[FRIAM] AOL 3.0!

[Steve Smith]

Frank -

You of the "lost generation" are definitely the frontiersmen of our 
domain...

My first e-mail was on an ATT Unix system in 1977,  as all UUNET 
addresses were in those days, you had to guess (or know) the 
intermediate relays that would get from here to there, off the machine, 
much less off campus.   I hit LANL in 1981 and we all had lanl.gov addys 
(mine sas, go figure) which meant *most* UUNET folks could get to me 
with minimal effort (and vice-versa)...  as I remember it, virtually 
every university (and military and scientific org) had a DNS entry by 
mid 80s, facilitating it all. An added level of indirection (degree of 
freedom) as the solution often is.

I was an early adopter of AFS (as well as the MIT suite of IP-based 
toolkits) in the 80s.  AFS was the perfect proof by example that (as I 
remember it) lead to NFS.

A *heck* of a lot has happened in the last 50 years... (UNIX Epoch?)  
and it is a strange brew of open-source, academic, big tech, big gov, 
and scrappy entrepreneurs...

On 6/7/22 5:58 PM, Frank Wimberly wrote:
> 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 <http://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 <http://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 <http://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 <http://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 <http://swcp.com>) they retracted the threat and kept
>     nets.com <http://nets.com> running (through whomever bought them
>     out)...
>
>     I do sometimes covet a well.com <http://well.com> address, but not
>     enough to actually sign up for it (seems they *still* offer new
>     well.com <http://well.com> addresses?). https://www.well.com/join/
>     $150/year!
>
>
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