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Tom Francis - SWSports

On Fri, 12 Dec 2008 14:47:49 -0800 (PST), wrote:

On Dec 12, 3:01*pm, "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.

--Mike

Actually there was ARPA net for a lot of us.- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -

That ran off of heated rocks and bronze, didn't it?!!!!!

Not exactly, but close enough.

Things were pretty primitive in those days. :)

When I think back on our first "big" machine - a whole 2K RAM on a
12X12 PCB with a bootstrap console and a paper tape reader - SANDIA
labs went ga-ga over that much memory on a single board and PAPER TAPE
for programming - man, that was 'da bomb. :)

Literally in this case.

Heck, I go back even further. Our high school math club used to
program Sylvania's mainframe (this was '62) using phone jacks/plugs on
racks six feet tall and four wide - there were fifteen of them.

With vacuum tubes no less. :)

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