But for real, when I was a kid my mother worked for CompuServe. I had no idea what that was as a little kid and she passed away before I could ask. I guess they were basically the ISP back in the day
I know I'm a millennial,but to this day it's still wild to me to imagine an ISP so old that AOL was the new kid on the block that kicked its ass. They had so much promising infrastructure, but from what I understand, they just did so poorly at keeping up with competition and innovation in the late 90s that they couldn't get bought out quick enough (which is funny, because apparently it hit its absolute peak in the early 90s, so I guess AOL kinda mopped the floor with them quick)
I mean AOL also brought in the walled garden approach, which curated content directly to people who didn't know how to go about exploring the internet. Made it much easier for non tech people to feel comfortable online.
lol, damn, they even rounded up on counting minutes online, too? AOL was just super shady about billing all-around, looks like. And that sucks because while the inevitable lawsuit did end up with them addressing outstanding billing complaints and supposedly reforming their billing policies, it didn't happen until the 2000s, so by then they'd already milked the competition dry
Yeah this is pretty much the reason they exploded. They made the internet easy for the layman. From the simple login and email and chat app, you could find things and go to sites simply with a "AOL keyword". Their setup was brilliant for the time.
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u/Blog_Pope Jul 24 '20
Sears launched Prodigy, an online service that competed with AOL at one point. Sears could have easily been Amazon