot on a homebuilt wireless.
Chat with the Author
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jkeyes
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· Score: 4, Interesting
I don't know if anyone else noticed this but there is going to be a chat with the author at 1 PM EDT Monday. It'll be at http://discuss.washingtonpost.com/zforum/03/r_maga zine_klein061603.htm
Damn, and to think I had the 'blloyd@aol.com' addy
by
CatOne
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· Score: 2, Interesting
No numbers about it.
I outgrew it in 1993. It was before the intArweb and everythin'!
Strange to believe that in '99 people would give away so much money to AOL... guess that was before Google.
i'll never understand
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
how being obviously out of your fucking skull is NOT in impediment to rising to a leadership position in a large company.
Compared to AOL MS Smells like a rose.
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
I saw pirates of sillicon valley. Even that stuff doesn't come close to the stuff in that article. I would much rather do buisness with microsoft than aol. I mean, AOL Litterly ate themselves out of house and home. If they haddn't charged all of the dot comms so much maybe they wouldn't have blown up. So they would still be around in another 7 years to sign another contract. Didn't they read the Lorax?
well duhhhh
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
you should have been marked down as redundant
or there should be a -1 obvious mod
Re:well duhhhh
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Anonymous Coward
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But it takes a brilent man to see the obvious, wait was it a blind man, or was it two moss stones can plug a hole in the bucket...
A blind man walks into a bar with a bucket under one arm and two bits of moss....
I remember when AOL first offered "Internet"...
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
... to their subscribers back around 1993-1994 timeframe. Back then, AOL was a closed system, a glorified BBS actually, and accessing the "Internet" for AOL customers was thru a bastardized proxy server that was fed with only a SINGLE 1.544Mbps feed to, I believe it was AT&T's backbone off the MAE-East. All 500,000 AOL users shared this one single T1's bandwidth.
Take it with a grain of salt
by
signe
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· Score: 1
The article is lacking fact-checking. For example, it states that by the late 90s, the business affairs unit was working out of CC4. Creative Center 4 wasn't even finished until summer of 2000.
So take it for what it's worth. I think the Sunday Post runs about $1.50.
-Todd
--
"The details of my life are quite inconsequential..."
Yess! That's him alright
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Anonymous Coward
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holy crap that is the funniest thing ive read all day
You forgot names with numbers
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Anonymous Coward
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Everyone on the Internet feels like their nicknames at different sites have to be their AOL screenname.
Enough with the numbers already, think of a more original name.
like others before him.....
by
tq_at_sju
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· Score: 1
david colburn couldn't bare to hit next to read the rest of the article....yeeehaw
-- http://www.vanillaafro.com - take me seriously and I will shoot you
AOL is not the internet
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gad_zuki!
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· Score: 4, Interesting
>In the mean time, the Internet-boom happened.
Yet, dial-up at that time could be had for 5.95 or if there wasn't much competition in your neighborhood at the time 9.95 or so while AOL wanted double that. AOL does not equal the internet-boom. They're an ISP second and a content/service provider first.
From my experience, cheap local dial-ups helped get most of the non-techies on the net a lot more than AOL and its other proprietary cousins. These non-techies fired up a browser and were off - excitied by the prospect of this web thing and email, while AOL people safely hid in their controlled chat-rooms and paid per-minute charges.
Sure the non-AOLers had to actually spend five minutes talking to tech-support to setup their modems and email clients but at least they learned a little about how their computers and modems worked, as opposed to being stuck with some proprietary software that didnt really deliver the goods regarding easy easy use until much later versions.
Now, these non-techies are somewhat savvy tech consumers and surprisingly handy with a computer and have long since moved on to broadband, while the AOL people I remember are still there on a beater 486 and still getting ripped off.
Not exactly a scientific study, but lets not overestimate AOL's influence. Those mysterious "http" things on movie commercials, that Netscape thing people keep talking about, and not having an answer to the question "Whats your email address" were probably the biggest factors in getting people online, not a voice saying, "You've got mail!"
Re:AOL is not the internet
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NeoSkandranon
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Some of us out here in the sticks didn't have any local ISPs until the internet had gained some popularity. Guess what, if it weren't for (primarily) AOL, that wouldn't have happened.
-- If you can't see the value in jet powered ants you should turn in your nerd card. - Dunbal (464142)
Remember the good ol 1980s...
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nutsy
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· Score: 1
As a former QuantumLink user
('Jaeger', if anyone cares), I still feel some amount of bitterness in
my gut about how America On-Line let the Q's database go to hell over
time. Monopolistic actions? Hell, that's only the latest reason
to despise Steve Case.
I knew they were evil...
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FatherBash
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· Score: 1
but had no idea how much. AOL single handedly killed the dotcom boom. Really, some of the dotcoms actually had potential.
which means you can also blame AOL for the recession, and the war and Bush and gas prices...
"By late 1999, many companies seeking to do business with AOL were no longer viewed as potential partners. They were a target, to be used. The first order of business was for AOL deal makers to find out how much money the dot-coms had raised in venture capital funding, then try to extract as much as possible from them in online ad deals. Informally, AOL's goal was to get a minimum of 50 percent of a dot-com's venture capital funding.
" '[F-word] 'em,' that was our mantra," said an AOL official. "We'd say that all the time. We took it to heart. 'Destroy them. [F-word] 'em.' You lived by that."
"
I agree, it's quite scary -- it sounds like AOL might have had a very nasty effect on startups. The article specifically mentions two companies that they killed, but there must have been many, many more...
Interestingly enough I was just thinking yesterday, what would the world be like if advertising of any form was illegal... would've saved those companies a whole lot of money, for one.
For something actually useful...
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GrodinTierce
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· Score: 1
Re:Ah yes.... (x1488)
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Dude. That's the joke. The joke is that it's so incredibly obvious what the next reply should be, and the rest of the world is just waiting to see if some idiot will take the bait. And guess what? You did!
The only thing worse is that instead of penalizing you for pointing out a couple of websites that reached their peak a couple years ago, they modded you up and called it informative.
Unspoken jokes like the parent are great. I would've been impressed if you'd followed it up with another (try to imagine how that would go--or ask your daddy), but that's far too much for your little mind to comprehend, right?
Great job. I think you deserve another l337 character in your name.
Btw, you're now one of my foes.
What most people won't know:
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Andre+Breton
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· Score: 2, Interesting
There once was a very small company called Quantum Computer Services, running an online service for users with Commodore machines. Then there was another company called Apple who had an online service for its employees and dealers called "AppleLink", which was all graphical interface and real easy to use. They wanted something like that for the general public and thought about buying Quantum. But then they decided to go joint venture. When Apple got reorganized (something they did on a monthly basis in these days...) they decided to drop AppleLink and instead payed Quantum to finish the Mac beta and market it under their own name. 1991 Quantum was renamed AOL and put the software on the market not only for Mac but Windows too.
Then Apple changed their mind and payed AOL money to use their code (which they kinda financed before...) for a new Apple online service called eWorld. (This was before the cool prefix was the "i") eWorld got online 1994 Mac only. It was shipped in the end of 1995 with every Mac (?...) and closed in March 1996 because the world in the mid 90s needed another online service as much as (insert what you want here).
Re:What most people won't know:
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petrilli
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· Score: 1
Close, but not quite. AppleLink was only partially developed by Apple, and it was run by GE for a *VERY* hefty fee, even for Apple employees to use it. So, in order to get rid of GE, and get away from some of the idiocyncracies of AppleLink, Apple decided to write their own software. Unfortunately, about 90% of the way there, it got killed for being "outside our business," and Quantum bought the rights to the whole thing.
That's why in the early days, AOL was *VERY* Mac-centric and friendly. Often new releases for the Mac came out months before the PC releases, and had more features. This slowly changed, and eventually it got so bad that Apple felt they needed to offer a competitor. What to do? Well, they ended up having to license the executable code back from AOL for them to use in creating eWorld, but they never got the rights to the source again, and so anytime eWorld wanted a change, they had to pay AOL for it.
Pretty messed up, in both directions. This is the history as told to me by someone who worked for eWorld during their entire "lifespan".
Re:What most people won't know:
by
Andre+Breton
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· Score: 1
Next time read my post more carefully:) You are totally right, but: I never said that Apple alone did AppleLink. They just did the GUI. The underlying structure came from GE Information Services Co., which also ran it. It was introduced in 1985. The next AppleLink, the one from Quantum and Apple was first called "AppleLink - Personal Edition" when introduced 1988 only for Apple II users.
I didn't want to make it too complicated. After all this is./;-P
And also it makes Apple look pretty much braindead back in those days:-D
AOL backdoor
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Anyone remember the good old days when you could logon to AOL through the backdoor and get a 555555555 screen name?
And hated it. This was in 2000 on a friends old computer with the constrained face of AOL making browsing unusable.
This was also at the time when I was still working for a dotbomb. What makes me so fucking hopping mad when I read this article, and there are literally tens of thousands who feel exactly this way, is how pure, unadulterated GREED fucked up the internet economy, and with it our jobs and our lives.
The moronic waste of invested money on expensive offices, cars, gadgets and toys by people who had no idea what they were actually doing running a company at the age of 26 with no experience and less intelligence is nothing compared to the greed that sucked everything up.
For that and the ensuing years of poverty and joblessness: FUCK THEM!
Re:Glory hole at AOL?
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
No no.
While some of us bought fancy cars and stupid crap, a lot of us bought real estate in Northern Virginia. One of my old co-workers owns 5 houses, and lives off the income of 6-month contracts for corporate housing clients. Others rolled over their stocks in bonds, T-bills, and such, because most of us knew the market could not bear tech stocks much longer. The P/E ratios were ludicrous in 1998.
Want to know something sickening? Buying a house, with cash, takes less than 20 minutes.
Re:Porn in the old days
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
I remember when I thought I was going overboard with 20mb of dirty GIFs:)
Want to know something sickening? Buying a house, with cash, takes less than 20 minutes.
Why is that sickening? Of course paying with cash expedites the process. There's little paperwork to do, just transfer the money and the title. Technically, it's just one piece of paper. For most people, the majority of the work is in working out a mortgage.
Slashdot Mirror
When the hell did they reach glory?
In fact, I didn't even know they've reached tolerable!
Those were the glory days. A new floppy disk in the mail every week. Unlike those crappy cd-roms in tins we get now. I mean what the heck do we do with them.
Found this article at the Washington Post about the wheeling and dealing at AOL back in the good old days (the 1990s).
~s/Great/Non/g
Karma: The shiznight, mostly because I am the Drizzle.
In 1998, AOL chairman Steve Case and his wife, Jean, gave over $8 million to a Christian school that, according to its own Web site, is a division of a virulently anti-gay church that seeks to "cure" homosexuals.
I guess this is why there are no more glory holes at AOL.
David Colburn's stature at AOL grew to such epic proportions that he earned a nickname: God.
Hey. That's reserved for sysadmins.
The coolest voice ever.
How about at least trying to troll. Recursive acronyms always work well for that...
AOL = AOL Old Ladies???
Karma: The shiznight, mostly because I am the Drizzle.
AOL never had glory. Glory was when Usenet had never seen a "me too", and barely had a dozen examples of the extremely annoying "LOL" or "ROTFLMAO".
AOL is to computer culture what Little Boy was to Hiroshima.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
Which are always nice for homebrew DVDs...
AOL needs to back off on the marketing. I think everyone knows who they are by now.
Ah, the glory days of AOL. The slowness. The service drops. The browser functionality that was always just a generation behind what non-idiots were using. Those were the days...
*weeps*
i've been waiting for 3 weeks now to hear if i have a job with them... i've gotten the thumbs up, but it's caught up in "finance"...
bleh.
dont consider the days of inflated prices, wasteful spending and endless accounting shenanigans and lies the glory days. And don't think AOL didn't do it. HealthSouth/Freddie Mac are the tip of a putrid iceberg. We don't even know how much thievery happened back then, but it wasn't honest and we are paying for it now and will be for a long time to come.
back in the good old days (the 1990s)."
Kids these days are spoiled. Back in the good 'ol days when we all had 14.4 modems and we had to walk fifty miles in snow and ice just to pick it up. If we wanted to talk on the phone, tough luck!
Too bad today's internet sucks!
----
Go canucks, habs, and sens!
I love this sort of stuff and am thinking of buying the book now.
Stuff written in this sort of style really draws you into the stories a lot better than dry reports on msnbcnn.
I loved "Inside Intel" too, and "Hackers" by Steven Levy.
The best bit in the article is right at the start, with the rabbis praying for stock to rise.
graspee
Actually, they did do something good for the Internet world. Remember that they made it the standard to charge people for access to the internet instead of charging per minute. Several smaller ISP's had the idea first, but AOL took it mainstream and did it nationwide.
:D
This of course was humanities first encounter with busy signals and paying for service you can't actually connect to, but hey, at least they had decent intentions...
-kalle
someone wrote a little-known program called "AOHell?"
Wh47 d1d j00 541, 31337 15n't t3h r0xor5 ne m0r3???
Back in the good 'ol days when we all had 14.4 modems and we had to walk fifty miles in snow and ice just to pick it up.
Pfeh. We had to manually carry our packets through the snow and hand-deliver them to the other computer(s). Didn't even have "baud."
The coolest voice ever.
the only times I could login was between 11:00pm and 5 AM. Those were the good ole days....
No one will look in there to steal your Altoids.
However, the possibility of someone unknowningly throwing all your Altoids away in a fit of anti-AOL hostility is distinct.
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
Obviously AOL is misplacing their resources. They're falling way behind the version war - remember how revolutionary 8 is compaired to 7, or hah hah... I laugh at the thought _6_? Hell emacs is in the 20s and I'd sure as hell rather use emacs (tough sell considering I'm a vi(m) user). AOL needs to move on to version 15 or so to totally blow away MSN. They can then add super championship turbo edition for power users, maybe give redhat kernel versions a run for their money.
Well, I never! I'm upset since you young guys hijacked television..
...rats..... hmmmm
err...wait
no...you can have it, changed me mind.. keep on hijacking it lads! Used to be we had one fuzzy channel that only ran to 10 or 11 or midnight, then went off the air and showed nifty test patterns, and programs that mostly sucked, now we have hundreds of programs that mostly suck! Now THAT's tech progress!
Not!
Radio! errr... no... wait......
Newspapers!
Movies!....uhhh... nooo.... hmmmmmm
Girls! There ya go, still exactly the same as the "good old" days! And now with even *less* clothes!
Firewire Hard Drives
Sony memory sticks
Until then they're just an A.O.K. intro to this "internet thing". Of course, I hope their users graduate eventually... =/
Instant Message excerpt when i was 15 yrs old back in 1997 (Seriously!)
My SN: Oh yeah baby that was good did you like it?
Sexychick: Yes you hunk!
My SN: You want to do this again next time? =)
Sexychick: HAHAHA You F*G I'm a guy AHAHA you loser AHAHAHA!
My SN: haha I knew that! was trying to trick you too! Hey man, this is neat, let's do this to other losers just to screw them up.....
Sexychick: shutup. bye
I remember back in the 90's everyone used AOL (version 3.0), on an old 14.4k modem, yet! I remember after a few years we bought a 56k modem for a whopping $100, but it was a huge improvement. Just shows you how quickly times can change.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I used to work with a fellow who wrote a book about the old days at AOL check it out
"I would say that 99 per cent of what my father has written about his own life is false." - L. Ron Hubbard Jr.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Comment removed based on user account deletion
You're talking about Quantum Link, right?
I think that was the last time they were respected...
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
Truthfully, the quality of posts from AOL accounts more than anything else kept me away from their service.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Comment removed based on user account deletion
AOL has millions of subscribers. Recently they posted losses in the *BILLIONS* of dollars. This is incomprehensible to me. How does a company lose thousands of dollars per subscriber? It would be better if they just gave free internet access to everyone and banked the billions lost in advertising and whatever it is that cost them *BILLIONS* of dollars.
I think AOL/TW would need about a 100,000 Rabis praying simultaneously to raise their sinkhole of a stock now!
I thought it was America Off Line?
*shrugs*
Does anyone else think that Myer Berlow looks like the "Coffee Guy" from Mad TV?
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
I think I had subzero.. you had a roombuster and punter and fake account creator?
seriously learned a lot making aol proggies because of all the "necessary" features.
right away you had to learn how to subclass windows from another process, intercept and send windows messages. how many windows programmers got in at such a low level?
bite my glorious golden ass.
after all, some stupid kid could infect a computer with that crappy aol trojan cd.
Lawyers, MBA's, RIAA? A jedi fears not these things!
I object to the whole 'cowboy' terminology used throughout the article like it was some sort of derogatory term. So this clown wore cowboy boots around the office: big deal. That doesn't make him a cowboy, and he certainly wasn't emulating cowboy behavior. Cowboys are straight-shooters and laid back. These AOLers are more like manic jackasses. Furthermore, anyone who emblazons their cowboy boots with the AOL logo seriously ought to have themselves checked by a psychiatrist--that's just not right.
The Rise and Fall of Online Community
Those were the days!
All the ToSSeRS, MaSSMaiLS and l33t hacking proggies!
I'd be curious to see some figures on how much of the aforementioned venture capital AOL managed to scoop up during the boom and what percentage of the total VC spent on Internet startups that number represents.
Of course, this doesn't change the fact that if people were busted out because of AOL it means the executives of the busted company were making bad decisions...but it might make even happier those on the sidelines (particularly those who got out of AOL/TW stock before the bottom dropped out and those who AOL squeezed out of business) who are now watching AOL seemingly reap what it sowed.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I remember reading about AOL guys selling their stock and retiring in their 30s back around 1999 or 2000. The article was "why are they doing this? they must be nutty!"
I wonder what happened to those crazy kids who sold the stock and retired. Probably living on an island accessing slashdot on a homebuilt wireless.
riding round the world on an old motorcycle
I don't know if anyone else noticed this but there is going to be a chat with the author at 1 PM EDT Monday. It'll be at http://discuss.washingtonpost.com/zforum/03/r_maga zine_klein061603.htm
No numbers about it. I outgrew it in 1993. It was before the intArweb and everythin'! Strange to believe that in '99 people would give away so much money to AOL... guess that was before Google.
how being obviously out of your fucking skull is NOT in impediment to rising to a leadership position in a large company.
I saw pirates of sillicon valley. Even that stuff doesn't come close to the stuff in that article. I would much rather do buisness with microsoft than aol. I mean, AOL Litterly ate themselves out of house and home. If they haddn't charged all of the dot comms so much maybe they wouldn't have blown up. So they would still be around in another 7 years to sign another contract. Didn't they read the Lorax?
you should have been marked down as redundant
or there should be a -1 obvious mod
... to their subscribers back around 1993-1994 timeframe. Back then, AOL was a closed system, a glorified BBS actually, and accessing the "Internet" for AOL customers was thru a bastardized proxy server that was fed with only a SINGLE 1.544Mbps feed to, I believe it was AT&T's backbone off the MAE-East. All 500,000 AOL users shared this one single T1's bandwidth.
The article is lacking fact-checking. For example, it states that by the late 90s, the business affairs unit was working out of CC4. Creative Center 4 wasn't even finished until summer of 2000.
So take it for what it's worth. I think the Sunday Post runs about $1.50.
-Todd
"The details of my life are quite inconsequential..."
holy crap that is the funniest thing ive read all day
Everyone on the Internet feels like their nicknames at different sites have to be their AOL screenname.
Enough with the numbers already, think of a more original name.
david colburn couldn't bare to hit next to read the rest of the article....yeeehaw
http://www.vanillaafro.com - take me seriously and I will shoot you
>In the mean time, the Internet-boom happened.
Yet, dial-up at that time could be had for 5.95 or if there wasn't much competition in your neighborhood at the time 9.95 or so while AOL wanted double that. AOL does not equal the internet-boom. They're an ISP second and a content/service provider first.
From my experience, cheap local dial-ups helped get most of the non-techies on the net a lot more than AOL and its other proprietary cousins. These non-techies fired up a browser and were off - excitied by the prospect of this web thing and email, while AOL people safely hid in their controlled chat-rooms and paid per-minute charges.
Sure the non-AOLers had to actually spend five minutes talking to tech-support to setup their modems and email clients but at least they learned a little about how their computers and modems worked, as opposed to being stuck with some proprietary software that didnt really deliver the goods regarding easy easy use until much later versions.
Now, these non-techies are somewhat savvy tech consumers and surprisingly handy with a computer and have long since moved on to broadband, while the AOL people I remember are still there on a beater 486 and still getting ripped off.
Not exactly a scientific study, but lets not overestimate AOL's influence. Those mysterious "http" things on movie commercials, that Netscape thing people keep talking about, and not having an answer to the question "Whats your email address" were probably the biggest factors in getting people online, not a voice saying, "You've got mail!"
As a former QuantumLink user ('Jaeger', if anyone cares), I still feel some amount of bitterness in my gut about how America On-Line let the Q's database go to hell over time. Monopolistic actions? Hell, that's only the latest reason to despise Steve Case.
but had no idea how much. AOL single handedly killed the dotcom boom. Really, some of the dotcoms actually had potential. which means you can also blame AOL for the recession, and the war and Bush and gas prices... "By late 1999, many companies seeking to do business with AOL were no longer viewed as potential partners. They were a target, to be used. The first order of business was for AOL deal makers to find out how much money the dot-coms had raised in venture capital funding, then try to extract as much as possible from them in online ad deals. Informally, AOL's goal was to get a minimum of 50 percent of a dot-com's venture capital funding. " '[F-word] 'em,' that was our mantra," said an AOL official. "We'd say that all the time. We took it to heart. 'Destroy them. [F-word] 'em.' You lived by that." "
Neil Fraser has built a 48 CD AOL Lamp.
Tierce
Tierce
Who sponsors your feelings?
Dude. That's the joke. The joke is that it's so incredibly obvious what the next reply should be, and the rest of the world is just waiting to see if some idiot will take the bait. And guess what? You did!
The only thing worse is that instead of penalizing you for pointing out a couple of websites that reached their peak a couple years ago, they modded you up and called it informative.
Unspoken jokes like the parent are great. I would've been impressed if you'd followed it up with another (try to imagine how that would go--or ask your daddy), but that's far too much for your little mind to comprehend, right?
Great job. I think you deserve another l337 character in your name.
Btw, you're now one of my foes.
Then Apple changed their mind and payed AOL money to use their code (which they kinda financed before...) for a new Apple online service called eWorld. (This was before the cool prefix was the "i") eWorld got online 1994 Mac only. It was shipped in the end of 1995 with every Mac (?...) and closed in March 1996 because the world in the mid 90s needed another online service as much as (insert what you want here).
Anyone remember the good old days when you could logon to AOL through the backdoor and get a 555555555 screen name?
And hated it. This was in 2000 on a friends old computer with the constrained face of AOL making browsing unusable.
This was also at the time when I was still working for a dotbomb. What makes me so fucking hopping mad when I read this article, and there are literally tens of thousands who feel exactly this way, is how pure, unadulterated GREED fucked up the internet economy, and with it our jobs and our lives.
The moronic waste of invested money on expensive offices, cars, gadgets and toys by people who had no idea what they were actually doing running a company at the age of 26 with no experience and less intelligence is nothing compared to the greed that sucked everything up.
For that and the ensuing years of poverty and joblessness: FUCK THEM!
No no.
While some of us bought fancy cars and stupid crap, a lot of us bought real estate in Northern Virginia. One of my old co-workers owns 5 houses, and lives off the income of 6-month contracts for corporate housing clients. Others rolled over their stocks in bonds, T-bills, and such, because most of us knew the market could not bear tech stocks much longer. The P/E ratios were ludicrous in 1998.
Want to know something sickening? Buying a house, with cash, takes less than 20 minutes.
I remember when I thought I was going overboard with 20mb of dirty GIFs :)
Why is that sickening? Of course paying with cash expedites the process. There's little paperwork to do, just transfer the money and the title. Technically, it's just one piece of paper. For most people, the majority of the work is in working out a mortgage.
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