05-08-2013, 07:44 PM
davemchine wrote:
Slightly off topic but AOL was a great service in it's day. Back in the 80's I was a user group representative. I received a free AOL account and I demo'd the service at user group meetings.
What I liked best about AOL was the group chats (which I have yet to see matched anywhere else) and I also liked the forums. They were very active and each forum had leaders to ensure policies were enforced.
Another great feature was the forum for user group newsletter editors. Articles could be submitted and used by anyone. We also made a monthly disk containing the best software offerings at that time.
There were a lot of good features to the service that have not been duplicated anywhere else.
I agree, actually. Before the Web got its feet under it, AOL was a pretty solid service (I'm thinking 1993-95 or so). Didn't take them long to fall off (or more accurately, for the rest of the world to pass them by), but in the days when online content was still migrating from cryptic BBS's to a much richer experience, they had the best thing going. For a while.