[FRIAM] AOL 3.0!

[Steve Smith]

Glen wrote:
>
> Just yesterday, I saw an email post to a math forum from someone with 
> an aol.com suffix. I thought "Who in hell still uses AOL?" Ha! Now 
> I've got a bad case of FOMO. But I'll be damned if I'm joining yet 
> another Discord server ... maybe next week.

I was recently back in touch with a high-school chum.  She was quite 
proud of her aol.com account and I didn't have the heart to tell her how 
much the olde garde who had been on some version of the internet before 
Al Gore (and AOL and Compuserve) invented it considered AOL users to be 
an embarrassment.  And then there are the WELL (whole earth 'lectronic 
link) folks who were (in?) ordinately proud of their Bay Area BBS system 
that hosted thousands (tens of?) in the 80s.  I still have friends who 
use their well.com addys proudly.

I am still a little mad/dismissive of AOL (and SciAm) because we did an 
early hypermedia "proof of concept" for SciAm (student project at LANL) 
and they blithely were (in the background) signing like a 10 year deal 
with AOL to provide that service for their customers.   For that whole 
decade (into the 2000s) I think Scientific American did not even have a 
website (or when they did it was served through AOL).   We did all the 
mockup on a NeXT machine which was a little unfair and/or showed things 
in too good of a light really.   Maybe what AOL did (pretty lame BTW) 
was actually a good LCD (least common denominator) for *their* customers 
and many who were dialing in at 1200bps on an early Winderz or even DOS 
machine.

I was an early patron of the first ISP in Santa Fe (StudioX/nets.com) 
with Roadrunner.com and several others coming in on their heels for my 
first private e-mail/web address, but let it go when (on their 10th 
anniversary) they *said* they were selling/passing us all off to one of 
the others and becoming nothing but a boutique web design/services 
shop.   Apparently enough of their customers raised a ruckus because 
after I'd moved to ABQ based Southwest Cyberport (thus swcp.com) they 
retracted the threat and kept nets.com running (through whomever bought 
them out)...

I do sometimes covet a well.com address, but not enough to actually sign 
up for it (seems they *still* offer new well.com addresses?). 
https://www.well.com/join/ $150/year!


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