Glory Days at AOL?
by
wo1verin3
·
· 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
·
· 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
·
· 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
·
· 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....:)
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
·
· 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.
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.)
Re:Glory days
by
LucidityZero
·
· 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.
-- Sig.i>
Re:Glory days
by
Smidge204
·
· 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
LucidityZero
·
· 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...?
-- Sig.i>
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.
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*
what about MY glory days?
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· 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"...
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!
--
----
Go canucks, habs, and sens!
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.
Re:Back in the days
by
thynk
·
· 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.
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!
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
-kalle
the glory days, like when...
by
rock_climbing_guy
·
· Score: 3, Funny
someone wrote a little-known program called "AOHell?"
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!
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
Another similar book
by
zephc
·
· Score: 2, Informative
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.
Did AOL Cause The Dotcom Depression?
by
Babbster
·
· 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.
Chat with the Author
by
jkeyes
·
· 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
·
· 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.
AOL is not the internet
by
gad_zuki!
·
· 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!"
What most people won't know:
by
Andre+Breton
·
· 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).
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.
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.
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!
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
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!
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 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
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."
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'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.
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.
>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!"
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).