I miss clients like this. It reminds me of a better time when the internet was young and fresh to me.
It does amuse me that this written up on livejournal.
It does amuse me that this written up on livejournal.
I remember when AOL was seen as evil that was going to kill the open internet.
It was the original "walled garden."
I wish someone could rescue the whole thing from tape and host it.
on a PDP-10
It effectively was for millions of users who did not venture outside the AOL client.
That wasn't always true. At some point internet access was a "feature" that was added to the walled-garden AOL. They famously added Usenet in September 1993. I can't find a date for web access, but I'd guess 1995.
I was one of those newbies. When my spouse and I were living in different towns after grad school, AOL allowed us to communicate using local phone numbers in our respective locations, using a single account. Later on, they reconfigured their software so that it was running on top of a regular TCP/IP client, and you'd use it by logging in with the AOL software and then switching over to Netscape and an e-mail program that recognized AOL's protocol.
I ran my first side business from an AOL e-mail address.
AOL was the closest thing to "it just works" in the business for quite a while. Plus, their nationwide reach meant that you could access it anywhere without paying for long distance phone service. It took a few more years for the Internet to work that well for everybody.
I predicted to my friends that pretty soon everybody would have access to the Internet! Today we look back on the early Internet with nostalgia.
Eternal September... yeah, bring it on.
Prior to that, no, you couldn't do that. Being dialed into AOL meant you were only connected to AOL. The email did have an internet gateway (since 1992), you could email people at other internet hosts, but you couldn't use regular internet software until that DLL came out.