it wasnt called aol initially

20 years, damn

Aol owns compuserve, so it could be because of that

I got my first internet connection back in 92 :pimp

I can remember formatting the all the AOL floppy drive disk I received in the mail. :1orglaugh

I first got online on AOL in 93 - 2400 baud modem and downloading porn in chat rooms "LIST ME !!!!!!!!!! "

LOL - I ran The Post BBS back then - one of the first BBS's to go multiline and then in the first group of sysops to install a searchable 6 disk CD drive for online files :) When we were able to connect to the internet backbone via something called planet connect things really took off :)

i used to have an old aol floppy disk laying around dated 1989

:1orglaugh it saved me having to buy a load when I started college

50 AOL is 20 years old? :upsidedow

i think a lot of you are confusing the WWW with the net

Yep, it was 96.

They do suck, but what the did do was make the internet user-friendly to the masses. They got the internet into every home in America which without them, we might all have different careers now.

:2 cents:

Yup, I still have (somewhere) the disks they used to mail for the Commodore 128... It used a fucked up windowing system which I forget the name of...

Compuserve was cirqua 1979, I got my first account in like 83 or 84, around the time of War Games.

20 years old, they are.

AOL bought Compuserve, and that makes them 20 years old.

aol have been going for 20 years - i heard that in the news one of their first dialup customers finally got connected last week!

actually concentric was the first unlimited national dialup 96 i believe

Good point

CompuServe has nothing to do with the age of AOL ... CompuServe was acquired in the mid/late 90s and had already become a "has been" by then.

20 years / 1985 is absolutely correct ... AOL was first branded as Q-Link, as others have already pointed out ... they then rebranded to America Online (AOL) a few years later...

Members who joined in the first few years (talking late 80s) were given discounts indefinitely when they re-branded to AOL.

Guess I'm showing my age (I'm 33) ... Q-Link / AOL's allure years ago wasn't the internet (they didn't even offer it until later), but rather that they had lots of chatrooms where people could socialize / adult oriented chatrooms; on-line hookups.

Ron

Brutal!

I remember when we hit 8300 and you could really surf for porn. Before that it was more surfing for well not really surfing....

:1orglaugh

FIDONet 4 LIFE!

:1orglaugh

I miss BBSes :(

i remember downloading an AOL update on a 1200 baud. Took about 6 hours. LOL.

those were the days..........