WayBack Machine-1995

[Mr.Bill]

The very 1st time I ever saw the Internet was in the early 80's.. A friend of mine was a professor at a State college, and they had it in his office.. He showed me it, and I wasn't impressed at all.. At the time I had no idea what it even was, or obviously it's potential. It was all text, it looked pretty boring.

What did I know.

[Spider]

Had to google. But yep...2.5 million people still use AOL.

What an amazing modern world we live in.


Wait. Are you talking about the service or the software?

[Spider]

But...how? How can you possible deal with dialup?

[Spider]

Then it isn't AOL. Might be some other provider they have an arrangement with to supply broadband. Their name might be on it but they don't actually have a broadband service.

I guess the people keeping them afloat are the ones clear out in the sticks with no broadband and no hope of getting it. They must just be checking email, as I'm pretty sure the flash ad's alone on a large website would destroy a 56k connection instantly.

[Spider]

Weird.

Truly it is weird, that that sort of thing is still around. Its like finding someone who has an 8 track in their car.

[broken robot]

[The Dharma Bum]

It's easy to ridicule AOL, especially in 2014, but they were the reason that personal internet usage for leisure became more than the next iteration of ham radio. The internet used to be a fun pastime for enthusiasts, and it was looking like expansion would mostly come in the form of use for business, not personal use by regular people. Then AOL came around and convinced everyone that the internet wasn't too scary or complicated to use even if you're not a techie.
You could argue that with the awe-inspiring potential that was always there, someone else would have done it if it wasn't AOL, but someone else didn't do it. AOL did. PCF very well might not exist if not for AOL.

[Winchester]

I used to get disks from AOL every month for quite a while (back in the eary 90's). I actually didn't have my first home PC capable of internet access till 1996 or so. I did buy an offbrand (Kaypro) PC in 1986. Only thing I remember running on it was Word Star, a pirated Lotus 123 program and Wizardry... tiltowait was the bomb, lol.

[Bauce]

At the time when AOL first started spamming disks to everyone in the country monthly or more, CD-Rom's still had a certain allure around them to me. They were shiny and I knew that my parents had some that cost a lot of money. Not fully able to comprehend that it was the programs on the disks and not the CD's themselves that had a high value, I remember one time going over the my friends house and seeing him snap an AOL CD in half. I kept telling him he had to try to glue it back together or hide it. Was sure he was gonna be in major trouble with his mom. lol

[Spider]