Beautiful Decay of AOL

I think this classic <i>Onion</i> piece from 2000 is always worth referencing in these situations - back then, using the internet for movie times and recipes was the subject for humor <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theonion.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;area-man-consults-internet-whenever-possible-1515" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theonion.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;area-man-consults-internet-w...</a><p>We&#x27;ve come a long way in a short time, but AOL (etc) deserve to be remembered for inspiring what was possible, even if they ultimately failed in the execution.

I don&#x27;t know why the author&#x27;s tone is so mean and snarky. Yes, the web won (inevitable and thank goodness), but it&#x27;s not like many 19-year-old web pages are still around and serving working links either.<p>And for all its fundamental closed-ecosystem walled-garden flaws, AOL brought the first taste of the Internet to millions. We should celebrate the accomplishments and learn from the failings, not dance on the graves of the vanquished.

This is really old fuzzy memory, but at one point there was some kind of administrative or staff plugin for AOL that would let you put in a sub-site-ID and jump straight to some of these things. A bunch of people started using a several-years-old superbowl message board to trade warez. It was like operating out of an abandoned stadium... but over 28.8.

Many, many, many years ago, I took over an office space from Matt Goldman, who was one the founders of The Blue Man Group. His full time job, before starting Blue Man, was duplicating AOL disks. Day after day. Just one of those tidbits of AOL history.

For some strange reason this reminded me of DeadAIM by Jdennis. Man AOL really handed the modern web to Facebook.

It&#x27;s amazing how differently time move online vs meatspace. Take computing out of the picture and 2007 isn&#x27;t very long ago at all. Look at a few web pages from then and it feels like 20 years ago.

AOL used to have an active hacking scene. Some of that is also still archived:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;mattmazur.com&#x2F;projects&#x2F;aol-files-com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;mattmazur.com&#x2F;projects&#x2F;aol-files-com&#x2F;</a>

The camo and leather fashion section is interesting as the second US Gulf War was just getting underway. Makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up in a <i>Oceania is at war with Eastasia.</i> kind of way.

Fascinating how the comments here are uniformly praising AOL.

How do we archive this?

AOL -&gt; geocities -&gt; friendster -&gt; myspace -&gt; facebook, the next AOL.