One of the earliest consumer internet options, AOL’s dial-up service was once the most common way for people to access the early web.
Today is October 1, 1993.
September is over.
You can finally wake me up
While I hated AOL for reasons, this is the end of an era. RIP
AOL will be remembered more fondly for things like this. But, nobody ever has a fond memory of the software AOL shoved out. It was clampware, unreliable and frequently crashed.
But they gave out nice coasters
Before that, they gave out floppy disks. You could tape over the write protect hole and reuse them.
But they were 720k. Barely usable
You could punch a hole in the corner and double the capacity 😁
You couldn’t flip a 3.5in floppy
You didn’t need to flip it, 3.5" readers could already read both sides, but the hole or lack of is what told them whether both sides were available. I’ve done it myself.
https://www.webcommand.net/index.php/2019/07/31/does-anyone-remember-the-floppy-disk-punch-notcher/
They were free and not everything needs 1.44MB.
Fuck AOL they killed CompuServe.
Someone else remembers CompuServe?!
Ah man I am saddened by this. I first got on the internet in 1997 at my house on a 14.4k modem using AOL. In 2001 I got cable internet and still used AOL a little. My career now is because learning to code by reading code from AOL Progs in Visual Basic 3.0. Fuck Steve Case!
Steve Case!
Now there’s a name I’ve not heard in a long time.
A long time.
