Now to find my 9600 bps MNP5 Fax external modem, so I can go on the internet in 1991 using my 16550AF serial UART

@Kierkegaanks @gimulnautti It's one of the reasons I refuse to buy anything that is #Apple. When #Apple #Disintermediated me from THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS of the Music I stored on my #AppleiPod and tied it to an #AppleID tied to an ancient #AOL account, I began to say #FUCKTECHNOLOGY. I won't be milked anymore.

An open-source AIM and ICQ server written in Go, that’s so cool. Really impressive how full-featured it is!

https://github.com/mk6i/retro-aim-server

Was Prodigy an online service, a band, a rapper, a Pokémon series, a Star Trek series, or something else?

Since I have nothing (sorry, I mean *EVERYTHING*) to do on Thanksgiving, I'm premiering my "online in '89" talk from @demosplash on YouTube in ~2 hours (8pm EST):

https://youtu.be/hUeNciQWysI

Lots of well-informed #tech folks these days didn't get to experience a #BBS, #AOL, #Prodigy, etc. Yet the #demoscene really thrived in this era!

Come to @demosplash in #Pittsburgh this weekend and hear @inversephase talk about being online in a pre-web world!

http://demosplash.org/

AOL’s ‘You’ve Got Mail’ voice, Elwood Edwards, dies at age 74. Read more at @theverge. #AOL #YouveGotMail #Tech #Technology https://flip.it/NKy8Nb

Voice of AOL's 'You've Got Mail' Dead at 74

https://www.tmz.com/2024/11/07/elwood-edwards-voice-of-aol-youve-got-mail-dead/

Try before you buy - 15 HOURS FREE!

#ICQ was the first "walled-garden" messenger app that went viral in the mid-90s. Then #AOL bought it and for a few years AIM and ICQ were interoperable. Its competitors were Yahoo! Messenger and Google Talk. In retrospect they began the trend of breaking the internet into corporate-owned bubbles. There was IRC and an open standard messenger protocol #XMPP was not adopted by these major players except Google (which later dropped it too)

https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/25/24164579/icq-shut-down-june

ICQ is closing down. It was really at its height in 2000 and that is when we integrated ICQ into Opera. We made a small (5k) client and it worked really well.

AOL had purchased ICQ and they were concerned about MSN taking users from them by connecting to their service, so they stopped supporting 3rd party clients. We contacted them, to see if they would make an exception for us, but they did not.

They said that if we removed our 5k client, we could maybe discuss bundling their client, but it was bigger than Opera, so that was not going to happen.

A lot of arguments people are making about why #Threads should not be allowed to join the #fediverse are some of the same arguments people made when #AOL was bridging its systems with #Usenet and later the larger #Internet.

The arguments were wrong then just as they are wrong now.

You can't be for an open fediverse if your first inclination is to shut out #Meta and Threads.

I mean you can.

But then you'll be a hypocrite.

New post!

What if #AOL still existed? What if the telecommunications act of 1996 never passed? These are questions I answer while having a terrible cold.

You've been warned.

Thanks to @vincentritter for kindly offering me early access to his cool new blog platform #Scribbles. It's really nice. I'm so sorry this is my debut post.

#SmallWeb #indieWeb #blogging

https://scribbles.page/jason/posts/aol-and-the-multiverse-of-sadness-s1smvng3

What if the real #Fedipact was that the whole #Fediverse exclusively set AOL.com as their homepage and used AOL for all their web searches from now until 1st January 2024 to really confuse #AOL employees when they returned back to work. They'd think it was 2001 again.