Star One Smart Blog's

...to 1994. America On Line.

You've got humor!

Goodbye.

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h/t PW's Craig C.

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I actually did use AOL, for a brief interval. I remember crossing email swords with Steve Case, around that time, about the difficulty AOL presented to finding the World Wide Web. They kept it hidden away, preferring users to play in their own sandbox (my term, in my email to Case, that prompted an angry response). AOL delighted in it's overwhelming internalized playpen homepage, and resented the 'outside' sites that was the burgeoning WWW. Sometimes the WWW was 'unavailable'. I didn't save that email to anc from Case, but it was a classic. Trust me. As usual, I was right on the money...the Web proved a bit more interesting than AOL's scratchbox. ;D

After I quit AOL, I used various 'new' services (AT&T, BellSouth, Mindspring, MSN, a slew of others) but I never returned to AOL, no matter how many hundreds of floppies (then, later, CD's) they mass-mailed promising '30 Hours FREE!' dial up service.

Today, I see an AOL email address, I immediately associate that with n00b. And I hope that, soon, that person will finally drop AOL for something more...adult.

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