- cross-posted to:
- foss
While young Martin was happily buzzing the windows of his MSN buddies, and dads around the world were ecstatic about seeing stock quotes in AOL, some idealistic nerds had a really different vision for the future of the internet. People like Tim Berners-Lee were quietly working on something called the world wide web, where any user’s computer could connect to any website, not just the handful of companies that AOL struck a business development deal with, and where the network itself would be fully open and decentralized.
This is misleading bordering on revisionist. The internet AOL had made available to everyone (e.g. their famous email being delivered over SMTP to anyone, whether or not in that handful of companies) was already something created by “idealistic nerds” to be fully open and decentralized. It’s weird to present the web as some “idealistic” new way of doing things, when the AOL model was by far the outlier, and HTTP/HTML was more of a continuation of the model that had already been humming along for decades (which AOL had hopped onto and done such a wonderful business by capitalizing.)
God, I remember in the early-ish days explaining what browsers were to AOL users.
It honestly felt pretty early in AOL days that people were mostly just using it for email, chatrooms, and otherwise as a web browser on the regular, non-AOL internet. Then AIM becoming more popular as time went on, but eventually third-party clients totally obviated that in a lesson Google would learn from well (and their takeaway was to destroy Jabber/XMPP with great prejudice before they lose control over their users).
Explaining parents that all they needed to do was open another browser – literally any other browser – while AOL was running and they could go to the websites with it was rough. “AOL has you connected to the internet already, you don’t need to use it to go to infoseek.com” or whatever.
Whenever they finally did it it seemed like magic. WOW, how does this connect to AOL! Then they’d close AOL and disconnect the modem and tell me the other browser was broken.
I remember all my friends convincing me to switch to Opera because it had tabs and that was revolutionary.
Is this mainly a US-centric take though? In the UK, yes we had AOL here and a fair number of people I knew had it, but it was never dominant as far as I could tell (I’d be happy to be corrected, I only came in around 1997). It was MSN messenger that became established as the dominant instant messenger here by about 2000, I don’t really remember too many people using AIM.
I had some French cousins we would talk to a little bit at the time, and I remember their descriptions of the early internet were just absolutely bizarre in comparison with the minitels.
In those days, I’m sure every major region and country had vastly different experiences.
But yeah, at least my experience in the US was that AIM was huge. My entire peer group was connected through AIM. That and memorized land line phone numbers.
Yes, the differences are fascinating, I know Minitel was big in France. To my mind it was Freeserve that brought the internet to the masses in the UK (and spawned many dozens of similar ISPs in the late-90s), but seems to be a bit of a footnote now. My peers first started messaging through YIM (Yahoo! Instant Messenger) before MSN took over as the default. I remember AOL was perceived as an expensive ISP which limited the popularity of AIM.
I think my mom still thinks that she has to open Firefox to connect to the internet as she did with AOL. She has broadband so of course she is always connected.
Idk how old your mother is but my dad is 80 (I’m 53) and he doesn’t understand windowing at all. I always thought it strange he has never figured it out. Even phone UIs baffle him. Older generations inability to grasp the concepts behind computer interfaces seems so strange to me. I wonder if a command line interface would make more sense. I know that sounds crazy, but using bash, for example, is more straightforward, in a way. You can list what folder you’re in, execute commands without any images or windows or other distractions. Mainly, it’s memorisation, as opposed to the more abstract concepts behind desktop interfaces. Sorry, I’m rambling now lol.
I was thinking more about what you said. I think at least for my mom her approach is procedural. If she can write down a procedure she can do it… well and has a good reason to do it often. Problem with that, you do not learn UI paradigms on one hand and on the other she is afraid to just try something for fear of breaking something. She is also not good at figuring out what the graphical icons mean. Some of that is context but it is not her strength either. UIs are based on paradigms and on exploring, no documentation needed. The lack of documentation and procedures really bothers her. Exploration is too scary.
As far as CLI, I am not sure she would use a computer at all without a GUI though I think she could do it because she is good a procedures. She would have to have a good reason.
Also she also will not use a desktop computer… She had one for a time and only really started using a computer often after I got her a laptop. She’s a very mobile person.
My mom is well into her 90s. She knows how to use her laptop, Libreoffice Writer, her printer, Thunderbird, and Firefox. Pretty much nothing else. She can stream her sports and navigate Facebook. She does not send email any more. Partially forgotten how and partially her contacts are no longer around. She is afraid to do business online so I help her with that, though she is fine researching and using search. Her big fear is making a mistake so she calls me when she needs help. That habit really helps in avoiding social engineering and malware.
She is a little afraid of her iPhone and Apple watch. She can make and receive calls. She can revcieve texts but does not send them. No interest I think. Recently to my surprise, she has gotten excited about the sleep monitoring app and uses that.
She is probably well ahead of her age group. Her mom was too. Back then her mom’s friends thought that she was a wonder to be able to use a microwave.
They actually said that? I’m not even going to bother watching that nonsense.
Actually CompuServe was before AOL. AOL was just a rewarming of it with flash sessions because the connect costs were so high. AOL was also faster to embrace actual internet connection and the web. Before this no one except universities, the military, and select few at large companies had internet access. For the general public dialup and BBS was the the thing.
Only point is how you experienced all this depended on who you were and what access you had.
Yeah, absolutely. I experienced BBS culture, and the pre-web internet, and Compuserve, and 100% agree with you. The big revolutionary thing about AOL in those days that distinguished it from something like Compuserve was exactly that it opened up the masses to the cooperative internet, which had previously been a very niche world, and was my opinion vastly superior to anything available on Compuserve or pre-internet AOL.
(What happened to the niche world because of the influx of AOL users and their fellow travelers is a whole different discussion.)
The point that I’m making is that the niche world was already cooperative and decentralized, whereas the guy in the video is making it sound like Tim Berners-Lee was some idealistic nerd who was coming up with something new. HTTP was actually more centralized relatively speaking than what came before it, because your web site could only be served by your own hardware, which wasn’t true of e.g. Usenet.
Yes. Usenet is the thing I miss. Miss CompuServe some too. Not the $24 an hour cost though.
Before the Web there was Gopher and Wais, and FTP of course.
Before the internet there was UUCP and Bitnet and email and mailing lists. Use to be terminal connection networks too like Tymnet which got around the high cost of long distance to some extent.
AOL is the PC-centric version of QuantumLink (Q-Link), the online service made for the Commodore 64. Much more vast reach of services and then gave their customers access to the web and internet.
That quote gave me nausea.
My favorite part in this video, was the ending:
maston’s CEO told me that for now these there basically no plans for native monetization either. As a content creator I of course have to have monetization. I mean, I spent over a month on this video alone and also thousands of Euros on equipment, rent, people editing the videos, etc., etc. And so until the fediverse figures out monetization, you can support my work by watching my stuff over on nebula
…said on a video on YouTube.
Wait a moment, doesn’t YouTube have “native monetization”? Wonder why he’s not using that… maybe “native monetization” isn’t all that great a thing after all? 🧐
He is using YouTube’s monetization…
Only for the blurb/ad for his extra content off-YouTube. If native monetization was so great, why not also upload the other videos to YouTube?
Because he’s heavily invested in Nebula and believes their system is better for him and other creators in the long term. That doesn’t mean he believes YouTube monetization doesn’t work at all, just he prefers to keep bonus videos on Nebula to entice users to join.
That sounds like a “I want to monetize the bonus videos… and I refuse to not monetize the ad too”. Good for him while he can pull it off, but IMHO the future lies in using PeerTube for the ads/blurbs, or directly the whole videos along a Patreon or similar, and leave YouTube behind.