AOL version 1.5!



I thought this might amuse some of you. I found this old mailer in my desk from AOL from 1992 when they were still just getting started. Notice the huge old floppy disk! I actually started with AOL the year before when they began beta testing of the initial DOS version of the software. It didn't run under Windows... (Windows existed then, but it really didn't do much, hardly anyone used it.), the AOL software used the GeoWorks environment, a very neat piece of software that at the time had Windows beat hands down for ease of use, cost and it's compact code. It was a graphical interface that actually ran on an XT computer and it was incredibly stable. Microsoft Windows eventually just swamped it; Gates had all the money he needed to promote Windows from his sale of DOS. (Which he bought from someone btw...)

Anyway, 11 years ago AOL was just the kewlist thing out there! I had used text based services like Compuserve and GEnie, but this was something else! When I signed on, there were somewhere between 100 and 200 thousand members and the fastest connection speed was 2400bps...that's 2.4k, hehe. Steve Case actually answered one of my e-mail questions! I left them around the time they hit 6 million members; when they decided it was more profitable to have 6 million frustrated customers rather than 600 thousand satisfied ones. Now they have over 35 million customers, so I guess some of them are happy, but I can't imagine why.

It pretty amazing to look at what's happened to the online community in just a little over a decade!