this post was submitted on 01 Feb 2024
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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.