On Fri, 12 Dec 2008 12:01:17 -0800, "Calif Bill"
wrote:


"Mike" wrote in message
. ..

wrote in message
...
On Thu, 11 Dec 2008 22:54:38 -0500, BAR wrote:

Why did anyone ever pay for AOL?
There was a time when it was only Prodigy and AOL, before there really
was an internet, from the consumer standpoint. It was all proprietary
software and captive content. Other than that you just had local BBS
services. If you traveled you wanted something with national coverage.
It still is about the most stable ISP. The rest came and went with too
much frequency to actually give anyone your Email address and have it
be useful a year later. Even now I can still use my 15 year old AOL
address but my Mediaone address is dead, as is the successor
Roadrunner (ended up Comcast), Sprint then Earthlink, ended up Embarq.
and a half dozen other places that I had accounts with. (RIP)

The software stopped being stable when they incorporated Internet
Explorer as the browser and W/9x. Prior to that it was rock solid. I
used to use the W/3.1 version to test communication on machines that
had suspected software problems since it didn't have to be "installed"
and it would run straight from a diskette.

Before Prodigy and AOL there was Compuserve and GEnie. Same stuff, just
earlier.

Actually there was ARPA net for a lot of us.

Heh - In '78, I was at BBN working on a joint project for the US Navy
(which is how I met Admn. Grace Hooper who was there consulting with
BBN on a DEC implementation) and as it happened, Ray Tomlinson was
involved in our project. I asked him point blank if he really didn't
know what he sent as the first remote email message and he grinned and
said he didn't have a clue.

I was told later on by somebody who was, in theory "in the know", that
it was a very naughty joke. :)