Lmst

Dialtone – AOL 3.0 Server

#HackerNews #Dialtone #AOL #3.0 #Server #tech #news #internet #nostalgia #server #technology

Sunday Paper

Jeff Ventura writes about Apple's role in Microsoft's downfall. The agent is OS-X. CrunchGear reports that Comcast thinks its best customers should get off its network. Broadband networks are not to be used to watch videos or download software. Web Worker Daily wants to know what chores you outsource? I briefly outsourced housecleaning before my wife took personal offence. And the Linux and Open Source Blog reports that GAIM makes nice with AOL and gets a new name. On my MacBook, I use […]

https://islandinthenet.com/sunday-morning-reading-2/

Version History: AIM

I had no idea that AOL hated AIM.

https://overcast.fm/+ABRo_YM0MMo

#VersionHistoryPodcast #AOL #AIM #internetHisory #podcastEpisode

I met approximately 75% of people that were connected to me back in the old #ICQ chat days. I'm still friends with 3 people who originally met me from ICQ.

Did you meet many of your former ICQ friends, offline too?

What platform did you first meet strangers online from & what platform did you first meet those strangers, offline, after some online communications?

It was #AOL for me. I met & briefly dated a pro hockey manager that first contacted me via AOL online platform.

#GenX #OnlineConnections

@peteorrall Don't disrespect a #unix like that! CD costers are reserved for #AOL cds only! 😁

@hrgajek berichtet auf Teltarif: https://www.teltarif.de/verkauf-aol-e-mail-finanz-investoren-mischkonzern/news/100890.html
Das hatte ich vorher gar nicht aufm schirm.
#AOL

@geerlingguy @dragonarchitect yeah.

I got like half a dozen #refurbishers on my bookmarks and given the rampant #Enshittification with #AIslop I should do something like a #donations-financed site that actually links to stuff…

Kinda like #AOL did it…

Screencaps of just the #GEnie history post from the thread, a first-hand account of the bigwigs running a promising internet company into the ground where #AOL easily scooped up the crown

Forum post, August 2, 2002.
Mark_Asher:
GEnie was a lot of fun, but they moved so slowly to a Windows version it just killed them.

anonymous_user:
And therein lies a long tale of corporate stupidty that boggles me today. GEnie was an excess capacity service of GE Information Services, a division of GE that billed around $500 million a year. We were the only consumer division in GEIS; all the other customers were businesses, such as banks, etc. As such, no one in the organization really liked GEnie, because we ate resources they wanted for their customers. We were grudgingly tolerated, however, because of the $10 million or so we billed every year, 50% went directly to the profit line and that turned out to be 15% of GEIS’s bottom line.

At least four times that I can remember, Bill Louden, the General Manager of GEnie, went to Helene Runtaugh, the President of GEIS, and begged for $50,000 to have a GUI developed to compete with AOL’s AppleLink and PC-Link services and CIS’s offline interfaces. Each time, he was turned down because that was too much money. Eventually, the guys in the IBM PC RoundTable did a CIS-like interface called Aladdin in their spare time and were eventually paid the lordly sum of around $3,000 for the rights (as I recall; I’m a bit hazy on the actual terms).

And that was it. GEIS’s objective was to squeeze every possible penny out of GEnie and put nothing back into it. I remember begging for money to give as advances to sign more MMOGs; my Games products accounted for between 20% and 25% of GEnie’s total revenues in any given year. From 1989 through 1991, I was allowed to spend a grand total of less than $40,000 in advances on 9 or 10 games. The only reason we got MultiPlayer BattleTech was, after I failed to get $30,000 in advances from GEIS so Kesmai could port a game we all expected to gross at least $600,000 in the first year, Activision took a flyer, cut a deal with Kesmai and paid for the porting. God bless them; if they hadn’t, it would never have happened.

Here’s how utterly stupid Ms. Runtaugh was: In 1993, Bill Louden, then President of NVN Online, a privately funded start-up based in Houston, TX, negotiated a $7 million buy-out of GEnie to help jump-start NVN. It was approved all the way up the GEIS pecking order until it came to Ms. Runtaugh’s desk for signature. On the day she was to sign, AOL announced their quarterly results (they were public by then), noting they were valued at $200 million. Runtaugh immediately reversed course and nixed the GEnie buyout, saying if AOL was worth $200 million, so was the text-based, moribund GEnie.

GEIS sold GEnie to IDT 1995-96 for about $1 million.

Stupid, stupid, stupid.

Mark_Asher:
AOL being late to the game was actually a big advantage. They build their service from the start to integrate into Windows.

anonymous_user:
Well, actually, no, we didn’t; we always reused code wherever we could. The first PC version of AOL was built in 1988-89 from the Apple II code for the Tandy computers under a deal similar to the one AOL (then Quantum Computer Services) cut with Commodore, using a proprietary GUI and named PC-Link. I’ll never forget the day the guys in shipping came trundling down the hallways with carts, dropping off boxes with Tandy computers in every office for us to assemble. I hated the Tandy; it required three different sized screwdrivers in both standard and Phillips heads to put together and though it was touted as IBM-PC compatible, there was a bunch of software that wouldn’t work right with it.

That Tandy GUI was also ported to work on the old IBM PS1 (?) and renamed Promenade, which I believe was intended to compete with Prodigy. By the time I left AOL in early 1989 to return to GEnie, we had four services, none of which could talk to each other: Applelink:Personal Edition for the Apple II and IIgs, QuantumLink for the C64/128, PC-Link for the Tandy and Promenade for the PS1. We were working on APE for the Mac to ship in late Spring of 89, and had just hired Doug Whately, formerly with Microprose on the Darkland team (and formerly my assistant , then Chief SysOp of the APE Games Forums), to

to make PC-Link work with the old Geoworks operating system.

For those who don’t remember, Geoworks was actually Windows before MS got arund to making a version, a GUI-powered OS that would run on virtually any IBM PC-compatible processor that existed at the time. It beat MS-DOS hands-down and gave DR-DOS a run for the money. Unfortunately, they couldn’t compete with MS’s exclusive bundling deals with the hardware manufacturers and evetually died out, even though it was a far better alternative to Windows1.0 through to Windows 3.x.

It was this version of the PC-Link software that was eventually ported over to MS-DOS and Windows, although I’m unsure of which Windows version; it may have been 2, it may have been 3. Around 1992-93, AOL changed it’s name to AOL, combined all the services into one entity, shut down the C64/128 service and went public.

And that’s my history lesson for the day, <g>

-Jessica

Anyone seeing AOL IMAP issues today?

I monitor AOL email for a vulnerable adult, via IMAP under the Gmail client, using an app-specific password. It stopped working some time between yesterday and today. I've reset the app password, and waited a bit for it to propagate, and it's still failing. Anyone else seeing this?

#AOL
#IMAP

Man discovers 'one sound' that, if you know it, precisely pinpoints your age

https://fed.brid.gy/r/https://www.upworthy.com/one-sound-from-the-90s-ex1

Oh wow. #msnbc is no more. I remember when NBC and #microsoft started that as like a giant rip-off of #AOL keywords to get people to use MSN. Did anyone actually subscribe to MSN?

30 years later, still got my #AOL addy ;-) #Tech #RetroTech #Email

Screenshot of an AOL-branded email inbox, with mostly spam messages saying "Your dream bathroom design starts here" and "MUST SEE therapy targets REAL REASON cancer starts".

Once upon a time, #AOL tried to convince everyone IT was the #Internet. Now, #Bitcoin is trying to convince the world IT is #Cryptocurrency. Phonus balonus.

Weekly output: phone plans, Nvidia keynote, passkey adoption, Bending Spoons buys AOL, SpaceX simplifying Starship lander, Internet luminaries on the open Web

This is not going to be a great week for normal sleep cycles: Tuesday, I will wake up at around 4 a.m. to spend a 15-plus hour shift working as an election officer for Arlington, and then Wednesday I’m off to Dulles Airport for this year’s final business trip across the Atlantic. I’m departing for Web Summit in Lisbon several days early because the organizers of another conference, the Mozilla Festival, offered a press pass and a travel stipend to cover that event in Barcelona. I’ve heard good things about this conference over the years, so accepting an invitation to spend a few days in one of my favorite cities in Europe was an easy call.

In addition to what you see below, Patreon readers got a detailed recap of how this past week’s event-packed schedule left its own series of dents in my calendar.

10/28/2025: The Best Cell Phone Plans, Wirecutter

This was going to be a modest update to the guide that I’ve been maintaining since 2014, but T-Mobile jacking up prices while AT&T and Verizon inflicted more modest rate hikes led to us dethroning T-Mo on cost grounds and handing our “for most people” pick to AT&T, which has advanced its own 5G network considerably.

10/28/2025: In DC, Nvidia CEO Touts New AI Partnerships, Goes a Little MAGA, PCMag

Heading into Nvidia’s conference, I was worried that CEO Jensen Huang would go into the weeds about the finer points of GPU architecture. Instead, he used this nearly two-hour keynote to jump from topic to topic without getting into too much detail about any of them–and kept coming back to opportunities to praise President Trump.

10/29/2025: Passkey Adoption Sees Striking Progress, With One Obvious Leader, PCMag

I struggled to get this written at the end of a long workday, resulting in my getting some nuances wrong that required updating the post the next morning.

11/1/2025: Serial Dot-Com Purchaser Bending Spoons to Buy AOL, But Why?, PCMag

Writing about AOL in 2025 makes me feel so old, but as one of PCMag’s graybeards I had to cover the news of Bending Spoons buying the company that once ruled the online world. I got to this story a day after it broke, so I turned that lag into an opportunity to expand the piece with some quotes from a publicist for that Italian firm and from a podcast interview of its CEO Luca Ferrari last year

11/1/2025: After Elon Tantrum, SpaceX Now Prepping ‘Simplified’ Starship-Based Lunar Lander, PCMag

Since I wrote about Elon Musk’s childish reaction to NASA’s understandable concern over the pace of its Human Landing System work, I had to reach for a keyboard to cover SpaceX’s grown-up corporate response.

11/1/2025: ‘The Truth Is Paywalled.’ Internet Vets Lament the State of the ‘Open’ Web, PCMag

This Monday-evening panel was one of the first items on my calendar this week, but having event after event after event follow it led to me not writing it up until Thursday night. Once again, it was a serious treat to hear some of the Internet’s founding figures talk about the state of the thing they invented.

#AmericaOnline #AOL #ArtemisIII #ATT #BendingSpoons #BrewsterKahle #CindyCohn #Dashlane #FoundationForAmericanInnovation #HumanLandingSystem #JensenHuang #Nvidia #NvidiaGTCDC #passkeyExport #passkeys #phonePlans #smartphonePlans #SpaceX #TMobile #unlimitedData #verizon #VintCerf

#BendingSpoons, a Milan-based tech conglomerate, acquires #underperforming but #popular #techbrands and transforms them for efficiency. The company, valued at over $10 billion, has acquired numerous companies including #Evernote, #WeTransfer, and is set to acquire #AOL and #Vimeo, focusing on improving products, services, and monetisation strategies. https://techcrunch.com/2025/10/31/what-is-bending-spoons-everything-to-know-about-aols-acquirer/?eicker.news #tech #media #news

¿Qué es doblar cucharas? Todo lo que hay que retener sobre el adquirente de AOL #adquirente #AOL #árboles_de_hoja_perenne #cucharas #doblar #Doblar_cucharas #hay #Qué #saber #sobre #todo #ButterWord #Spanish_News Comenta tu opinión 👇
https://butterword.com/que-es-doblar-cucharas-todo-lo-que-hay-que-retener-sobre-el-adquirente-de-aol/?feed_id=51803&_unique_id=6905a54a62ab4

Mashable: AOL to be acquired for $1.5 billion by the same company that bought Vimeo, Evernote. “…millions of people still hear that infamous catchphrase to this day when logging into their email account on America Online, better known as AOL. And those millions of users are worth a significant chunk of change to the Italian app maker Bending Spoons, which just announced it was acquiring AOL […]

https://rbfirehose.com/2025/10/30/mashable-aol-to-be-acquired-for-1-5-billion-by-the-same-company-that-bought-vimeo-evernote/

Internet pioneer: Bending Spoons from Italy now also takes over AOL

Bending Spoons' shopping spree continues, the Italian company is now also buying AOL. The website and mail provider are being taken over.

https://www.heise.de/en/news/Internet-pioneer-Bending-Spoons-from-Italy-now-also-takes-over-AOL-10965197.html?wt_mc=sm.red.ho.mastodon.mastodon.md_beitraege.md_beitraege&utm_source=mastodon

#AOL #EMail #Übernahme #Wirtschaft #Yahoo #news

> Bending Spoons to acquire AOL
https://techcrunch.com/2025/10/29/bending-spoons-to-acquire-aol/

AOHell still exists? And who the heck is buying them now?

#tech #Internet #AOL

Die Einkaufstour von Bending Spoons geht weiter, das italienische Unternehmen kauft jetzt auch AOL. Übernommen werden die Website und der Mail-Provider. #AOL

Internetpionier: Bending Spoon...

#aol

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