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Glen wrote:<br>
<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:3d535a84-8103-9b4d-8cdc-49107b29cbbc@gmail.com">
<br>
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.
<br>
</blockquote>
<p>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. <br>
</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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)... <br>
</p>
<p>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?). <span
style="font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Times New
Roman",serif" lang="EN-US"><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.well.com/join/">https://www.well.com/join/</a>
$150/year!</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Times New
Roman",serif" lang="EN-US"><br>
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