AOL in 1995.
From the book “America Online’s Internet for Windows: Easy Graphical Access - The AOL Way” by Tom Lichty.

#AOL #AmericaOnline #90sInternet #RetroTech #90sNostalgia #ThrowbackTech #YouveGotMail #RetroComputing

As a web developer, I think it's important to stay up-to-date on current technologies.

So, I picked up this book today to 10× my skills.

#Programming #WebDevelopment #WebDev #AOL #AmericaOnline

¡¿ #AOL cobra por #SoporteTécnico?!  

#AssistByAOL #AmericaOnLine

Some days you just need a surge protector, power strip, a phone line splitter for modem use, and a phone cable, all in a portable package.

(Acquired this in an auction lot bin of cables that included the thing I wanted: the original cord for the Apple Adjustable Keyboard I won in a different lot.)

#RetroComputing #AOL #AmericaOnline

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

Let’s be honest… when you saw this story two things happened;
1) You thought “Dial-up still exists?”
2) You heard a familiar voice in your head say “You’ve got mail!”

#AOL #AmericaOnline #Internet #Technology
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/aol-dial-up-silenced-rcna234655

Today (Sept. 30) is the final day. 🫡

"Say bye-bye to the beeps and boops of AOL's dial-up internet service"

Dial-up modem connecting video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1UY7eDRXrs

NPR article: https://www.npr.org/2025/08/12/nx-s1-5499539/aol-dial-up-ending

#AOL #AmericaOnline #nostalgia

Today, AOL users say “goodbye” to those loud, screeching modem sounds that confirmed you were connecting to the information superhighway.

#RetroTech #AOL #AmericaOnline #90sComputing #DigitalNostalgia #OldSchoolTech #TechThrowback #1990sTech

The Day I Said No to Google – DrWeb’s Domain

A personal essay… from DrWeb

The Day I Said No to Google

“I am probably the only person I know who said ‘no’ to Google in a meeting with Larry Page and Sergey Brin…”

Confession: Given my birthday coming up (hint!), I am older than dirt. Some of the memories remain, thank genes I guess. But, others are foggy. I remember the day, but the exact date escapes me. I remember the meeting, but in many ways, it has blurred into meetings of my life for business. So, I cheated, kinda. You get to decide. Claude, a creative intelligence, assisted me with the writing. I edited. This is what we did together. It felt like the best way to tell this old story now. Let’s travel back to yesteryear.. the Internet was young… One history note, I was the first Webmaster at DIALOG, and employed there from 1995-1997, when along with many others, MAID bought DIALOG, and I was let go, fired. Carry your things out in box time. My time at America Online was December, 1998, Product Manager for AOL NetFind, until November, 1999. Enjoy the memory lane!

The Meeting Above the Shop

The afternoon sun streamed through the windows of that small conference room above a Palo Alto shop, casting long rectangles of California light across our makeshift boardroom table. It was one of those perfect Silicon Valley days where the air itself seemed to hum with possibility, but the fluorescent overhead lights and generic office chairs reminded us this was business, not a social call.

I’d arranged my materials carefully before they arrived—a brief summary report for my AOL team, printed specs for what we needed, bottled water for everyone. The kind of preparation that had become second nature after years in this business [and later becoming DIALOG’s first webmaster dealing with sophisticated databases and searches], now managing search for America Online in this digital Wild West. Twenty-five million AOL users were counting on decisions like this one, though they’d never know it.

When Larry and Sergey walked in, there was something almost academic about them—Larry doing most of the talking while Sergey hung back, observing. Their energy was unmistakably that of people who believed they were onto something big. But belief and business results were different things, as I’d learned the hard way. Perhaps it was like meeting Steve Jobs, early, in his garage.

We think we can scale this in ways nobody else can, Larry was saying, sketching out their vision with the kind of confident hand gestures. You could hear the enthusiasm.

The algorithm they called PageRank sounded revolutionary in theory—ranking pages by how other pages linked to them, like academic citations. Elegant, certainly. But elegant theories didn’t always survive contact with millions of real users hitting your servers every day. Then, at AOL, we were still in the era of typing in code and managing data with spreadsheets, so, yes, after all—proven performance mattered more than brilliant concepts.

The afternoon conversation had that particular rhythm of meetings where both sides already knew the likely outcome. We asked about customers—they had few. Performance metrics under load—they were working on it. Detailed technical specifications—still being refined.

I felt those were all reasonable answers for a startup, but AOL couldn’t run on reasonable answers. We needed proven, and growign solutions, the kind Excite was delivering with their concept-based search algorithm and comprehensive portal approach—news, weather, email, the one-stop destination our users expected. I used Excite, so were many early adopters.

I found myself watching Sergey more than listening to Larry at one point. There was something in his quiet attention that suggested he understood exactly what we were really evaluating. Not just their technology, but their readiness to handle the weight of AOL’s scale and expectations. Maybe he knew, as I was beginning to suspect, that this was more a friendly courtesy call than a serious negotiation.

The meeting wound down with handshakes and the kind of polite enthusiasm that masks mutual recognition—they knew we weren’t ready to bet on an unproven system, and we knew they weren’t ready for us yet. Outside, that sunlit, warm California afternoon continued, indifferent to the small pivotal moment that had just passed in a conference room above a Palo Alto shop.

Later, writing up my report for the team, I found myself thinking about Steve Case back at headquarters in Virginia. Our larger-than-life CEO had built AOL by making bold bets, but also by knowing when to stick with what worked. Excite had customers, track records, proven performance under the kind of load we’d throw at them. Our homework showed the numbers, and it was a future option we felt we had to explore.

Their concept-based searching could understand meaning beyond mere keyword matching—sophisticated technology that had already proven itself with millions of daily users. It wasn’t glamorous compared to Larry and Sergey’s academic theories, but it was safe. And yet, choosing Excite felt like the next step, of what would be many.

I never found out if my report made it all the way to Case’s desk, but I liked to think it did—one small decision in the endless stream of choices that kept twenty-five million people connected to the emerging world of the web. At the time, it felt like the right call. Careful. Responsible. Business-smart.

The irony, of course, would only become clear later.

#1999 #2000 #2025 #AI #AmericaOnline #AOL #California #Essay #Excite #Google #History #Irony #Opinion #PaloAlto #PersonalHistory #Science #searchTechnology #Technology #UnitedStates #UniversityAvenue