AOL was your ISP - you would connect via your telephone line instead of cable/fiber. Your modem would call their number and establish a connection. No one else could use the phone while you were online.

When you connected, it would load the AOL application which contained most of what AOL offered - built in AIM (AOL instant messaging), a web browser, group chats, keyword search, email, etc.

You were still connected to the internet and could use alternate browsers, but most people stayed inside the AOL app and ecosystem. Keywords were a time before search, where companies could buy keywords (from AOL) and then when people searched them they would show up. It was kinda a separate system from DNS that AOL tried to profit from.

You had competitors like Prodigy and CompuServe offering similar dial-up + custom app offers.

You wouldn't use the AOL app without having AOL dial-up service (although I recall them offering it separately late in its life, bring your own internet). People thought "AOL" was the internet. You might recall the classic "You've got mail" movie. That was from the AOL app which loaded after connecting.

aside: It's crazy how AOL could have become Facebook. AIM chat was the main focus - but AIM had "profiles" which you could customize, and I did - even with daily status updates. Modern Facebook is basically the reverse - profiles with a chat attached.

▲

toast0 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

AOL started off as something different from an ISP.

Like Prodigy and Compuserve and GEnie and some others, it was an on-line information system. Chat, message boards, news, stock quotes, (limited) shopping, games, software downloads, etc. But all within a single system. Kind of like a nationwide/global BBS, but with a GUI interface. In the 80s, all these systems were independent, in the early 90s they got internet email, and the mid 90s added web browsers and (eventually) real tcp/ip.

▲

ycombiredd 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Yes. I worked for the world's largest ISPs (NETCOM (#1), which merged with Mindspring (which was considered #2), which merged with EarthLink (the previous #3, then #2 to the post-NETCOM Mindspring). It was funny, in hindsight, that even though AOL had already adopted TCP/IP and integrated an "Internet Gateway" functionality and had more subscribers than even the combined #1, 2, and 3 rollup I just described, at no time did anyone in the industry actually consider AOL to be an ISP, so the "#1" in size distinction went to the companies mentioned. AOL, deserved or not, never really escaped their second class designation, which also tended to taint their users as they ventured on to the larger internet.

All that said, I still communicate with one person who maintains their aol.com email address to this day in spite of it all.

▲

serf 7 hours ago | parent [-]

Mindspring, I haven't read that in a long time.

Didn't they try to come back as a brand when free ad-supported dialups became a thing for a bit?

	▲	ycombiredd 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I dunno. I left around 1999, just before the EarthLink merger. Related, while doing a quick search to see if I could learn anything about what you described I found Wikipedia quoting NYT as writing about EarthLink in 2000: "second largest Internet service provider after America Online". I guess it was around y2k when aol finally got its ISP (and this its "world's largest") designation by the world at large. :)

▲

pests 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I was young during the era, your probably right. I was just sharing my experience.

▲

miki123211 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Did the AOL protocol (whatever the AOL app itself used for chat etc.) go over TCP/IP, or was that its own network, parallel to the internet?

Was the limitation that you couldn't use AOL from a different ISP artificial (whitelisted IP ranges, no routing to relevant addresses from the outside), or did it actually use an "internetless" protocol that you just couldn't emulate if all you had was the internet?

I vaguely remember reading somewhere that internet access was a late addition to AOL, hence the question.

	▲	tjohns 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		AOL was it's own network, completely parallel to the internet. It didn't use TCP/IP, it used a propritary transport called P3 - heavily optimized for dialup. They had their own dedicated client app, where each page loaded in its own window. It didn't use HTML, it used something called "Rainman". URLs weren't a thing, you accessed "channels" (pages) by entering a specific "keyword". Later on, in 1993, they added support for Usenet (see: "Eternal September"). Then in 1994 they added support for Gopher and WWW. So you could dial into the AOL client, and then open a regular web browser. But for most home users, there was more content in the AOL walled garden, so the web was something of a curiosity at first. So to answer your question: It wasn't an artificial limitation. AOL was designed in a way that was fundamentally alien to the way the Internet + Web evolved. (At some point, you could connect to AOL over TCP/IP - useful if you had a broadband Internet connection but still wanted access to content on the AOL network. This was done by encapsulating P3 inside a TCP/IP header. You still had to use the AOL client software and have an AOL membership.)

▲

burnto 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I was pretty young at the time, but I think it started as basically a BBS. With an Internet backbone so a bunch of local numbers could all access the same server. They added Internet access later, and initially only via their own browser.

	▲	pests 8 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I admit I was a young child during the AOL-mailer-cd era. I don't really know what came before.