Remember AOL keywords? They basically had their own private DNS alternative. Every commercial on TV for a website would say "AOL keyword <xyz>!" instead of the actual URL. I guess it was a lot less scary for your average internet user to type in "nick" instead of "http://www.nick.com". I feel like we still kind of have the "URLs are hard" problem. I've noticed a lot of ads in Japan tell the users to search (presumably Google) for a specific phrase, and buying the adwords for that is more or less the modern equivalent of paying for an AOL keyword. Search was really rough back then (although it's gone full circle into shit again I feel), and the URL bar UX wasn't quite figured out yet. Will users be able to adapt to wacky new TLDs or will we be stuck with .com forever because it's recognizable as a domain name? Do people still type "www."? Is the app store the modern equivalent of AOL channels? Sometimes I wonder if we're stuck in an infinite cycle of reinventing AOL.
I am getting merried next month - we have a wedding website via "with joy", which had a URL a bit too long to fit on our wedding invites, so I set up a redirect of "wedding.surname.tld" - the amount of people who messaged us saying the website didn't work, and it turns out they were putting "www." beforehand was staggering (until I added that as a redirect too).
Similar thing happened to us. I had the www redirect but used a .wedding TLD. On the invites I even put the entire “http://<domain>.wedding/“ hoping it’d be clear. I’d say a majority of people didn’t recognize that it was a web address and assumed we didn’t have a website.
I suppose that could also be an indication that they haven't typed in a URL in a very long time.
A shocking (to me) number of people I work with don't know the URLs of websites they visit every day or that they can go directly to a site by typing in the address in "the search bar". And I mean people who use their computers for a living, not the "smartphone generation" or strangers to the web.
It's possible to create your own AOL keywords in firefox by setting the `keyword` field in `Manage Bookmarks`. Bookmark hackernews, set the keyword to `hn`, then all you have to do in the address bar is `hn<enter>` and you're here.
Instagram usernames are much easier to reason about if you don't understand/care about the differences between domains, subdomains, tlds, protocols etc.
We gave people a messy solution that assumed they would care about implementation details.
I don’t know if domain names is really that much better a solution—between the messiness of protocols, subdomains, and TLDs (how many kids in school went to whitehouse.com instead of whitehouse.gov back when the former was a porn site?), they can also expire and be replaced with a domain showing very different content. Lidl recently had to recall some kids snacks because the URL was not showing what they wanted it to.
Considering the level of computer knowledge and sophistication of most 90s users, this was a genius idea. The fact that it also served as a form of marketing and soft lock-in was also not overlooked
> I've noticed a lot of ads in Japan tell the users to search (presumably Google) for a specific phrase, and buying the adwords for that is more or less the modern equivalent of paying for an AOL keyword.
There was a CBC News article within the last while that linked to an earlier article. However, the hyperlink pointed to a Google query for “blah blah topic cbc article”.
It was interesting to see that journalists within large organizations are hacking together their own resources instead of relying on internal tools (likely because they don’t exist).
I always assumed that ads that told people to search for the product/company were to raise their search ranking (due to relevancy?). But I’ve got no idea if that would actually make a difference or not, or if it is just so people don’t have to type a URL as you said.
The heyday of AOL keywords was before SEO or search engine relevancy was anything that any company cared about. Search engines existed, but this was mostly pre-Google and they were not great. A lot of discovery happened in other ways - the AOL keyword scheme was basically their attempt to tie web discovery to their products so people who left AOL wouldn't know what to do.
Didn't most AOL keywords redirect to AOLs content only hosted on AOL? I don't remember what their "sites" were called, but I used to use keywords to navigate to those areas. I don't really remember using them at all to get to actual websites. I only had AOL for two years before we got a cable modem in late 1998 though, maybe that was more common in the later years when the web started picking up.
Ah, that's true. Even Google search has used this sort of pattern to try and become a "soft walled garden". Things like widgets that look like they might take you to Wikipedia, but land on Google pages instead.
AOL had a 45 minute idle timeout, meaning you'd be logged out regardless of what was happening on your screen if you weren't moving the mouse or using the keyboard. This was a problem if you wanted to download files and have them in the morning.
Making my first "idler" in Visual Basic (which sent a string of whatever song was playing in Winamp to a random AOL chatroom where I was the only person) meant my inactive timer was reset every few minutes.
AOL, "progs", Visual Basic—and the "scene" in AOL chatrooms at that time—hold a special place in my heart.
That idle timeout was pretty important when AOL cost $1/hour (and it was the cheap service! Prodigy, Compuserve, and especially GEnie were more expensive!). Leaving it connected overnight would get you grounded in a hurry when that AOL bill came in the next month.
It was really no wonder that all of those services basically collapsed once dial up ISPs with flat (and low!) monthly fees started appearing. $10 for unlimited (modem speed) data is a steal in comparison.
> That idle timeout was pretty important when AOL cost $1/hour
Let me guess: are you American?
Brit here. Our phonecall connection charges were a lot more than that. The ROTW pays for local calls as well as long-distance. $1/hr would have been great. I paid closer to $1/min for dial-up. We all used OLRs: Offline Readers. An app that dials your service provider, posts all outgoing messages, grabs all new messages into a file, zips it, downloads it and any pending file downloads, then hangs up.
They were great and all message reading was local, hence fast: no lag at all, even on 14.4kb/s.
But CI$ ones were rubbish and AOL didn't have one at all, 'til it went toll-free in about 1998.
I imagine everyone who was a kid during the dial-up times has a horror story of being confronted with an enormous phone bill by their parents. I remember mine going mental at me for costing us £40 one month (normal service was iirc ~£10)
I've been using AOL CD-codes up until the moment where I got my hands on some Compuserve code generator. The only cost which remained was for the local dial up. Good times. I personally thanked a Compuserve representative for their easy access at some fair. Didn't seem like he understood but I still felt better afterwards.
AOL gave me my love of programming. I learned how to program in Visual Basic because I wanted to write my own "aol prog". I can still remember the "server" in the Warez room listed VB3.0 as the "the software that is used to make progs". Luckily there were people sharing their code so I could study and figure out how to do it myself.
Me and my cousin created a yo momma joke spammer. I was a shit head back then, but it paid off being a nerd. But still, I did not learn about linux and free software until many years later because of AOL's shitty walled garden.
Aohell is what got me into Windows dev stuff back in the day. Then discovered the warez room. Downloaded a copy of VB 3.0 and bunch of other dev tools. I think Borland Delphi and also Power Builder. Best thing about AOL was that even in the mid-90s, their email system held what seemed like an unlimited amount of multi-part binary files as attachments. So when you requested a warez in the chatroom, your inbox got flooded with like 30-40 emails with rar file parts. Like pretty much everyone back in those days on dialup, I'd start the download at night , so less chance of someone picking up phone and disconnecting my session from AOL. When I was college, it got easier. Because AOL added TCP/Winsock support to their desktop client. So I could just install AOL on unsed Comp Sci lab PC and then download all the email attachments at 1-2mbps.
Ahh good memories. This is how me and a friend got into programming. We would constantly feud though because he used VB, but I used delphi. Clearly, I was using the superior language :)
Ha, that scene is how I learned to program. Built a shareware tool called AoLOL! (available by going to keyword "Addon"), $14.95, got paper checks from all over the country! Then I met the ICQ founders...
Ha, that reminds me of one of my first useful programs. In the early days of the internet my dad picked up a internet contract which allowed you to dial in on a toll free number; it was pretty cheap per month but the only catch was while dialled in they displayed a banner along the top of the screen with advertising. Using the win32 API in VB I was able to find the handle to the window kill it.
The only problem then was that tying up the land line constantly got on my mum's nerves, being back in the days before land line numbers were redundant for other reasons.
Yep, there were a few of free dial up ISPs that came and went like BlueLight and NetZero. I took a more crude approach to work around the banner and used Internet Connection Sharing in Win98 from a second PC and kept the monitor off.
Anyone remember the first question their Tier-1 support would ask?
"Do you own a computer?"
This was due to the fact that most of the people who called for support didn't understand what a CD-ROM was, and tried playing it in their CD music players.
That reminds me of one of the most popular questions in their chat rooms by the late 90's: "A/S/L?" While it did bleed over into other services, it was very AOL-centric. I'm happy it has long since faded into obscurity.
I completely forgot AOL used to be Q-Link.
Related memory: I was using still using a 300 baud modem with my C=64 when Q-Link launched. It was rather disappointing after having used other BBS for free. The same with AOL after having been using Gopher, IRC, Anonymous-FTP years prior.
But heck, they got my dad - and a lot of people who never used computers before - to learn how to send email. I did not appreciate the scale of how impressive that was until decades later.
I'm also impressed this many random memories popped up. Unexpected.
But it was about 30 years later when I discovered that "cup holders" were a real thing that are a standard fixture on American cars.
European cars are tiny things by comparison and there isn't room to drink while driving, and we didn't have drive-through food or drink places in the 20th century, either. Also, they are all manual gearshift, so your hand is too busy to drink.
Some cars have a recess by the gear stick for a bottle or a can of soft drink, but most people use it for small items like garage door zappers or coins for meters instead.
Thus is was about 2015 or 2020 when I first saw a picture of a pop-out cup holder and realised that this was a Thing, a Thing that Americans would recognise, and that optical drive trays do look similar.
Nobody ever bothered to explain that, because Americans tend to assume that the whole world is like America.
I wouldn’t have thought that there were many people using computers who weren’t already familiar with audio CDs. While most portable players were top-loading, I remember the majority of home stereos having the slide-out tray. I would have thought anyone using computers at the time would also have been familiar with home stereo/hi-fi systems (even if they didn’t own one).
Random people would just message you this out of the blue. When I was about 10 or 11 some girl did this and we figured out we lived two hours away from each other. We ended up talking and kept in touch for years. Eventually our family’s had planned a vacation to the same city at the same time and we met up in person finally and had a good time. It never turned into a relationship but we kept in touch until I was in my early twenties. It just seemed like a different world compared to the social networking of today. Things were more innocent and there was a lot more inherit trust between people online.
> I was using still using a 300 baud modem with my C=64 when Q-Link launched.
Wow, that brought back memories for me. Quantum Link was my first "online" experience, and the cost made it very much a "get in, get it done, and get out" kind of experience, but Grolier's Online Encyclopedia helped me with many reports and papers in elementary school.
Once I moved to PC and dial-up BBS, it was all over for Quantum Link.
Kind of an aside, but one mind-boggling decision I never understood was that if the dial-up connection was disrupted, the entire AOL app closed with a "goodbye." If you were reading something, filling out a form, whatever, you're out of luck - despite the fact that you might have been able to quickly reconnect.
I remember that as well. I thought that _was_ the internet since that was my first real exposure to home internet. Outside of that it was just my elementary school and the library. When services like NetZero and Juno came out, my mind was blown knowing that I didn't need to have the entire AOL ecosystem load up -- which could take a while with a 14.4k modem and a 133MHz(?) Pentium with 32MB RAM.
I once showed this off to a friend by minimizing the AOL window, opening a folder, and typing some domain into the location bar. Back then IE was intermingled with explorer enough that this opened the website inside the folder window! Thus proving the internet existed outside of AOL!
We also had similar discoveries of editing the HTML of the folder itself before discovering .html files for making websites.
Then again when we discovered how to make content go into horizontal columns with this magic called <table> and <td> ! The magic!
I was the exact same. My mind was blown when I realized you could connect to AOL and THEN open an internet browser and just be ONLINE! I spent way to long thinking AOL was the internet before I think I saw my cousin do this and it changed my world forever.
AOL did keep state locally. There was caching. To not only keep the content fresh, additional minutes would be used getting back to the previous state and wallah .... more minutes used.
When was that? I briefly used AOL as a dial-up service in the UK circa 2000 because of the toll-free number and penny a minute billing and don’t recall this.
It's important to remember that AOL could have been they internet if the succeeded.
They offered one view of the world: where the internet would be like a cable package and AOL would be the cable provider of this new world who captures a huge part of the market with its first mover advantage.
The idea of a truly open internet where anyone could view anything from anyone else as long as they paid for a connection was in many ways a much crazier.
It seems inevitable in hindsight given how things have played out but with some slightly changed starting variables or decisions made along the way we could have an internet but no web like we do now.
If I'm honest, I kinda miss the AOL all in one approach. Email, news, stocks, chats, IMs, web search, all just there front and center. Easy to use, no trickery, no figuring out what sites or apps to use, as everyone else(generally) was on AOL.
I wonder if an idea like that would work again - was just ahead of its time?
I think this is what WeChat sort of is? And what Musk wants Twitter/X to become.
IMO interoperability and standards work better than this sort of all-in-one package. Do one thing, do it well, and play nice with others. Let the best app win. You know the team working on “X news” or whatever is going to be phoning it in, thinking in the back of their heads “we’d really have to do a bad job to get somebody to leave the whole platform.”
There's a lot of these comparisons, and I wouldn't want to reply to all of them, but will on this one.
What's missing on most of these are the social aspect. With Google, you can't just drop into a 'miamidolphins' chat room to discuss the Dolphins. Nor can you instant message folks.
Think of what you'd need to recreate all of it with what we have today. Discord for chat rooms. Whatsapp for IMs. Chrome for browsing. Outlook for email. Steam for games? And there's many more features missing still. All in one application.
Further, part of the 'magic' to me was that the application itself was native and static. So you always had your menu bar to click between. And each clicked thing was its own subwindow. Like an OS inside an OS, if you will. Sounds wacky, but I loved the experience...at least at the time.
That idea is alive in well in China as WeChat. We really don't want or need something like that in the West, even in spite of Musk's attempts to recreate it.
There's some variations of that (like MSN), but I gotta say having messaging tied to a paid service makes me feel a lot more comfortable with using it. I am paying for this! This is how the service works! No weird angles to it
Yeah I was just thinking that there should be a service that's like aol, with all the buttons and features just together. Like Google basically has it but it's not all really tied together. The reality is that computing simply used to be a lot cooler.
A smartphone would be near the opposite of that. Having to figure out what app others are using and install, and keep switching between them. With AOL if you wanted to contact someone, it was just IM(AIM), for example.
Yahoo had a lot of the same features, but never did it as cleanly as AOL. Perhaps because AOL provided an actual native client whereas I believe Yahoo was always just web based, which marred the experience quite a bit.
I guess the ultimate takeaway is that there's not a lot of money to be made if they're all gone now.
I'm sure we've all had the experience where we went to meet a romantic partner's extended family, and realized our partner was the only one who didn't have seven toes.
In one instance, I did meet a family member who was inexplicably rich. He reasoned, "Heck, even I can understand AOL!" and went all in, early enough.
I'd be rich if I'd taken the money I spent on storerooms for empty computer boxes, and put it all on Apple. Alas, the success of Microsoft in those days had convinced me I don't have a gift for such picks. The world isn't rational.
Readit News
From my experience, yes.
I am getting merried next month - we have a wedding website via "with joy", which had a URL a bit too long to fit on our wedding invites, so I set up a redirect of "wedding.surname.tld" - the amount of people who messaged us saying the website didn't work, and it turns out they were putting "www." beforehand was staggering (until I added that as a redirect too).
A shocking (to me) number of people I work with don't know the URLs of websites they visit every day or that they can go directly to a site by typing in the address in "the search bar". And I mean people who use their computers for a living, not the "smartphone generation" or strangers to the web.
https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/info/help/aol-ke...
We gave people the concept of portable identity with domain names, and they rejected it for another walled garden.
We gave people a messy solution that assumed they would care about implementation details.
There was a CBC News article within the last while that linked to an earlier article. However, the hyperlink pointed to a Google query for “blah blah topic cbc article”.
It was interesting to see that journalists within large organizations are hacking together their own resources instead of relying on internal tools (likely because they don’t exist).
The article didn’t have a screen shot of how AOL tacked the entire Internet Internet onto their glorified BBS as a button on their toolbar. Seriously.
And we've gone full circle. We have the same today, just in a form of a #tag.
QR codes.
Dead Comment
Making my first "idler" in Visual Basic (which sent a string of whatever song was playing in Winamp to a random AOL chatroom where I was the only person) meant my inactive timer was reset every few minutes.
AOL, "progs", Visual Basic—and the "scene" in AOL chatrooms at that time—hold a special place in my heart.
It was really no wonder that all of those services basically collapsed once dial up ISPs with flat (and low!) monthly fees started appearing. $10 for unlimited (modem speed) data is a steal in comparison.
Let me guess: are you American?
Brit here. Our phonecall connection charges were a lot more than that. The ROTW pays for local calls as well as long-distance. $1/hr would have been great. I paid closer to $1/min for dial-up. We all used OLRs: Offline Readers. An app that dials your service provider, posts all outgoing messages, grabs all new messages into a file, zips it, downloads it and any pending file downloads, then hangs up.
They were great and all message reading was local, hence fast: no lag at all, even on 14.4kb/s.
But CI$ ones were rubbish and AOL didn't have one at all, 'til it went toll-free in about 1998.
I am still liamproven@aol.com to this day.
Me and my cousin created a yo momma joke spammer. I was a shit head back then, but it paid off being a nerd. But still, I did not learn about linux and free software until many years later because of AOL's shitty walled garden.
It definitely got me interested in programming and the early-ish days of being apart of an internet community.
An embarrassing aside: my parents used to give me birthday and Christmas presents that was an allowance of AOL minutes.
The only problem then was that tying up the land line constantly got on my mum's nerves, being back in the days before land line numbers were redundant for other reasons.
"Do you own a computer?"
This was due to the fact that most of the people who called for support didn't understand what a CD-ROM was, and tried playing it in their CD music players.
That reminds me of one of the most popular questions in their chat rooms by the late 90's: "A/S/L?" While it did bleed over into other services, it was very AOL-centric. I'm happy it has long since faded into obscurity.
I completely forgot AOL used to be Q-Link.
Related memory: I was using still using a 300 baud modem with my C=64 when Q-Link launched. It was rather disappointing after having used other BBS for free. The same with AOL after having been using Gopher, IRC, Anonymous-FTP years prior.
But heck, they got my dad - and a lot of people who never used computers before - to learn how to send email. I did not appreciate the scale of how impressive that was until decades later.
I'm also impressed this many random memories popped up. Unexpected.
Broadband - especially 1+Gbps connections (we are spoiled and I love it!)
Latency that can be measured in milliseconds per packet around the world, not seconds or minutes per character.
Multitasking not just locally, but across a network
Streaming video when I remember a 320x240 image taking FOREVER to download
Downloads that actually complete and don't corrupt most of the time.
Stateless connections that are easy to restart if something does go wrong
And so much more.
But it was about 30 years later when I discovered that "cup holders" were a real thing that are a standard fixture on American cars.
European cars are tiny things by comparison and there isn't room to drink while driving, and we didn't have drive-through food or drink places in the 20th century, either. Also, they are all manual gearshift, so your hand is too busy to drink.
Some cars have a recess by the gear stick for a bottle or a can of soft drink, but most people use it for small items like garage door zappers or coins for meters instead.
Thus is was about 2015 or 2020 when I first saw a picture of a pop-out cup holder and realised that this was a Thing, a Thing that Americans would recognise, and that optical drive trays do look similar.
Nobody ever bothered to explain that, because Americans tend to assume that the whole world is like America.
I remember being in Yahoo chat rooms and my 11 year old logic was "I should lie and say I'm older...13 is old enough to be 'not a kid' right?"
Wow, that brought back memories for me. Quantum Link was my first "online" experience, and the cost made it very much a "get in, get it done, and get out" kind of experience, but Grolier's Online Encyclopedia helped me with many reports and papers in elementary school.
Once I moved to PC and dial-up BBS, it was all over for Quantum Link.
I once showed this off to a friend by minimizing the AOL window, opening a folder, and typing some domain into the location bar. Back then IE was intermingled with explorer enough that this opened the website inside the folder window! Thus proving the internet existed outside of AOL!
We also had similar discoveries of editing the HTML of the folder itself before discovering .html files for making websites.
Then again when we discovered how to make content go into horizontal columns with this magic called <table> and <td> ! The magic!
AOL did keep state locally. There was caching. To not only keep the content fresh, additional minutes would be used getting back to the previous state and wallah .... more minutes used.
Deleted Comment
They offered one view of the world: where the internet would be like a cable package and AOL would be the cable provider of this new world who captures a huge part of the market with its first mover advantage.
The idea of a truly open internet where anyone could view anything from anyone else as long as they paid for a connection was in many ways a much crazier.
It seems inevitable in hindsight given how things have played out but with some slightly changed starting variables or decisions made along the way we could have an internet but no web like we do now.
Well, we now have 4 AOLs: Google, Apple, Microsoft and Facebook.
I wonder if an idea like that would work again - was just ahead of its time?
IMO interoperability and standards work better than this sort of all-in-one package. Do one thing, do it well, and play nice with others. Let the best app win. You know the team working on “X news” or whatever is going to be phoning it in, thinking in the back of their heads “we’d really have to do a bad job to get somebody to leave the whole platform.”
What's missing on most of these are the social aspect. With Google, you can't just drop into a 'miamidolphins' chat room to discuss the Dolphins. Nor can you instant message folks.
Think of what you'd need to recreate all of it with what we have today. Discord for chat rooms. Whatsapp for IMs. Chrome for browsing. Outlook for email. Steam for games? And there's many more features missing still. All in one application.
Further, part of the 'magic' to me was that the application itself was native and static. So you always had your menu bar to click between. And each clicked thing was its own subwindow. Like an OS inside an OS, if you will. Sounds wacky, but I loved the experience...at least at the time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_portal
https://tw.yahoo.com
Yahoo tried to be that, too. Both are now mostly of historical interest.
Deleted Comment
I guess the ultimate takeaway is that there's not a lot of money to be made if they're all gone now.
MSN
https://beta.aol.com/main
Dead Comment
In one instance, I did meet a family member who was inexplicably rich. He reasoned, "Heck, even I can understand AOL!" and went all in, early enough.
I'd be rich if I'd taken the money I spent on storerooms for empty computer boxes, and put it all on Apple. Alas, the success of Microsoft in those days had convinced me I don't have a gift for such picks. The world isn't rational.