this post was submitted on 01 Feb 2024
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Actually CompuServe was before AOL. AOL was just a rewarming of it with flash sessions because the connect costs were so high. AOL was also faster to embrace actual internet connection and the web. Before this no one except universities, the military, and select few at large companies had internet access. For the general public dialup and BBS was the the thing.
Only point is how you experienced all this depended on who you were and what access you had.
Yeah, absolutely. I experienced BBS culture, and the pre-web internet, and Compuserve, and 100% agree with you. The big revolutionary thing about AOL in those days that distinguished it from something like Compuserve was exactly that it opened up the masses to the cooperative internet, which had previously been a very niche world, and was my opinion vastly superior to anything available on Compuserve or pre-internet AOL.
(What happened to the niche world because of the influx of AOL users and their fellow travelers is a whole different discussion.)
The point that I'm making is that the niche world was already cooperative and decentralized, whereas the guy in the video is making it sound like Tim Berners-Lee was some idealistic nerd who was coming up with something new. HTTP was actually more centralized relatively speaking than what came before it, because your web site could only be served by your own hardware, which wasn't true of e.g. Usenet.
AOL is the PC-centric version of QuantumLink (Q-Link), the online service made for the Commodore 64. Much more vast reach of services and then gave their customers access to the web and internet.