Former AOL Tech support guy here: What a nightmare the disks were... AOL had no idea who was getting a disk until you signed up. We just sent the disks, without addresses, in bulk to USPS. It was USPS who printed addresses onto the disks from THEIR database, and then sent them to you. Since the disks were "Bulk Rate US Postage Paid", USPS was (by law) required to send them. Shit... We tech call center people HATED getting the "Stop sending me disks, assholes!" calls. Why? Cause WE got the fucking things too.
Actually, I thought it was great when AOL would send free floppy diskettes of their software. You could format them and use them for whatever you needed, saving you the cost of buying blank disks. But then AOL switched to CD-ROMs, which ended that freebie. Of course, now we've got USB thumb drives, SD cards, and smartphones. When you think about it, it's kind of amazing how much data storage and processing power we can easily tote along in the course of our daily lives. We've also got the cloud, but I don't trust storing my data there at all.
lol sucks about the people who were annoyed with the disks in the mail but, it was a lady who came on to AOL at that time who thought of that idea. That is what made AOL into the powerhouse it became, all because of that disk idea.
They where also at grocery store checkouts 👌🏻👌🏻 I also remember seeing one that said "AOL 2.0" and my 8 year old brain was like "Oh, they're making them better every time they send them! That's why we get so many!"
AOL will always hold a very special place in my heart. It's where I met my husband 22 years ago. We met in a chatroom one day in June of 2000 by total fate. It turned out that we only lived just over 3 hours apart (within reasonable driving distance), with me living in central Maine and him in Boston. We had a great deal in common as he was a paramedic and I had just become an EMT, which was how we initially connected and bonded. I was only 18 and had just graduated from high school and he had just turned 30, so there was an 11-year age gap, but we instantly connected. Instant messaging on AOL turned into hours long phone calls. Then, about a week after we started talking, he made the trip to meet me and we spent several amazing days together in Acadia National Park and almost instantly fell in love. The rest is history. We had an amazing 22 years together and were rarely ever apart. He was my soulmate and the love of my life, not to mention my rock. If it hadn't been for AOL, we never would have crossed paths and met. Sadly, he passed away exactly 1 month and 2 days ago very suddenly and unexpectedly and I miss him so, so much. 😥 Thank you, AOL, for leading me to the love of my life.
Can you imagine how life changing this was for the era? It’s genuinely amazing how far we’ve come with information technology in such a short amount of time
Imagine? I lived it. It was truly an amazing time to be able to experience the infancy of the internet. These have been the biggest moments in my life when it comes to computers... Early AOL chatrooms 1997 Burning custom made CDs 1998 AOL like this commercial 2000 Napster music downloading 2000 High speed internet 2001 Then everything else
Let's get this straight: your mom's birthday tomorrow your trip is next week and your planning these both now? Forget the AOL tutorial! Let's talk about basic responsibility!
Kailer Gibes don’t worry it’s the google effect..kids seem really smart now days an think they are as well but when they are asked a question an don’t know the answer an don’t have a phone ..there stupid ..lol..attic telephone
I called that number and was disappointed to find out aol no longer offer 10 free hours of web surfing. I should of called sooner like in the early 90's.
@@space2803 Oh god, I remember the first time I went on RUclips in 2006 still using dial up (I lived with my grandparents shut up) took 20 minutes to load a 3 minute video. I do miss the "Welcome, you've got mail" guy?
"Screw taking my kids to the library and letting them search for the dinosaur books they want to study. These two pages of random Dino facts should suffice!"
I remember the first time I saw the internet, also in 1995...was in high school, and one of my friends called me excited, saying she had something on her computer where she could talk to people across the world by typing conversations etc! I couldn't believe my eyes when I saw it, wow seeing this brings back memories lol. How far we've come!!!!
@@fromryuk7785 Oh god, I remember the first time I went on RUclips in 2006 still using dial up (I lived with my grandparents shut up) took 20 minutes to load a 3 minute video. I do miss the "Welcome, you've got mail" guy?
"You get 10 free hours to check it out!" He forgot to mention that more then half of that 10 hours will be connecting to the Internet and loading screens.
@@aolmsn Oh god, I remember the first time I went on RUclips in 2006 still using dial up (I lived with my grandparents shut up) took 20 minutes to load a 3 minute video. I do miss the "Welcome, you've got mail" guy
When he mentioned the live chat and that he met his kayaking buddies on there it made me so happy and sad at the same time. Oh how I miss those AIM days so much!
@@moonflower6607 you would have just had to been there. During this time kids actually went outside to play and ride bikes. No one was in a rush like they are today....life was slow but simple. People actually spent time with their families. Christmas felt like it took forever and that made it more enjoyable. People were actually nicer ....the internet was just a thing to were you weren't obligated to live on it like today. We had choices
@@moonflower6607 - Early days of the internet were great. Trolls were banned on message boards, but evading a ban was as simple as disconnecting and dialing back up (dynamic IP). There was minimal advertising, although the early era of pop-ups was horrible. Chatting was crazy fun. You met randoms and people actually did not like giving away personal details immediately. It usually took a few days of chatting to get a name. A few weeks for a grainy pic. And a last name? Maybe eventually. FB killed online privacy. Now everyone is about the likes and stalkers be damned. It went from being a fun and useful tool to today... The epicenter of our lives where all gatherings is just everyone on their phones. Tragic.
I still have all the cd’s and floppy discs they’d send lol. I was a kid remember being 6 years old popping the floppy in trying to install it myself lol
Oh god, I remember the first time I went on RUclips in 2006 still using dial up (I lived with my grandparents shut up) took 20 minutes to load a 3 minute video. I do miss the "Welcome, you've got mail" guy?
+AverageAsianMe I checked about a year ago our local numbers still work. I had trouble connecting, but I was using a VOIP phone line. I was basically accessing the internet through a phone line attached to the internet. Internet inside phone inside internet!
I remember watching porn on AOL using real player. 8 second long clips at a time. I found 1 minute long videos from time to time that took 15 minutes to download. It was so high tech.
Being able to do banking, research, discussing interesting topics with random people and reading the news all from your computer was such a huge deal. What used to take hours or days to get done now could be done in minutes.
As opposed to using some proprietary network. Back before the Internet was mainstream, there were dozens of online services like Genie, Prodigy, CompuServe, AOL, etc. Most of them could not send messages back and forth because they were completely separate networks. It was a huge freaking deal when some of those online services started offering Internet in the mid- to late 90's. It was like the invention of the interstate highway; you weren't stuck traveling to places exclusively in your own state anymore.
About 40% of what you see today, not everyone had a computer, and most families that did, usually only had one. By the early 2000's that number had fucking exploded though.
Well they left out a buuuuunch of stuff. Like, lost connections. Need a seperate phone line to place calls (unless you could afford a cell phone and it’s minutes). It could take 5-15 min to load a single page and then discover half the page currupted.
Every part of this is awesome. The ad. The internet two decades later being advanced enough to show a younger generation its rudimentary beginnings. The younger generation opining on what they see.
As a former AOL tech I can say AOL was usually decent to its employees...but shit to its customers. All of the nightmares you've heard? True. Every one. And we witnessed them first hand sometimes. Then again, some of the customers were just despicable human beings too. Made our lives a fucking nightmare. But most of the time, we felt the customer's pain. More than once, a techie would fly into a rage over the shit the customer went through, and have to be calmed down. The frequent disconnections and shit? The technicians at HQ. They'd shut batches of connection servers off to restart them and clear memory. Customers experienced this as a random "Goodbye!" :( Just terrible... So...yeah, "AO Hell" worked as a moniker from both sides.
I was an AOL Guide / Chat host for a few years and was always nice to everyone.. til they got rid of me for being too nice (my managers wanted me to really treat some people like scum and I refused to) I then did a 360 and became an AOL hacker, hacking accounts, kicking people offline with Bots. Had about 45 accounts at once one time -- ah the fun days of AOL before Time Warner ruined it. They could have been Google
I joined AOL in 2002 and left in 2007. In that time, they went from 30 M subscribers (a high), to 1-2 million, with people cancelling and fleeing to other providers daily. It was sad to watch, but not a shock. AOL was so entrenched in the Internet of the 90s (closed systems, contained browsing, monthly subscriptions for access) that when stand-alone browsers, cable/DSL, and non-subscrption email became the norm, they were totally unable to adapt.
And just how did he order flowers and airline tickets without even asking his friend for credit card info, address to send to, location to travel to...I could go on and on lol!! Seriously, I miss these simple days.
I remember it was only AOL that you have to pay by the hour. I had regular dial up internet service back in 95 and we still pay by the month back then too.
I was 23 in '95. I remember seeing this commercial and thinking "who is going to believe all this stuff can be done on a computer!" And then, ten years of being a chat room addict, gosh time flies...
I remember when they used to send me floppy disks for the Windows 3.11 versions and eventually the Windows 95 versions of AOL. And they had no idea that I had a Mac at the time..... so I just erased them and formatted them for Mac, and used them to store my old games on them for next to nothing.... it was great! And then they switched over to distributing AOL on CD. Awww..... :( That's alright though, by then I moved to using Zip 100 disks. hahahaha!
+George T. What's ironic to me is that this is an infomercial to promote internet, and yet internet destroyed infomercials. ; ) But at least AOL helped us get rid of that dreadful WOW! software CompuServe had.
+George T. Well, how many people today say to their buddy, "I just love this terabyte drive I got. I can hold so much more PORN!" We all know what people do online... but how often do you tell everyone?
This was a fantastic time AOL 3.0 Cybersex, chatting with random girl you end up liking a lot, but never meeting, fighting in chat rooms, the laughs, the games (slingo), playing solitaire feverishly waiting to get online to hangout with virtual buddies across the world. Aol you'll be missed dearly.
"Limit one per household." I'm like boy did that change in a few more years. AOL disks were on everything from magazines to cereal boxes in the late 90's.
why really miss game because I miss aol too many times and now my friend point right huh 🤔 and I don’t know 🤷♂️ right away aol mail right huh 🤔 point about this morning reporter right now point penny penny thanks 🙏 penny penny option penny penny penny option penny penny option option
Oh man, this took me immediately back to my childhood. I remember the Kids Only page, which I thought was so cool. Then the craziness of the chat rooms and hoping you were actually talking to another teenager and not a creeper. Good times.
When I joined AOL in late 97, it was like the only legit thing on the Internet. How far we've come since then. I'm surprised AOL didn't try to offer their own broadband service to try to compete with the phone and cable companies.
I bought my first computer - a 386DX 33mHz with a 40MB hard drive, and both 5.25 & 3.5 floppies. Ran both DOS 6.1 and Windows 3.11 - in '91 and got on AOL. Been using the same email address ever since.
It was slower but remember that there was also a lot less to load on any given page, so it wasn't what you described. When pages started getting more complex, higher speeds where desired.
you know whats funny....they made it seem like the internet was fast back then...see how the pages loaded up...that was false advertisement...it was dial up haha
+Nepu-Tech USA that +Aymer de Valence person is posting such brutal comments to everyone including me. that person should be banned from youtube. we're here for a a good laugh and I think everyone's comments are funny except that person obviously
Yesenia Rosales lol he's one of those kids parents leave alone on the internet all day and all they do is rage and whine because they are desperate for attention. It's pretty sad actually this generation being raised by Ipads.
When I first got AOL in the very early 1990s, ... I think 1993, I lived in Los Angeles and believe it or not, the closest connection was a long-distance phone number. When my dad got the bill for the first month, we owed over $550 ... in 1990s money. That's like $800 or something today. He made me spend the entire summer pulling weeds to pay for the phone bill.
I wish I could go back to that time when the world made sense but unfortunately time waits for no one and cannot be rewound so... Its up to us to make every moment in our lives count ^_^
Even standalone ISPs back then were not unlimited. I remember my first ISP in 1994 gave me 300 hours a month. Unlike AOL, they had no option to pay by the hour. You hit that limit and you were fscked for the remainder of your 30 day billing period ;) They offered access to a silly BBS along with your $20 a month Internet connection fee. You could continue using that after the 300 hours of Internet, but that was largely pointless because it was only other local users and there were other free BBS's. In retrospect, 300 hours was probably pretty reasonable for back then. I was a little ahead of my time I guess, because I hit that limit on more than one occasion even with as few things as there were to do on the Internet :P
Three years after that, everybody and their mother would end up with an AOL free trial cd in their mailbox and they just kept on coming until the mid 2000s.
He forgot to log out.. after he got back from the game he owed AOL $20,000.00
Jayrocco Sechsunddreißig lol ' don't burn up my hours!!!'
Jayrocco Sechsunddreißig lol ' don't burn up my hours!!!'
You made me laugh out loud. That doesn't happen very often these days. Well played sir.
That...was the funniest comment ive seen all week. lmao
I laughed too hard at this comment
This commercial just aired last week in North Korea.
hahahahaha
lmao
schrekt 'em
Jessica Ingenbrandt it should be nkol
😂😂😂😂😂
10 hours on AOL was enough to visit 1 website
You actually had Encrata for that.
There was only 2 actual websites back then.
JACKOTACO Encarta Encyclopedia
56K yes.
And download half a song
"So how do you get America Online?"
"Easy! They cram a disc in your mailbox every other day."
Former AOL Tech support guy here: What a nightmare the disks were...
AOL had no idea who was getting a disk until you signed up. We just sent the disks, without addresses, in bulk to USPS. It was USPS who printed addresses onto the disks from THEIR database, and then sent them to you. Since the disks were "Bulk Rate US Postage Paid", USPS was (by law) required to send them.
Shit... We tech call center people HATED getting the "Stop sending me disks, assholes!" calls. Why? Cause WE got the fucking things too.
Actually, I thought it was great when AOL would send free floppy diskettes of their software. You could format them and use them for whatever you needed, saving you the cost of buying blank disks.
But then AOL switched to CD-ROMs, which ended that freebie.
Of course, now we've got USB thumb drives, SD cards, and smartphones. When you think about it, it's kind of amazing how much data storage and processing power we can easily tote along in the course of our daily lives.
We've also got the cloud, but I don't trust storing my data there at all.
lol sucks about the people who were annoyed with the disks in the mail but, it was a lady who came on to AOL at that time who thought of that idea. That is what made AOL into the powerhouse it became, all because of that disk idea.
They where also at grocery store checkouts 👌🏻👌🏻
I also remember seeing one that said "AOL 2.0" and my 8 year old brain was like "Oh, they're making them better every time they send them! That's why we get so many!"
My mom said the discs made pretty handy mini frisbees !
"I can even send email on the internet". I love it!
as opposed to the post office lol
thanks howie
Woohoo! This information superhighway things sounds neat! Can't wait to see if it has potential!
"Get off the Internet I need to use the phone" 😂😂😂👌
Emo Anie I remember those days
No mom....im chatting with hotgirl1616.
Emo Anie Facts
even when DSL came out when the phone rang your connection still slowed down a lot
My mom missed so many calls.
AOL will always hold a very special place in my heart. It's where I met my husband 22 years ago. We met in a chatroom one day in June of 2000 by total fate. It turned out that we only lived just over 3 hours apart (within reasonable driving distance), with me living in central Maine and him in Boston. We had a great deal in common as he was a paramedic and I had just become an EMT, which was how we initially connected and bonded. I was only 18 and had just graduated from high school and he had just turned 30, so there was an 11-year age gap, but we instantly connected. Instant messaging on AOL turned into hours long phone calls. Then, about a week after we started talking, he made the trip to meet me and we spent several amazing days together in Acadia National Park and almost instantly fell in love. The rest is history. We had an amazing 22 years together and were rarely ever apart. He was my soulmate and the love of my life, not to mention my rock. If it hadn't been for AOL, we never would have crossed paths and met. Sadly, he passed away exactly 1 month and 2 days ago very suddenly and unexpectedly and I miss him so, so much. 😥 Thank you, AOL, for leading me to the love of my life.
So sorry for your loss!
😢
Ohy God so sorry to hear that it is a very beautiful story wow, God bless you and your hole entire family 🙏❤️
I'm sorry about your husband :(
😭😭😭😭😭😭
Can you imagine how life changing this was for the era? It’s genuinely amazing how far we’ve come with information technology in such a short amount of time
Imagine? I lived it. It was truly an amazing time to be able to experience the infancy of the internet. These have been the biggest moments in my life when it comes to computers...
Early AOL chatrooms 1997
Burning custom made CDs 1998
AOL like this commercial 2000
Napster music downloading 2000
High speed internet 2001
Then everything else
Invented by the military and used to facilitate communication between researchers.
Today: used for watching TikTok and porn.
exactly
@@oktavianzamoyski9809pretty sure it's still used by the military and researchers
I miss the excitement, but not the waiting, the sound of the modem and having the phone line tied up, or the insomnia!
Let's get this straight: your mom's birthday tomorrow your trip is next week and your planning these both now? Forget the AOL tutorial! Let's talk about basic responsibility!
john erikson this may be the funniest comment I’ve ever read! 😂
ok boomer
Kailer Gibes don’t worry it’s the google effect..kids seem really smart now days an think they are as well but when they are asked a question an don’t know the answer an don’t have a phone ..there stupid ..lol..attic telephone
hi my name is Ricardo pinto remember that you don’t call 📱 silence Komo 4 news
You're a father!
I called that number and was disappointed to find out aol no longer offer 10 free hours of web surfing. I should of called sooner like in the early 90's.
Shit i was born in 95'. Should've started crying for that free 10 hours the second i came out of that womb.
LMFAOOOOOOOOO
A SNAKE IN ME BOOT incess
I have a emachines with aol
Bullshit number disconnected tho
@@space2803 Oh god, I remember the first time I went on RUclips in 2006 still using dial up (I lived with my grandparents shut up) took 20 minutes to load a 3 minute video. I do miss the "Welcome, you've got mail" guy?
"Screw taking my kids to the library and letting them search for the dinosaur books they want to study. These two pages of random Dino facts should suffice!"
Language watch your cussing
@donniebrasco1364 are you kidding? There was no cussing in his comment and who r u to tell people what they can say?
I remember the first time I saw the internet, also in 1995...was in high school, and one of my friends called me excited, saying she had something on her computer where she could talk to people across the world by typing conversations etc! I couldn't believe my eyes when I saw it, wow seeing this brings back memories lol. How far we've come!!!!
Thats how i felt too, these days i end up putting a lot on ignore. Sad really how things change.
@@fromryuk7785 Oh god, I remember the first time I went on RUclips in 2006 still using dial up (I lived with my grandparents shut up) took 20 minutes to load a 3 minute video. I do miss the "Welcome, you've got mail" guy?
... And that was the last time he ever left the house.
A few weeks later he was arrested by the FBI because his "kayaking buddies" were a secret group of pedophiles.
Lol
Some 1999 E commerce commercial to add stuff to a home
She. There's a lot of love here but we can fill this space
He. I'm gonna get me a bed
Lmaooo
Priceless..
"You get 10 free hours to check it out!" He forgot to mention that more then half of that 10 hours will be connecting to the Internet and loading screens.
No.
Wasn't like that at all.
@@one7decimal2eight There wasn't wi-fi in 1995. There was 28k dial-up, and it was FUCKING SLOW.
@@aolmsn Oh god, I remember the first time I went on RUclips in 2006 still using dial up (I lived with my grandparents shut up) took 20 minutes to load a 3 minute video. I do miss the "Welcome, you've got mail" guy
@@aolmsn Dig it. And web pages back then weren't as graphic-intensive as they are nowadays!
AOL was such a nice company. I wasn't even a customer and yet they'd send me a free coffee coaster every month.....
Lol I used mine as coasters too….but for scented 🕯😂
Or two 3D printed save buttons.
Lol 😄👍
@@johnfoltz8183 That took me a second haha
Kinda funny how they sabotage themselves
the struggle, these new age kids will never know
I was born in 2001 will I understand
+INDEK FINGERBOARDS
2001? High speed internet was out lol
Acting like we even want to know
fuck that shit with long ass load times
you guys where lucky, I had to record HBO at night in old VHS tapes in hopes of finding some boobs or something xD
+Nepu-Tech USA. Lol Hitchhiker series was gold mine for boobs back then.
When he mentioned the live chat and that he met his kayaking buddies on there it made me so happy and sad at the same time. Oh how I miss those AIM days so much!
if you don't mind telling me may i ask what was it like to experience that era?
AIM was the shit back in the day
@@moonflower6607 you would have just had to been there. During this time kids actually went outside to play and ride bikes. No one was in a rush like they are today....life was slow but simple. People actually spent time with their families. Christmas felt like it took forever and that made it more enjoyable. People were actually nicer ....the internet was just a thing to were you weren't obligated to live on it like today. We had choices
@@moonflower6607 - Early days of the internet were great. Trolls were banned on message boards, but evading a ban was as simple as disconnecting and dialing back up (dynamic IP). There was minimal advertising, although the early era of pop-ups was horrible. Chatting was crazy fun. You met randoms and people actually did not like giving away personal details immediately. It usually took a few days of chatting to get a name. A few weeks for a grainy pic. And a last name? Maybe eventually. FB killed online privacy. Now everyone is about the likes and stalkers be damned. It went from being a fun and useful tool to today... The epicenter of our lives where all gatherings is just everyone on their phones. Tragic.
@@Lokigard miss the days of good ole' forumz
2010 is where it went to sh!t
That guy was not finishing up with Kayaking friends. He was trying to click and hide the porn site really quick before his friend walked over...
BBPhotography2012 omg
did they even have sites like that back then?
he probably spent 3 hours downloading that 30 second clip aint no way hes closing that out.
Steve Kay he was in cinemax porn softcore movie xalled elke
He did look a bit alarmed when his friend walked in
That actually seemed like a legit conversation between two guys. Not like the crappy infomercials and whack commercials of today.
Remember getting those damn CDs in the mail? I think I still have some LOL
It was hard to forget, considering they came every day it seemed
They had them at electronic stores as well, like Circuit City and Best Buy.
I still have all the cd’s and floppy discs they’d send lol. I was a kid remember being 6 years old popping the floppy in trying to install it myself lol
Why not use Intervening Explorer or another web bowser?
Oh god, I remember the first time I went on RUclips in 2006 still using dial up (I lived with my grandparents shut up) took 20 minutes to load a 3 minute video. I do miss the "Welcome, you've got mail" guy?
The phone number no longer works
Thank you for testing it.
How the hell am I supposed to get online then? My kids have a dinosaur project due tomorrow!
It's the National Telemarketing Company now or something.
Lol I tried to call a Sega Genesis tips line not to long ago.
+AverageAsianMe I checked about a year ago our local numbers still work. I had trouble connecting, but I was using a VOIP phone line. I was basically accessing the internet through a phone line attached to the internet. Internet inside phone inside internet!
I remember watching porn on AOL using real player. 8 second long clips at a time. I found 1 minute long videos from time to time that took 15 minutes to download. It was so high tech.
Hahahaha
Now that's what I call "jacking off with sophistication"!
Fucking Real Player. I hated that shit, they conned me into buying their stupid software 20 years ago.
Ah the days of "Heather Brooke", "Dawn Allison", Wifey and Danny Ashe, where you had to WAIT for your hooters dammit.
real player, that was truly a software nightmare.
I love how this commercial gives off the "random commercial you see on TV at 5:00am" vibe.
Being able to do banking, research, discussing interesting topics with random people and reading the news all from your computer was such a huge deal. What used to take hours or days to get done now could be done in minutes.
"How do I get America Online?"
By using one of the thousands of disks they sent you every year.
"I can even send email on the internet"
Umm, as opposed to sending email via the postman?
As opposed to using some proprietary network. Back before the Internet was mainstream, there were dozens of online services like Genie, Prodigy, CompuServe, AOL, etc. Most of them could not send messages back and forth because they were completely separate networks. It was a huge freaking deal when some of those online services started offering Internet in the mid- to late 90's.
It was like the invention of the interstate highway; you weren't stuck traveling to places exclusively in your own state anymore.
+TARDIS Tales
Remember, it was the 90s.
I don't think computers or internet usage was anywhere near as common in 1995 as it is now.
MrGencyExit64 Hello, fellow old person!
About 40% of what you see today, not everyone had a computer, and most families that did, usually only had one. By the early 2000's that number had fucking exploded though.
They have the internet on computers now!
10 Free Hours, Great! with Internet speeds in 1995 you can book a flight in only 5 hours!
+Aymer de Valence woooaah!! no need to lose it, it was JUST A JOKE!BITTER BITCH!!!
And that's only one way lol
You'd need the other five hours if you wanna get back xD
So that was Internet 20 years ago
+Hurriname Wait. Wasn't '95 five years ago?
+Eryk Pawlik FIVE???? More like 21.
Well they left out a buuuuunch of stuff. Like, lost connections. Need a seperate phone line to place calls (unless you could afford a cell phone and it’s minutes). It could take 5-15 min to load a single page and then discover half the page currupted.
@TJTaco 24
the Internet*
Every part of this is awesome. The ad. The internet two decades later being advanced enough to show a younger generation its rudimentary beginnings. The younger generation opining on what they see.
I sure would've liked to see what internet was like in 1822.
@@zeropointzero telegraphs
@@fromryuk7785 Ponies
As a former AOL tech I can say AOL was usually decent to its employees...but shit to its customers. All of the nightmares you've heard? True. Every one. And we witnessed them first hand sometimes. Then again, some of the customers were just despicable human beings too. Made our lives a fucking nightmare. But most of the time, we felt the customer's pain. More than once, a techie would fly into a rage over the shit the customer went through, and have to be calmed down.
The frequent disconnections and shit? The technicians at HQ. They'd shut batches of connection servers off to restart them and clear memory. Customers experienced this as a random "Goodbye!" :( Just terrible...
So...yeah, "AO Hell" worked as a moniker from both sides.
What about random backwards messages in blood that would appear on my monitor...and on my wall...and my dreams?
Oh, those? Earthlink. Yeah...Earthlink. Bastards...
I was an AOL Guide / Chat host for a few years and was always nice to everyone.. til they got rid of me for being too nice (my managers wanted me to really treat some people like scum and I refused to) I then did a 360 and became an AOL hacker, hacking accounts, kicking people offline with Bots. Had about 45 accounts at once one time -- ah the fun days of AOL before Time Warner ruined it. They could have been Google
How fast AOL failed was truth to its ignorance. If it wasn't bought out, AOL would be nothing more than a Wikipedia article.
I joined AOL in 2002 and left in 2007. In that time, they went from 30 M subscribers (a high), to 1-2 million, with people cancelling and fleeing to other providers daily. It was sad to watch, but not a shock.
AOL was so entrenched in the Internet of the 90s (closed systems, contained browsing, monthly subscriptions for access) that when stand-alone browsers, cable/DSL, and non-subscrption email became the norm, they were totally unable to adapt.
The “kayaking buddies” group gradually evolved into Grindr.
Best comment ever.
And just how did he order flowers and airline tickets without even asking his friend for credit card info, address to send to, location to travel to...I could go on and on lol!! Seriously, I miss these simple days.
I forgot how we had to pay for internet by the hour back then. Wow... I'd be broke if that were the case today!
I remember it was only AOL that you have to pay by the hour. I had regular dial up internet service back in 95 and we still pay by the month back then too.
Well luckily people back then had the money to do that
Remember aol message hey louder louder amber alert ⚠️ 📢 👏 🙌 👌 ❤️ ⚠️ 📢 👏 🙌 👌 ❤️ ⚠️ 📢 👏 🙌 👌 ❤️ ⚠️ 📢 👏 crazy night 🌙
Really depended on your service. In '96, the local dial-up companies were selling lifetime passes for about $300.
I want these days back
mee too
same here. AOL was like my first taste of freedom. I remember being all nervous exploring the net in a browser outside the screen of AOL.
Yeah aol was my first email
Bish no
I don’t want to call a number on my phone just to go on Snapchat
Remember the AOL chat rooms? Loved them!
I was 23 in '95. I remember seeing this commercial and thinking "who is going to believe all this stuff can be done on a computer!" And then, ten years of being a chat room addict, gosh time flies...
'So how do you get America Online?'
'Just check your mailbox. They will send you enough start up disks each week to shingle your house'
I well remember seeing this commercial and having no idea what they were talking about. Yet by 1996 I was using AOL.
I never shopped on AOL because I was a kid, but I was addicted to the AOL chat rooms.
Wow, I remember seeing this commercial. Right around the time Dan Lapre was advertising his tiny classified ads infomercials.
Your so old 🧓
I can't count how many times did my pop yelled at me about being on the phone line....LMAO
"Plane ticket's ordered. Now, let's look up dinosaurs!" LOL so dorky
I remember when they used to send me floppy disks for the Windows 3.11 versions and eventually the Windows 95 versions of AOL. And they had no idea that I had a Mac at the time..... so I just erased them and formatted them for Mac, and used them to store my old games on them for next to nothing.... it was great! And then they switched over to distributing AOL on CD. Awww..... :( That's alright though, by then I moved to using Zip 100 disks. hahahaha!
This is what I felt like showing people Reddit back in 2010
Even though I was a kid in 1995, it's one of my favorite years to date.
If I had been alive in 1995, I definitely would have called that phone number.
I’m gonna call it right now in 2022…
update, it played a mid 2000s virgin mobile hang up sound wtf- i have T-Mobile
This looks awesome. I'm definitely getting this. AOL Internet subscription here I come.
I enjoy seeing these old commercials but at the same time they kind of make me feel old too.
This conversation is so unrealistic. No mention of porn?
George T. "kayaking buddies"
+George T. What's ironic to me is that this is an infomercial to promote internet, and yet internet destroyed infomercials. ; ) But at least AOL helped us get rid of that dreadful WOW! software CompuServe had.
+George T. was they Age 18 in 1995 to do porn ? And what where there Names ? And who upload it to internet ?
+George T. Well, how many people today say to their buddy, "I just love this terabyte drive I got. I can hold so much more PORN!" We all know what people do online... but how often do you tell everyone?
+Jonas Clark All the time. No joke.
'The Facebook' commercial brought me here
Internet unites us :')
Same here. Welcome to Matrix.
The Facebook sent me here.
my name is BRANT
Man, 10 free hours to use the internet.
And silly me just used all those AOL trial discs as coasters.
AOL brought me porn when I was too young to buy porn. Thanks AOL.
NumberWonMonkey eww nasty guy
You buy porn now??
Wow...its crazy how much we take for granted
This was a fantastic time AOL 3.0
Cybersex, chatting with random girl you end up liking a lot, but never meeting, fighting in chat rooms, the laughs, the games (slingo), playing solitaire feverishly waiting to get online to hangout with virtual buddies across the world. Aol you'll be missed dearly.
Boy, enjoying tech back then was a blast. I miss it.
The Internet - A dark carnival of humanity's most wrathful impulses!
You are a malevolent god.
"Where's Mike?"
"Still Downloading."
I remember they used to bill bill bill for those hours.
Now you can talk to your kayaking friends while you’re kayaking.
I think most of the commenters were born after this commercial was made...
Probably.
I was ten years old lol
Remember the photos were loaded as .art? JPEGs took too long to load.
I remeber when i was in the grocery store at age 5 and these AOL Cd´s where there to take home i had like 20 of them but never got internet :
I just now got this 1995 commercial downloaded on AOL 😂
The hell kind of connection he had? Those browser windows popped instantly. 0:32
I'm old
Here come the dinosaurs
That’s what the guy said after jacking off and his buddy walked in why is your pants soaked
"Limit one per household." I'm like boy did that change in a few more years. AOL disks were on everything from magazines to cereal boxes in the late 90's.
can we just acknowledge how incredibly ironic it is that we are watching a commercial for the internet.......on the internet
anyone missing hearing "you've got mail"?
Guy: "ready for the game?"
10 seconds later, same guy
Guy: "I can't go to the game"
The guy at the computer was the one to ask if hes ready for the game
why really miss game because I miss aol too many times and now my friend point right huh 🤔 and I don’t know 🤷♂️ right away aol mail right huh 🤔 point about this morning reporter right now point penny penny thanks 🙏 penny penny option penny penny penny option penny penny option option
hey dude aol american mail me anytime 😊 I wanted say hello ❤ jek I'm glad you like it was just about me getting to know you dick he'll
@@ricardoreporterkiro7news721 penny
“How long have you had it?”
“About a week.”
It would take a week just to connect to AOL on dialup back in the 90s
I gotta check this out ...
***** I know. Awesome technology right?
***** are you kidding? A 56 K modem! Unreal
Came here from the Facebook commercial. ^_^
If he met his kayaking buddies in chat, I have to wonder what they're into besides kayaking.
haha....thanks to america online...i had my first.....nevermind!
NathanIVV 1st sin!? Sinna!
dragon dildos
Umm... You do realize there were hobby chat rooms back then, don't you? Not everything was one big cyber orgy.
Oh man, this took me immediately back to my childhood. I remember the Kids Only page, which I thought was so cool. Then the craziness of the chat rooms and hoping you were actually talking to another teenager and not a creeper. Good times.
now look at today.
its a fucking warzone
what, the internet?
MrVarhansen yep
Illuminati confirmed 1:13
omg!!!
LOL!!!
I saw it
+dynd LOL
I SEE IT
Also the AOL logo is illuminati confirmed.
+dynd was just looking at the comments to see if anybody elese mentioned it
When I joined AOL in late 97, it was like the only legit thing on the Internet. How far we've come since then. I'm surprised AOL didn't try to offer their own broadband service to try to compete with the phone and cable companies.
I met my husband of 21 years on Love@aol. Still going strong! Thank you aol ❤
JESUS FUCKING CHRIST... AMERICA ONLINE IS THE MOST GOD DAMNED AMAZING THING I'VE EVER FUCKING SEEN
I remember using IM-Bomber.
Still faster than Internet explorer.
First time I operate a computer was back in early 1992 in one of my first jobs, first time I enter the Internet was back in 1999 in an Internet Cafe.
First time I operate a computer was back in early 1992 in one of my first jobs, first time I enter the Internet was back in 1999 in an Internet Cafe
I bought my first computer - a 386DX 33mHz with a 40MB hard drive, and both 5.25 & 3.5 floppies. Ran both DOS 6.1 and Windows 3.11 - in '91 and got on AOL. Been using the same email address ever since.
"Of course my personal favorite porn I MEAN kayaking stuff"
0:41 Instant news and information? Yeah, so long as you're willing to wait 20 minutes for the damn page to load. Ah, the days of dial-up.
It was slower but remember that there was also a lot less to load on any given page, so it wasn't what you described. When pages started getting more complex, higher speeds where desired.
i miss those days
It's amazing how we are watching something that they consider "revolutionary" with a smartphone in the palm of our hands.
10 free hours. DAYUM.
He was in chat rooms begging girls for "gifs". LOL
Kayaking buddies, yeah right 👌
Whoa wait a minute... Compton has a library?
They wish the internet was that fast back then lol. I used to wait like 4 mins for Webster to load for homework
back in high school we didn't know what was the internet lol, yup that's detroit lol
you know whats funny....they made it seem like the internet was fast back then...see how the pages loaded up...that was false advertisement...it was dial up haha
First time I used AOL I had a 28.8 modem, took forever to load a page and I would get booted every time the phone rang.
Those pages load up faster than on my 100mbps connection...
The dark ages ladies and gentlemen
*****
Hey bud be careful you don't cut yourself with that edge
+Nepu-Tech USA that +Aymer de Valence person is posting such brutal comments to everyone including me. that person should be banned from youtube. we're here for a a good laugh and I think everyone's comments are funny except that person obviously
Yesenia Rosales
lol he's one of those kids parents leave alone on the internet all day and all they do is rage and whine because they are desperate for attention. It's pretty sad actually this generation being raised by Ipads.
+Aymer de Valence why do you care what she does? Just shut up and keep your mouth shut
+Aymer de Valence why do you care what she does? Just shut up and keep your mouth shut
When I first got AOL in the very early 1990s, ... I think 1993, I lived in Los Angeles and believe it or not, the closest connection was a long-distance phone number. When my dad got the bill for the first month, we owed over $550 ... in 1990s money. That's like $800 or something today. He made me spend the entire summer pulling weeds to pay for the phone bill.
I wish I could go back to that time when the world made sense but unfortunately time waits for no one and cannot be rewound so... Its up to us to make every moment in our lives count ^_^
same here man, i miss the 90s sooo much.
I followed you.
Derby Harrington technology is advancing way too fast now. Can't people see that the world is getting more and more lazy?
You made this comment 6 years ago, so let’s say 2015. It is breathtaking how much MORE nonsensical the world has become since that time.
People played fantasy football BEFORE the internet?
lolyes. Shit existed before you did.
Trey Warnock lmao, yes it has.
per hour. Wow they used to really have you by the balls
I used to pay 1p per minute here in the UK...
And I used to play EQ >
Even standalone ISPs back then were not unlimited. I remember my first ISP in 1994 gave me 300 hours a month. Unlike AOL, they had no option to pay by the hour. You hit that limit and you were fscked for the remainder of your 30 day billing period ;)
They offered access to a silly BBS along with your $20 a month Internet connection fee. You could continue using that after the 300 hours of Internet, but that was largely pointless because it was only other local users and there were other free BBS's.
In retrospect, 300 hours was probably pretty reasonable for back then. I was a little ahead of my time I guess, because I hit that limit on more than one occasion even with as few things as there were to do on the Internet :P
Three years after that, everybody and their mother would end up with an AOL free trial cd in their mailbox and they just kept on coming until the mid 2000s.