[FRIAM] AOL 3.0!

[Frank Wimberly]

I had a CMU Andrew account.  You're all pikers.  Long live AFS.

---
Frank C. Wimberly
140 Calle Ojo Feliz,
Santa Fe, NM 87505

505 670-9918
Santa Fe, NM

On Tue, Jun 7, 2022, 9:41 AM Steve Smith <sasmyth at swcp.com> wrote:

>
> 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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