Date: Sat, 23 Apr 2005 00:19:22 -0400
From: Steve Smith <sgs at aginc.net>
To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at WSFA.org>
Subject: [WSFA] Net History (was Re: Quoting)
Reply-To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at WSFA.org>

MarkLFischer at aol.com wrote:

> AOL was not, in the beginning, an ISP, it was a standalone online service,
> and what content they provided was what you got.  The protocols involved  were
> entirely proprietary.  For one thing, the client side carries a much  heavier
> load than a regular ISP (this is the root of most of the problems people  have
> with AOL).  Legacy issues, and some business choices largely having to  do
> with advertising, have kept AOL in its own insular orbit.

Originally, ARPANet and later the Internet was just one more network.
There were lots of others -- Compuserve, Tymenet, Genie, The Well, and,
of course, AOL.  Not to mention about a zillion PC BBSs.  Each had its
own standard for mail, news, and so forth.  Problem was, they couldn't
communicate with each other.  They also had weird pricing, strange
policies, and quite often didn't work very well.  The Internet, which
was designed as an inherently distributed system, tended to Just Plain
Work.  (There is dispute over the claim that it was designed to survive
a nuclear war, but the design is certainly robust.)  The others were all
modeled on a central server that controlled everything.

When they all started connecting to the Internet, of course there was a
great deal of friction.  AOL was a particular problem, as they had
zillions of users who didn't really believe that anything outside AOL
actually existed.  It got tedious really fast watching a bunch of AOLers
  whining about the moderator not keeping the chat rooms to what they
considered civilized standards.  (The vast majority of USENET newsgroups
are, of course, completely unmoderated.)

It didn't seem to me that AOLers were any more clueless on average then
any other bunch of newbies, it was just that there were so many of them.
  Ya want *really* clueless newbies, try WebTV.  I suspect WebTV was
really trying to hose the Internet (they're owned by Microsoft, after
all.)  Their introduction to USENET, for example, said that everybody
used HTML, all the groups were moderated and perfectly fine for
children, and that animated signatures were Really Cool.  Bleah!

> AOL is useful for beginners, and also users who have no interest in  the geek
> side of things, or "power user" features, and just want a single  package
> with decent utility that gives them what they need with a minimum of  fuss.  From
> years of doing tech support for them, I find that the  archetypal "dumb
> AOLers" are just regular folks dealing with unfamiliar and  vaguely scary
> technology.

This is an important point to keep in mind -- a lot of the things that
"dumb users" get razzed about make perfect sense if you think about them
  from the user's point of view.  My favorite example (probably
apocryphal) happened just after the first Macintosh was introduced.  The
software and OS were seriously buggy and tended to crash a lot.  When a
program crashed, the Mac would put up an icon of a bomb (classical
anarchist; round black ball with burning fuse).  One manager saw this
and assumed that the icon meant that the computer was going to explode,
so he ordered the building evacuated.  Hey, we've all seen computers
explode on TV, right?

--
Steve Smith                                    sgs at aginc dot net
Agincourt Computing                            http://www.aginc.net
"Truth is stranger than fiction because fiction has to make sense."