The Good Ol' Days of the Internet

Yep, another boring day here working for the Empire, so you get a twofer here on AOwL.com.

I just finished reading an Lance Ulanoff article on PC Magazine's website decrying AOL's decision to launch the low-priced Netscape ISP service earlier this year. Kind of weird that he just wrote such an article last week, but hey, that's not my call.

But instead of writing on the stupidity of AOL, which would take all remaining space on the Internet not currently reserved for porn, it just reminded me of how different things were when I first started using the Internet. I try to be, what the marketing textbooks classify, an "early adapter". The problem is that I have no money, so I can't necessarily jump on the bandwagon as quickly as I like. So, I didn't get on the Internet bandwagon until 1995 when a neighbor of mine got a computer and would let me use it. Even with that, I didn't really start using the Internet daily until I went off to FSU in 1997 where they had terminals throughout the library that had just been installed.

But I remember just some of the great tools that you could use back then that aren't around anymore, either bought up by a corporate titan (i.e., Hotmail) or has just faded through the years due to better competition (i.e., AltaVista). My favorite search feature, before Yahoo! and Google became the staples, was Infoseek. Just so easy to use, would give you so many results if you were doing a report and needed a lot of information. Just a great tool. Then, Disney had to go and buy it to feature their search technology on their new Go.com portal. But, Disney really mismanaged Go, which had great potential with exclusive content from ABC and ESPN, and Infoseek rotted on the vine with it. Now, Go just offers links to their more popular websites and keeps their old e-mail client server active, while offering a search tool run through Google. My original homepage was on the free webhosting site Angelfire back before they were bought out by Lycos (which was, in turn, bought out by Spanish web-provider Terra) and people would be able to visit it without being inundated with a dozen pop-ups. RocketMail and Launch have since been bought out by Yahoo!, but have kept up their quality of content.

Then there was the old Netscape browser, which was clearly the king. Yet, after being purchased by Internet slumlord AOL, was allowed to whither and die (why did they even bother buying them when they turned around and ran the AOL service off of Microsoft's Internet Explorer?). Luckily, some of Netscape's developers have opened up the source for other developers, and have launched the incredible Mozilla Firefox last week (I've been using it for a couple of months when they launched the Preview Edition, and it's such a great tool).