Davepl: The specific client we tried to emulate from AOL was their Mac client. The Messenger dev manager, found out from some AOL senior execs at a conference about the buffer overrun. The other reason in addition to interop with AOL, was that if we could host our IM traffic for free on AOL's systems, then we would not have to stand up our own server farm. Eventually we worked with Yahoo to form IMIP (Instant Messenger Interoperability Protocol) in order to try to apply pressure to AOL. We also tried to apply pressure at the merger hearings (TimeWarner/AOL) where they would have to open the IM eco-system. Those were fun times!!
So the monopoly tried to act like a monopoly and threw a hissy fit when they couldn't get a foot in on a new area invented by AOL--heck, Barry even has a patent on the AIM concept. And then MSFT got all angsty about interoperability and open yadda yadda when they themselves where the king of close-everything and sue anybody who tries to peek under the covers. And what about the freshly minted DMCA? Wasn't that in effect at the time? Doesn't that say something about no reverse engineering? So the AIM system was effectively delivering dynamic code to the client. Why's that an issue? You fired up the AOL AIM client and were at it's mercy, already. So trusting code delivered from the AIM servers is not big deal. And hiding the update mechanism in a buffer overflow? Sheer genius. And yeah, you kinda hit a nail on the head there with that "would not have to stand up our own server farm". That's another reason why MSFT would have lost in court. They were effectively trying to steal services from AOL. Did you put the ads up on the client that AOL was delivering? Or did you substitute your own? This was one of those cases where Bill tried to fight fair and realized he couldn't win. So he decided to play dirty... the usual "do anything to win, we'll pay whatever penalties in court but the payout from winning will be 100x bigger". MSFT got got.
It's such a cool experience as an engineer now getting the perspective of an engineer that worked on/around the things that consumed my pre/teen years!
Has a tech worker myself, I also find those stories so fascinating, they are the "making of" from the time I was still a young user. I wish more tech veterans would share stories like this.
I loved ICQ, but ended up using MSN Messenger the most, because that's what most of the people I wanted to chat with was using. This was in the UK, where AOL wasn't so big, yet I remember even us getting those AOL CDs 🙂
I'm loving these stories from a MS insider perspective, please keep 'em coming. For a future episode: Are there any tales from when the UI for Windows 95 was being planned such as alternatives to the iconic Taskbar and Start menu that were seriously considered but didn't see the light of day?
I remember using AOL with a modem. AOL _hid_ the rest of the Internet from their users, especially when (as I suspect was _way_ too often) the user didn't even know there was an entire Internet out there!
Early 90s that was kind of the norm, it's weird looking back and seeing how much Netscape and MSIE opened up the internet because you were no longer gated by compuserv, AOL, etc in what you saw through their systems.
Still kinda of the norm now from ISPs and the darkweb (although I haven't tried in a while, so maybe not). But ISPs certainly truncated what was accessible through their networks.
Not even that, all you needed was a post box that was not welded shut, and where the slot was not stuffed to overflowing with mail marked "occupant", and if overflowing it would be in the pile on he ground next to it in multiples.
@@pete3897 you're saying thousands of developers got thier windows licensing key code reverse engineered by Sony? (the flex is not the end user who used the rootkit).
My brain had the whole affair filed under Scott Hanselman for some reason, but it was actually Mark Russinovich (before ms scooped up sysinternals). If I remember correctly the “rootkit” hid itself from task manager (among other things). Procmon is a beaut of a util, probably my favorite next to mspaint and notepad lol
@@skougi I always find myself starting to write some custom code, or maybe PS script, then remember at the last second that Mark's sysinternals already does it. Good code lasts forever.
15:15 "Perhaps if everyone had come together and standardized on an interchange format things would have turned out differently." That actually happened with XMPP. The Google, AIM, Facebook, and MS Messenger services each supported this standard protocol. Unfortunately for us they closed back up. Now e-mail is all we have left in terms of commonly-used open-spec messaging.
FB Messenger still uses XMPP, but it's a bit hacked up at this point in comparison with the specs, disappointing since Jabber extensions were so valuable to allow that interoperability for businesses without needing the bloat of other clients.
@@cericat c2s endpoints were killed years ago, s2s never existed, and the c2s endpoints were a hack as FB didn’t transport raw XMPP XML internally thus preventing interesting stuff from being done. Unless a FB employee confirms this, I am almost completely convinced FB chat software has nothing to do with XMPP.
AOL had value from 1990-ish to the late 90's even if you were technically adept. I traveled a lot on business at that time for a telecom-related company. I needed internet access every night and hotels then offered nothing. You couldn't count on the room's handset fitting anything, so you would pull out your handy "MacGyver" kit and disassemble the handset, the phone base, or the wall plate; whatever gave easiest access to red/green "tip and ring." Alligator clips to the modem now you still had nothing unless you wanted long-distance at hotel rates. But with AOL you just told it what city you were in, it gave a POP, you dialed for that and boom, internet connection. You had to fiddle with the AT command set a bit to navigate the hotel telephony but they were all pretty much the same. So, unlimited internet access from any hotel even though they weren't real sure what that was. Ty AOL. I educated a few hotel managers what that was after getting careless about what housekeeping found over longer stays. Once they believed I wasn't sabotaging the hotel, they thought it was pretty cool.
I actually was one of those people using AIM in 2017. Granted, it was through Pidgin, which probably is part of why Verizon/AOL/Yahoo/Oath/etc decided to shut it down. I migrated that particular friend group over to Discord and I'm sure I'll be migrating them again in a decade's time. As for "emulating the binary read check", I have to wonder what, if anything, Microsoft Legal thought of embedding someone else's binary into MSN in order to send bits of it back to AOL. (Or what AOL Legal thought of hacking their own users to check if their apps were legit.) I imagine this could have escalated into a terribly tricky legal battle pretty quickly.
In a hundred years from now when hardly anyone alive has ever even seen a 28K modem, this video and others of yours like it may be important historical resources.
Dave I stumbled across your channel a while ago & subscribed... Man this is some good stuff, keep up the stories and great work!! It's really awesome to see someone from little old Saskatchewan doing neat things that impact millions... Electrical Engineer, 13 years, from the Saskatoon area.
Yes. Remember i 1996 when we used an hour and half to download one picture of Pamela Anderson on a 14400 modem. We weren't disappointed watching the picture unfold itself line by line.
Must have been a short video. A 14.4 modem did about a 1.5kbyte/s or 90kbyte per minute. Even a highres (for the time) image would have only 5 minutes max. My first modem experience was a 1200 baud modem, that took forever. I spent all my savings on a 14.4 modem which was sooo much faster. Videos on the other hand did take forever (easily an hour), and you ended up with maybe a 1 minute clip at 160x100 or something ridiculously small likevthat
Love this historical stuff - keep 'em coming! Thanks for this and all of your other content. Amazing the nostalga type feeling that was triggered upon hearing that W.95 "sound".
"Protocol wars" were common in 2000's. I remember I had to routinely update my third-party ICQ client because it stopped working every now and then. ICQ (and then, AOL) insisted on using their own official client software, which was loaded with ads to the brim. The ads were so obtrusive that people jumped from one third-party client to the other, trying to avoid the official ICQ client by all costs...
Dave, this video is straight up hamster. Thankyou for yet another awesome tale! I love being able to have the technical side of a historical story, it's like a documentary for tech geeks :D
I remember the messenger war being between ICQ and MSN, at least here in Europe. I remember Microsoft's strategy being to include "Windows Messenger" with the OS, and making it annoy the user with pop-ups until they signed up and logged in, and the settings to shut it up were a bit buried. AOL merging ICQ and AIM was a logical decision. Not a lot of people over here used AIM (most of Europe was ICQ territory) so making the two systems interoperable meant keeping and expanding both userbases, at least for a while.
I remember tossing many AOL CDs that were everywhere you went. Magazines, mail, and as you said, free. But I was a CompuServe user using two phone lines, straight from the NID and in tandem to have some "speedy" dialup using Mosaic, and Netscape. Those were the days of Buses. Great video
I went digging in the attic a few months ago and found an AOL floppy disk still sealed in plastic wrap. Gave it to my nephew for a laugh, he got a kick out of it. He wasn't even born yet to be familiar with that era but he's a history buff and his dad got him into retro computers when he was very little so he's appreciative of things like that. :-)
your channel is so underrated! I love these microsoft stories especially since you worked for them. That’s so cool, this makes me happy, coming from a retro collectior :)
It's cool that making these vids is your hobby. It's pretty clear you don't need to cash and was happy to hear the profits are going to a good spot. I assumed based on your personality that you were already donating but cool to hear it. Also as someone who grew up in Redmond and is a pc nerd, cool to hear this stuff.
I remember having AOL as a teen. I remember their walled garden approach to internet. Keywords and chatrooms. Then at school one day we had to do a project and use the real internet. That's when I discovered yahoo search, and everything else... thanks to another student who knew what he was doing.
My whole life, I thought that Microsoft engineers were like a klan or something that you weren´t able to talk about even after retirement. All the info that I´ve been gathering from your videos is pure gold. Please keep this up!
I still have fond memories of my first exposure to a 300 baud modem in 1979 (a Novation modem). Sure, it was alow by today's standards, but considering that an 80 cps matrix printer was a small fortune for me. It wasn't long before the modem arms race began as speeds went from 300 to 1200 to 2400, etc. I lived in San Diego at the time and knew folks who had access to the Arpanet. The access numbers were a closely guarded secret and by the time I got the number, it worked for a few days before it was changed. I got involved in the internet in the earliest days ... long before the graphical web was available. I ran several BBS systems over the years including PMS and Fidonet systems. The happiest day for me was when Comcast introduce cable modems in my neighborhood.
Microsoft was also doing shady stuff. It was mutual. It's pretty bad that in order to keep Microsoft at bay AOL had to do something that could have been harmful to their paying customers. It's reasons like these I prefer to use Linux and other open-source products for a good portion of my computational needs. They suck so bad at maintaining users, that you'd have to worry more about a project dying than some kind of exploit being added to impact the application's security to keep it safe from the OS maker. You have things like Pidgin which works on numerous different messaging systems, on just about every platform. If you think Windows, MacOS and Linux support is a lot, they also have support for BSD... so all three of those guys can use it too! 🤣
@@sbrazenor2 The trick is to use a wrapper that hides the OS specific stuff. For example, I use the Qt library. I program/debug on Linux. Once ready, the codes changes needed to make it run on Windows are minimal. They have to do with the file system. I just log into Windows, open my project with Qt Creator and I hit compile and out comes a EXE file. I don't know if Qt is available for BSD. However, there is a bunch of wrappers other than Qt. You could also code in Java which is a virtual machine or virtual environment or whatever you want to call it.This is a case of compile once and run anywhere. You could OpenGL to render everything and OpenGL tends to be present on every OS.
I would say that as much as I was not a fan of AOL, I can see how this was a necessary move on their part. The monopolistic behavior of Microsoft is well documented and there were massive judgments about this but they weren't resolved until the situation with bundling Internet Explorer. AOL was just using the only tools they had to give one of their flagship pieces of software a fighting change. I see it as straight self-defense.
Outstanding, like all of your videos. I especially like the information density - so much content every minute. I always feel like it's time very well spent.
I remember my mom being what was a somewhat early adopter (at least for non-tech heads) getting a PC for the Internet in 94/95. I remember the first internet being MSN, then going to AOL, my family hating it, then later going back to MSN before the early 00s and getting "broadband." Could finally play Runescape without lag lol. I always thank my mom for getting a PC and internet that early, because I know many especially of our economic status that didnt get internet, let alone really into it, til the mid 2000s at the latest.
just stumbled upon your channel. couldn't be happier to see so much good content in here. decided to put it in the prime spot of my dinner-time videos collection
Friends, Seinfeld, and ER was quite a Thursday night line up, now that you mention it. Didn't we also have the option of swapping ER for The Simpsons by rolling over to Fox for the second hour? Halcyon days 😂
I worked in mainframe communications for the airline industry. To us the biggest benefit was a common industry standard, that everyone used, so we could all sell each others tickets (taking a commission). Now if you think we might take a $1 commission on a transaction and we processed a 1000+ Transactions Per Second (only a small fraction of those generated revenue, but even at say 1% you see we made money). We actually had more computing power than many small nations, in our data centers.
Wow, this was interesting. I started off the internet with win 3.11 (didn't trust the new fangled win95 os, so had to setup winsock). Also ran ICQ, and still remember my user number, 25 years or so later. Oh the memories, back when the internet was largely innocent. I remember upgrading from my 2400baud modem (from BBS connections) to a 28.8k, lightning fast. Thanks Dave for your videos. Keep them coming.
Those AOL CDs were used in some marinas to scare birds off the boats before they left their dirt. That was the most productive use for the things I ever did find, other than using AOL to find Netscape and surf without the handholding.
Around the time of the Acoustic Coupler, we in mainframes were using proper modems to connect over leased lines, and sometimes dial-up too. On dial-up, the standard synchronous modem offered by the Post Office in the UK offered 2400 bps. We normally used Micom Borer devices which gave 4800 bps. These were very robust - one site had phone lines where the voice quality was unintelligible. Hit the data button and that 4800 modem gave us error-free data. Wiring them to the line was a pain though, because every district seemed to have at least 3 ways of wiring up the consumer end of the line.
4800! I rememer learning Shannon's theorem and plugging in the signal to noise ratio for the phone line and getting something like 35kbit, which might not even be correct but it was so close to the max modem speeds that I always assumed I must have done it right!
Another excellent episode, Dave - Nicely done! I have less than completely fond memories of the 2B+D ISDN line we had when I was working for the phone company up in Minneapolis back in the late 90's. Ah, the good(?) ol' days...
I had a couple of telxons, and while I never had an AOL account, and later ran my own ISP for a time, remember [un]fondly of redialing 300, 2400, 14.4, and 56k (running at 38K) Baud modems to get on both BBSs and PPP/SLIP modem banks, back in the day! Oh, and we used mosaic, thank you very much! :)
Great episode. I had a modem for my Vic 20 and had a compuseve account. It was an expensive way to play hangman. I use AIM from 2000 until the end, mainly for work. Now it’s teams or slack.
I particularly enjoy your series about task mgr, zip folders, format and the rest. Also love the end .. Friendly Giant! Keep up with this entertaining series.
You should check out LGR's video on the history of AOL he goes into some more depth about the CD marketing campaign and such, pretty good addition to the info you shared here! Great vid man, really enjoying your channel!
8:19 Sorry Dave, but major oversight not to include the "oh! oh!" notification sound from ICQ. That sound is what actually inspired me to include the thunderstorm sound in PopUp Killer, every time a popup was killed (closed).
I used to use AOL discs as frisbees. Everything came with their discs in the UK for a while, which I always found ironic considering what AOL stands for.
I think a relative still has a stack of them sitting on his desk (he's a bit of a pack rat). The plan was to create an adjustable parabolic mirror with them as a backyard weapon. At the time couldn't get over CDs still commanding a premium yet here is AOL handing them out for free...
Loved it Dave! Please KEEP adding the bloopers at the end of video ( or even in place). It's fun to watch and endearing as it reaffirms you are not an android writing his own OS. Or perhaps you are but just sly..... hmmnnn....
My dad actually had a subscription to quantum link and on the commodore 64 they had a game called Club Caribe where you could walk around a resort island and talk to other people. It really blew my mind as a kid.
Fun remembering the old modems, I ran my first BBS off of a 300 baud modem attached to a c64 from basic code I'd come across and modified to accommodate a second floppy drive, which I had to take the cover off and slice a jumper to make it serial device 9! By the time the end was near for BBS's I ran a large Fidonet board in Tacoma with 56k modems but we did our mail tranfers via FTP over internet, ah yes, the good old day. :)
I don't want to be that "one up" guy where, if you've seen a dog with 5 legs, he's seen one with 6! But I also ran a BBS on a 30 baud modem, except it was my 300 baud brown VicModem which lacked autoanswer. So I'd answer the phone and if I heard a carrier, run and throw the switch. I was not up to speed on FidoNet, it was just coming in as I moved to the Internet at school, but it seemed cool in that you could send email and files all around it!
@@DavesGarage I remember the vicmodem! I used to sit on the carpet with my keyboard hooked up to the TV and fascinate myself with communication, (while irritating my wife) that's when I knew I just had to have more, lots more! These days, I'm that guy at work that the IT guys hate because I amuse myself writing front ends for the db that bypass the accounting system when IT isn't anywhere near my job description :)
Had ISDN as well, the 2 B channels and the D channel were bonded in the Cisco router to get 144Kbps, was AMAZINGLY fast for the time. What’s amazing to me is looking back how costly that $20 a month was. Heck, I pay $50/mo today for Internet and it’s 350Mbps. Oh, one word: ICQ...
Me too, the only downside was that I was stuck with it for about 5 years past when ADSL came out, but I couldn't get it! I was really surprised that MSN actually supported it, and I could dial into them as my ISP with both channels for years!
@@DavesGarage I had ISDN at work, with a 16 bit ISA card in the gateway PC, and then the ISDN TA that was connected to the phone wires and the computer. Interesting to see that it would power on when connected to the phone line, but only would work for data when you powered it locally as well, though the phone port on it would work perfectly just off the 250VDC line powering. Rock solid 64k connection though.
50 bucks an mo ???? i pay 40€ a month for home TV, unlimited home phone and internet, and for my phone, i pay 10€ a month for unlimited calls and unlimited 4G/5G usage (used 1.5to to test it a few months back, didn't got blocked or anything, it's true unlimited usage)
Good grief I haven't heard the name ICQ since I was 14. My first messenger was actually PowWow, then briefly ICQ, and thereafter it was MSN all the way. I still remember being absolutely BLOWN AWAY that I could type messages instantly to someone in a different county or even country. Now it all just feels very familiar and unimpressive. Anyway, great video Dave!
What a crazy ride. I remember the days but only used ICQ, before moving to MSN when it became standalone. Please upload more content around security topics from the past, much appreciated :-)
Back in our corner of Eastern Europe we only had mIRC back then. And then Yahoo Messenger became popular and everyone was using it. But AIM? MSN? MSN was just some strange icon on our desktops we weren't quite sure about. AIM was basically unheard of.
From what I remember, AOL allowed ICQ to still be a thing. I went to college in 1996, and my first experiences with internet was broadband with T-1 in college dorm. I had to do AOL dialup while visiting family. But my computers were always just on broadband T-1 from 1996-2002. I'm saying this because I do think ICQ had a large enough market during this time period (in fact I've just found a graph that indicates users continued to rise to 2001 with 120 million users). It definitely was unique in that it wasn't tied to an ISP (like AOL or MSN), and it was more of a precursor to some of the messaging apps we have now that are stand alone and [should] have less overhead.
I was one of those users in 2017. Mostly because there were still people on my buddy list and,as you pointed out, there was no real easy on-ramp onto another service beyond mutual agreement on where to hop to and what your new username would be. Kinda miss aim. Sure there is that project that has recreated it with at least partial functionality, but.... I dunno. Anyway I love these prods and pokes and stories from your garage especially given I was just becoming computer aware in the 90s and so a lot of these from the trenches stories fill in knowledge gaps, and even when it's something I already know your story telling method is entertaining all on its own.
6:09 in my country actually a lot of providers used to flood everything with CDs. I remember that in the late 90s, someone must have got into our classroom before school and put CDs from some provider on every seating spot there (in my country schools usually open about 1 hour before the first lesson and usually everyone can just walk in, because it's not the US, but a safe country, so schools don't need security). Noone actually used them for their intended purpose, instead they had covers which had some mechanism which could be used to "fire" the CDs across the room, so we just used them to shoot each other with CDs.
A fascinating story, and a trip down memory lane. Compuserve was how I first got onto the Internet back in the 90s, and we had ISDN also, though that couldn't be used by the PC (it was purely for the SPARCstation machine for my father's work (he worked for Sun)). I have mixed memories of both MSN, Yahoo!M and ICQ, which I used at different times, though I used IRC a fair bit more often, usually from University a bit later on, and tended to much prefer that to the IM platforms in many ways.
On the iPhone and in iMessage, a blue background means the message went through apple’s servers and is encrypted, a green background means it is unencrypted SMS. If the message can’t be sent to another Apple client through Apple’s servers, it goes through as an unencrypted SMS message with a green background. The main difference between blue and green is encrypted and unencrypted.
I was still using AIM when they shut it down. It had an uncomplicated ui and always just worked. It lacked encryption but that was never something I cared about, as I used it mainly for chatting with a handful of friends. We also used ICQ and Trillian for a time, but eventually switched back to aim. There were hacked aim clients (most notably deadAIM) which removed the spam from AIM. Those were great, and worked very consistently. When AIM ended, we moved over to using MightyText/SMS messages. No file transfer capability with SMS, unfortunately (other than images).
I remember AOL back when it came on floppies or CDs that were in a bin or on a rack and just free to take. I wonder how many people took them just for the floppies. They would have a user name and password you could use to set your own up. Back when I was on AOL there seemed to be a version of the software I liked a bit more or found it easier to upgrade from. Of course back then I was on dial-up and it had a maximum possible speed of 56k so many things took quite a while. You can imagine how nice it was to keep backups of anything like the AOL software once it was installed. It could take a good while to install it on dial-up.
I remember that AOL already had a bad rep in the mid 90s, at least in my country. They still had many users, but many of them just had installed it from an icon on their desktop or from CDs that they would give away for free on the streets and didn't really have a clue about it.
Telxon! Yup. My family ran a hardware and animal feed store in the 90's and early 2000's. We used the same thing with our supplier. Was fun looking things up in their giant paper catalog. And those crates they delivered stuff in were great when I was in college and needed to move stuff around.
Late 90s my office (and server room) had it's window covered with AOL CDs to provide some level of privacy. Didn't take long to get it pretty private!!! 😁
I remember as far back as MS-DOS and Win 3.1 we had separate software to enable sockets, ftp, telnet, and a terminal emulator, usually a VT100 or even an IBM 3270.
As an Australian, AOL never got a hold of the marker here as much. Certainly there CDs were everywhere but I think they just got to the party here a little late. Instead we had an ISP called OzEmail (pronounced as Aussie Mail) who was the market leader for awhile.
This was also the golden period of third-party multi-protocol chat clients whose hobbyist developers cracked protocols and offered chat for multiple platforms within a single, unified design interface. Then Jabber happened.
ISDN's akimbo! That was a god-tier connection back then! I frog leaped from 14.4k to 56k to 1500k (we won't talk about the down...side of things held @ 5k forever!) Currently 160, 000k+ (20+MB/s). Definitely not linear. Yeah, no going back! Love that CD-RW for AOL idea, that would have saved me some coin. Though my first 2x cd burner and 384k buffer could still easily coaster a CD-RW. They were ~10x the cost of a CD+/- R. In 2 years I'll actually be able to see if burnt CD's can be read 30 years later, not a simulated lab test, but actual time!
Ha.. I had ISDN 2D+B in '96. I got upgraded to Cable in '98. The IDSN freaked me out because it connected in about 0.25 seconds. No screeching or scratching. I remember downloading Firefox as a Cable speed test. All 16MB only took 2 minutes! Blazing!
Ironically this hurt AOL in the UK. They continued to charge an hourly rate way longer than in the US. This meant that less and less people used AOL here over time. Then MSN worked for more people on different ISPs, it very quickly became noticable that Europeans used MSN messenger and the US AIM. I briefly used trillian before dumping it altogether not long after.
Davepl: The specific client we tried to emulate from AOL was their Mac client. The Messenger dev manager, found out from some AOL senior execs at a conference about the buffer overrun. The other reason in addition to interop with AOL, was that if we could host our IM traffic for free on AOL's systems, then we would not have to stand up our own server farm. Eventually we worked with Yahoo to form IMIP (Instant Messenger Interoperability Protocol) in order to try to apply pressure to AOL. We also tried to apply pressure at the merger hearings (TimeWarner/AOL) where they would have to open the IM eco-system. Those were fun times!!
So the monopoly tried to act like a monopoly and threw a hissy fit when they couldn't get a foot in on a new area invented by AOL--heck, Barry even has a patent on the AIM concept. And then MSFT got all angsty about interoperability and open yadda yadda when they themselves where the king of close-everything and sue anybody who tries to peek under the covers. And what about the freshly minted DMCA? Wasn't that in effect at the time? Doesn't that say something about no reverse engineering?
So the AIM system was effectively delivering dynamic code to the client. Why's that an issue? You fired up the AOL AIM client and were at it's mercy, already. So trusting code delivered from the AIM servers is not big deal. And hiding the update mechanism in a buffer overflow? Sheer genius.
And yeah, you kinda hit a nail on the head there with that "would not have to stand up our own server farm". That's another reason why MSFT would have lost in court. They were effectively trying to steal services from AOL. Did you put the ads up on the client that AOL was delivering? Or did you substitute your own?
This was one of those cases where Bill tried to fight fair and realized he couldn't win. So he decided to play dirty... the usual "do anything to win, we'll pay whatever penalties in court but the payout from winning will be 100x bigger". MSFT got got.
It's such a cool experience as an engineer now getting the perspective of an engineer that worked on/around the things that consumed my pre/teen years!
Seriously. This is quickly becoming my favorite channel.
Has a tech worker myself, I also find those stories so fascinating, they are the "making of" from the time I was still a young user. I wish more tech veterans would share stories like this.
@@zaphodbond lemme tell ya 'bout the IBM 7094 Core Whomper...
This channel is pure candy for us who lived through these great times
I loved ICQ, but ended up using MSN Messenger the most, because that's what most of the people I wanted to chat with was using. This was in the UK, where AOL wasn't so big, yet I remember even us getting those AOL CDs 🙂
I'm loving these stories from a MS insider perspective, please keep 'em coming.
For a future episode: Are there any tales from when the UI for Windows 95 was being planned such as alternatives to the iconic Taskbar and Start menu that were seriously considered but didn't see the light of day?
Its kinda funny to think how revolutionary the start menu was back then and how horrible it is today.
4:08 you could say in the dial-up times Computers were having literal phone calls between eachother
I remember using AOL with a modem. AOL _hid_ the rest of the Internet from their users, especially when (as I suspect was _way_ too often) the user didn't even know there was an entire Internet out there!
Early 90s that was kind of the norm, it's weird looking back and seeing how much Netscape and MSIE opened up the internet because you were no longer gated by compuserv, AOL, etc in what you saw through their systems.
Still kinda of the norm now from ISPs and the darkweb (although I haven't tried in a while, so maybe not).
But ISPs certainly truncated what was accessible through their networks.
"In order to find an AOL CD all you had to do..."
...was maintain a body temperature roughly somewhere in the 90's ;-)
Not even that, all you needed was a post box that was not welded shut, and where the slot was not stuffed to overflowing with mail marked "occupant", and if overflowing it would be in the pile on he ground next to it in multiples.
I'll have you know I found some in a hospital gift shop as a kid running a temp a good bit over 100
Pretty much. Every computer/gaming magazine in the '90s came with either an AOL or Earthlink CD under plastic.
Just about every modem shipped with an AOL CD.
Compusrv... Flooded
"I've personally had Sony rootkit my code"... both funny and a BIG flex.
Big flex? Thousands of us have had it
@@pete3897 I guess he may have meant “my code” as in the code they exploited in Windows to install the root kit was literally code he wrote ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
@@pete3897 you're saying thousands of developers got thier windows licensing key code reverse engineered by Sony? (the flex is not the end user who used the rootkit).
My brain had the whole affair filed under Scott Hanselman for some reason, but it was actually Mark Russinovich (before ms scooped up sysinternals). If I remember correctly the “rootkit” hid itself from task manager (among other things). Procmon is a beaut of a util, probably my favorite next to mspaint and notepad lol
@@skougi I always find myself starting to write some custom code, or maybe PS script, then remember at the last second that Mark's sysinternals already does it. Good code lasts forever.
15:15 "Perhaps if everyone had come together and standardized on an interchange format things would have turned out differently."
That actually happened with XMPP. The Google, AIM, Facebook, and MS Messenger services each supported this standard protocol. Unfortunately for us they closed back up. Now e-mail is all we have left in terms of commonly-used open-spec messaging.
FB Messenger still uses XMPP, but it's a bit hacked up at this point in comparison with the specs, disappointing since Jabber extensions were so valuable to allow that interoperability for businesses without needing the bloat of other clients.
@@cericat c2s endpoints were killed years ago, s2s never existed, and the c2s endpoints were a hack as FB didn’t transport raw XMPP XML internally thus preventing interesting stuff from being done. Unless a FB employee confirms this, I am almost completely convinced FB chat software has nothing to do with XMPP.
Some people claim that WhatsApp still probably runs heavily modified ejabberd...
IRC
IRC has existed long before any of those things and perfected text chat and will always continue to exist
AOL had value from 1990-ish to the late 90's even if you were technically adept. I traveled a lot on business at that time for a telecom-related company. I needed internet access every night and hotels then offered nothing. You couldn't count on the room's handset fitting anything, so you would pull out your handy "MacGyver" kit and disassemble the handset, the phone base, or the wall plate; whatever gave easiest access to red/green "tip and ring." Alligator clips to the modem now you still had nothing unless you wanted long-distance at hotel rates. But with AOL you just told it what city you were in, it gave a POP, you dialed for that and boom, internet connection. You had to fiddle with the AT command set a bit to navigate the hotel telephony but they were all pretty much the same. So, unlimited internet access from any hotel even though they weren't real sure what that was. Ty AOL.
I educated a few hotel managers what that was after getting careless about what housekeeping found over longer stays. Once they believed I wasn't sabotaging the hotel, they thought it was pretty cool.
I actually was one of those people using AIM in 2017. Granted, it was through Pidgin, which probably is part of why Verizon/AOL/Yahoo/Oath/etc decided to shut it down. I migrated that particular friend group over to Discord and I'm sure I'll be migrating them again in a decade's time.
As for "emulating the binary read check", I have to wonder what, if anything, Microsoft Legal thought of embedding someone else's binary into MSN in order to send bits of it back to AOL. (Or what AOL Legal thought of hacking their own users to check if their apps were legit.) I imagine this could have escalated into a terribly tricky legal battle pretty quickly.
In a hundred years from now when hardly anyone alive has ever even seen a 28K modem, this video and others of yours like it may be important historical resources.
Dave I stumbled across your channel a while ago & subscribed... Man this is some good stuff, keep up the stories and great work!! It's really awesome to see someone from little old Saskatchewan doing neat things that impact millions... Electrical Engineer, 13 years, from the Saskatoon area.
Yes. Remember i 1996 when we used an hour and half to download one picture of Pamela Anderson on a 14400 modem.
We weren't disappointed watching the picture unfold itself line by line.
Must have been a short video. A 14.4 modem did about a 1.5kbyte/s or 90kbyte per minute. Even a highres (for the time) image would have only 5 minutes max. My first modem experience was a 1200 baud modem, that took forever. I spent all my savings on a 14.4 modem which was sooo much faster. Videos on the other hand did take forever (easily an hour), and you ended up with maybe a 1 minute clip at 160x100 or something ridiculously small likevthat
Oh... the days of exchanging FTP passwords...
Love this historical stuff - keep 'em coming! Thanks for this and all of your other content. Amazing the nostalga type feeling that was triggered upon hearing that W.95 "sound".
Thanks Dave! This is so much fun. We were always suspicious this sort of thing was happening but better to know it actually was!
"Protocol wars" were common in 2000's. I remember I had to routinely update my third-party ICQ client because it stopped working every now and then. ICQ (and then, AOL) insisted on using their own official client software, which was loaded with ads to the brim. The ads were so obtrusive that people jumped from one third-party client to the other, trying to avoid the official ICQ client by all costs...
Dave, this video is straight up hamster. Thankyou for yet another awesome tale! I love being able to have the technical side of a historical story, it's like a documentary for tech geeks :D
I remember the messenger war being between ICQ and MSN, at least here in Europe. I remember Microsoft's strategy being to include "Windows Messenger" with the OS, and making it annoy the user with pop-ups until they signed up and logged in, and the settings to shut it up were a bit buried.
AOL merging ICQ and AIM was a logical decision. Not a lot of people over here used AIM (most of Europe was ICQ territory) so making the two systems interoperable meant keeping and expanding both userbases, at least for a while.
I love the bloopers at the end. It reminds me that no matter how smart we are we all fumble our words at times.
Brought back lots of memories with this one! I was an AIM and ICQ user.... Never knew this inside history, though. Thanks!
I remember tossing many AOL CDs that were everywhere you went. Magazines, mail, and as you said, free. But I was a CompuServe user using two phone lines, straight from the NID and in tandem to have some "speedy" dialup using Mosaic, and Netscape. Those were the days of Buses. Great video
I went digging in the attic a few months ago and found an AOL floppy disk still sealed in plastic wrap. Gave it to my nephew for a laugh, he got a kick out of it. He wasn't even born yet to be familiar with that era but he's a history buff and his dad got him into retro computers when he was very little so he's appreciative of things like that. :-)
I love hearing all the stories from the golden era.
your channel is so underrated! I love these microsoft stories especially since you worked for them. That’s so cool, this makes me happy, coming from a retro collectior :)
It's cool that making these vids is your hobby. It's pretty clear you don't need to cash and was happy to hear the profits are going to a good spot. I assumed based on your personality that you were already donating but cool to hear it.
Also as someone who grew up in Redmond and is a pc nerd, cool to hear this stuff.
I remember having AOL as a teen. I remember their walled garden approach to internet. Keywords and chatrooms. Then at school one day we had to do a project and use the real internet. That's when I discovered yahoo search, and everything else... thanks to another student who knew what he was doing.
Next episode: The long slow death of MSIE + ActiveX/Flash
And Silverlight!
This is the best so far! Nerdy info from the 18th century AND bloopers at the end! Perfect!
My whole life, I thought that Microsoft engineers were like a klan or something that you weren´t able to talk about even after retirement. All the info that I´ve been gathering from your videos is pure gold. Please keep this up!
I still have fond memories of my first exposure to a 300 baud modem in 1979 (a Novation modem). Sure, it was alow by today's standards, but considering that an 80 cps matrix printer was a small fortune for me. It wasn't long before the modem arms race began as speeds went from 300 to 1200 to 2400, etc.
I lived in San Diego at the time and knew folks who had access to the Arpanet. The access numbers were a closely guarded secret and by the time I got the number, it worked for a few days before it was changed.
I got involved in the internet in the earliest days ... long before the graphical web was available. I ran several BBS systems over the years including PMS and Fidonet systems.
The happiest day for me was when Comcast introduce cable modems in my neighborhood.
That intro was GOOD, hahaha. AOL doing shady stuff to Microsoft sounds like a good story no matter how you slice it.
Microsoft was also doing shady stuff. It was mutual. It's pretty bad that in order to keep Microsoft at bay AOL had to do something that could have been harmful to their paying customers.
It's reasons like these I prefer to use Linux and other open-source products for a good portion of my computational needs. They suck so bad at maintaining users, that you'd have to worry more about a project dying than some kind of exploit being added to impact the application's security to keep it safe from the OS maker.
You have things like Pidgin which works on numerous different messaging systems, on just about every platform. If you think Windows, MacOS and Linux support is a lot, they also have support for BSD... so all three of those guys can use it too! 🤣
@@sbrazenor2 The trick is to use a wrapper that hides the OS specific stuff. For example, I use the Qt library. I program/debug on Linux. Once ready, the codes changes needed to make it run on Windows are minimal. They have to do with the file system.
I just log into Windows, open my project with Qt Creator and I hit compile and out comes a EXE file.
I don't know if Qt is available for BSD.
However, there is a bunch of wrappers other than Qt.
You could also code in Java which is a virtual machine or virtual environment or whatever you want to call it.This is a case of compile once and run anywhere.
You could OpenGL to render everything and OpenGL tends to be present on every OS.
I would say that as much as I was not a fan of AOL, I can see how this was a necessary move on their part. The monopolistic behavior of Microsoft is well documented and there were massive judgments about this but they weren't resolved until the situation with bundling Internet Explorer. AOL was just using the only tools they had to give one of their flagship pieces of software a fighting change. I see it as straight self-defense.
That MO story was epic, love your channel bud.
You've really come a long way since you started this gem of a channel Dave. I must say your speaking and overall delivery has improved ten fold!
Outstanding, like all of your videos. I especially like the information density - so much content every minute. I always feel like it's time very well spent.
I remember my mom being what was a somewhat early adopter (at least for non-tech heads) getting a PC for the Internet in 94/95. I remember the first internet being MSN, then going to AOL, my family hating it, then later going back to MSN before the early 00s and getting "broadband." Could finally play Runescape without lag lol. I always thank my mom for getting a PC and internet that early, because I know many especially of our economic status that didnt get internet, let alone really into it, til the mid 2000s at the latest.
just stumbled upon your channel. couldn't be happier to see so much good content in here. decided to put it in the prime spot of my dinner-time videos collection
Friends, Seinfeld, and ER was quite a Thursday night line up, now that you mention it. Didn't we also have the option of swapping ER for The Simpsons by rolling over to Fox for the second hour? Halcyon days 😂
What about MacGyver?
I worked in mainframe communications for the airline industry. To us the biggest benefit was a common industry standard, that everyone used, so we could all sell each others tickets (taking a commission).
Now if you think we might take a $1 commission on a transaction and we processed a 1000+ Transactions Per Second (only a small fraction of those generated revenue, but even at say 1% you see we made money).
We actually had more computing power than many small nations, in our data centers.
Ahh ICQ. Loved that little uh-oh sound :)
Met my wife over ICQ back late last century too!
Wow, this was interesting. I started off the internet with win 3.11 (didn't trust the new fangled win95 os, so had to setup winsock). Also ran ICQ, and still remember my user number, 25 years or so later. Oh the memories, back when the internet was largely innocent.
I remember upgrading from my 2400baud modem (from BBS connections) to a 28.8k, lightning fast.
Thanks Dave for your videos. Keep them coming.
Those AOL CDs were used in some marinas to scare birds off the boats before they left their dirt. That was the most productive use for the things I ever did find, other than using AOL to find Netscape and surf without the handholding.
Around the time of the Acoustic Coupler, we in mainframes were using proper modems to connect over leased lines, and sometimes dial-up too.
On dial-up, the standard synchronous modem offered by the Post Office in the UK offered 2400 bps. We normally used Micom Borer devices which gave 4800 bps. These were very robust - one site had phone lines where the voice quality was unintelligible. Hit the data button and that 4800 modem gave us error-free data.
Wiring them to the line was a pain though, because every district seemed to have at least 3 ways of wiring up the consumer end of the line.
4800! I rememer learning Shannon's theorem and plugging in the signal to noise ratio for the phone line and getting something like 35kbit, which might not even be correct but it was so close to the max modem speeds that I always assumed I must have done it right!
Another excellent episode, Dave - Nicely done! I have less than completely fond memories of the 2B+D ISDN line we had when I was working for the phone company up in Minneapolis back in the late 90's. Ah, the good(?) ol' days...
I remember when AOL on came on 3.5" floppies.
I had a couple of telxons, and while I never had an AOL account, and later ran my own ISP for a time, remember [un]fondly of redialing 300, 2400, 14.4, and 56k (running at 38K) Baud modems to get on both BBSs and PPP/SLIP modem banks, back in the day! Oh, and we used mosaic, thank you very much! :)
Great episode. I had a modem for my Vic 20 and had a compuseve account. It was an expensive way to play hangman. I use AIM from 2000 until the end, mainly for work. Now it’s teams or slack.
I particularly enjoy your series about task mgr, zip folders, format and the rest. Also love the end .. Friendly Giant! Keep up with this entertaining series.
You should check out LGR's video on the history of AOL he goes into some more depth about the CD marketing campaign and such, pretty good addition to the info you shared here!
Great vid man, really enjoying your channel!
8:19 Sorry Dave, but major oversight not to include the "oh! oh!" notification sound from ICQ.
That sound is what actually inspired me to include the thunderstorm sound in PopUp Killer, every time a popup was killed (closed).
I used to use AOL discs as frisbees. Everything came with their discs in the UK for a while, which I always found ironic considering what AOL stands for.
I think a relative still has a stack of them sitting on his desk (he's a bit of a pack rat). The plan was to create an adjustable parabolic mirror with them as a backyard weapon.
At the time couldn't get over CDs still commanding a premium yet here is AOL handing them out for free...
Loving the outtakes ... because your reaction ...
Loved it Dave! Please KEEP adding the bloopers at the end of video ( or even in place). It's fun to watch and endearing as it reaffirms you are not an android writing his own OS. Or perhaps you are but just sly..... hmmnnn....
That's just was a good robot WOULD say :-)
My dad actually had a subscription to quantum link and on the commodore 64 they had a game called Club Caribe where you could walk around a resort island and talk to other people. It really blew my mind as a kid.
Fun remembering the old modems, I ran my first BBS off of a 300 baud modem attached to a c64 from basic code I'd come across and modified to accommodate a second floppy drive, which I had to take the cover off and slice a jumper to make it serial device 9! By the time the end was near for BBS's I ran a large Fidonet board in Tacoma with 56k modems but we did our mail tranfers via FTP over internet, ah yes, the good old day. :)
I don't want to be that "one up" guy where, if you've seen a dog with 5 legs, he's seen one with 6! But I also ran a BBS on a 30 baud modem, except it was my 300 baud brown VicModem which lacked autoanswer. So I'd answer the phone and if I heard a carrier, run and throw the switch.
I was not up to speed on FidoNet, it was just coming in as I moved to the Internet at school, but it seemed cool in that you could send email and files all around it!
@@DavesGarage I remember the vicmodem! I used to sit on the carpet with my keyboard hooked up to the TV and fascinate myself with communication, (while irritating my wife) that's when I knew I just had to have more, lots more! These days, I'm that guy at work that the IT guys hate because I amuse myself writing front ends for the db that bypass the accounting system when IT isn't anywhere near my job description :)
I miss instant messaging. It is so much better in so many ways to "social media". Maybe we need a revival of this direct contact paradigm.
Whatsapp: Am I a joke to you?
Telegram: Ha ha ha
@@GoodMuyis There's skype too, but MSN was more fun to use despite being hella dated when it finally went tits up.
I love the old storys, very interesting. I hope you have more!
Up into 2019 when I was still doing contract it on-site support for retirees in the Bellevue and Issaquah area, still had to support AOL...
I love all your stories. I'll watch pretty much anything you do here. Pretty much ...
Had ISDN as well, the 2 B channels and the D channel were bonded in the Cisco router to get 144Kbps, was AMAZINGLY fast for the time.
What’s amazing to me is looking back how costly that $20 a month was. Heck, I pay $50/mo today for Internet and it’s 350Mbps.
Oh, one word: ICQ...
Me too, the only downside was that I was stuck with it for about 5 years past when ADSL came out, but I couldn't get it! I was really surprised that MSN actually supported it, and I could dial into them as my ISP with both channels for years!
@@DavesGarage I had ISDN at work, with a 16 bit ISA card in the gateway PC, and then the ISDN TA that was connected to the phone wires and the computer. Interesting to see that it would power on when connected to the phone line, but only would work for data when you powered it locally as well, though the phone port on it would work perfectly just off the 250VDC line powering. Rock solid 64k connection though.
TIL a form of ICQ still exists today 😂
50 bucks an mo ???? i pay 40€ a month for home TV, unlimited home phone and internet, and for my phone, i pay 10€ a month for unlimited calls and unlimited 4G/5G usage (used 1.5to to test it a few months back, didn't got blocked or anything, it's true unlimited usage)
@@DamirMaatar lucky you, not in a major US market are you. Comcast was $325/mo for Internet and cable.
Good grief I haven't heard the name ICQ since I was 14. My first messenger was actually PowWow, then briefly ICQ, and thereafter it was MSN all the way. I still remember being absolutely BLOWN AWAY that I could type messages instantly to someone in a different county or even country. Now it all just feels very familiar and unimpressive. Anyway, great video Dave!
Dave, just want to say Great Job! Your channel is now a must-watch. Signed, a Gen X current ‘Softie.
Wow, thanks!
What a crazy ride. I remember the days but only used ICQ, before moving to MSN when it became standalone. Please upload more content around security topics from the past, much appreciated :-)
Back in our corner of Eastern Europe we only had mIRC back then. And then Yahoo Messenger became popular and everyone was using it. But AIM? MSN? MSN was just some strange icon on our desktops we weren't quite sure about. AIM was basically unheard of.
I used a Telxon in my old job at a grocery store. I remember having to hold it up to the telephone ear piece to send off the orders!
From what I remember, AOL allowed ICQ to still be a thing. I went to college in 1996, and my first experiences with internet was broadband with T-1 in college dorm. I had to do AOL dialup while visiting family. But my computers were always just on broadband T-1 from 1996-2002. I'm saying this because I do think ICQ had a large enough market during this time period (in fact I've just found a graph that indicates users continued to rise to 2001 with 120 million users). It definitely was unique in that it wasn't tied to an ISP (like AOL or MSN), and it was more of a precursor to some of the messaging apps we have now that are stand alone and [should] have less overhead.
You are quickly becoming my fav youtuber
Love the bloopers at the end Dave.
I was one of those users in 2017. Mostly because there were still people on my buddy list and,as you pointed out, there was no real easy on-ramp onto another service beyond mutual agreement on where to hop to and what your new username would be.
Kinda miss aim. Sure there is that project that has recreated it with at least partial functionality, but.... I dunno.
Anyway I love these prods and pokes and stories from your garage especially given I was just becoming computer aware in the 90s and so a lot of these from the trenches stories fill in knowledge gaps, and even when it's something I already know your story telling method is entertaining all on its own.
6:09 in my country actually a lot of providers used to flood everything with CDs. I remember that in the late 90s, someone must have got into our classroom before school and put CDs from some provider on every seating spot there (in my country schools usually open about 1 hour before the first lesson and usually everyone can just walk in, because it's not the US, but a safe country, so schools don't need security). Noone actually used them for their intended purpose, instead they had covers which had some mechanism which could be used to "fire" the CDs across the room, so we just used them to shoot each other with CDs.
A fascinating story, and a trip down memory lane. Compuserve was how I first got onto the Internet back in the 90s, and we had ISDN also, though that couldn't be used by the PC (it was purely for the SPARCstation machine for my father's work (he worked for Sun)). I have mixed memories of both MSN, Yahoo!M and ICQ, which I used at different times, though I used IRC a fair bit more often, usually from University a bit later on, and tended to much prefer that to the IM platforms in many ways.
On the iPhone and in iMessage, a blue background means the message went through apple’s servers and is encrypted, a green background means it is unencrypted SMS. If the message can’t be sent to another Apple client through Apple’s servers, it goes through as an unencrypted SMS message with a green background. The main difference between blue and green is encrypted and unencrypted.
I was still using AIM when they shut it down. It had an uncomplicated ui and always just worked. It lacked encryption but that was never something I cared about, as I used it mainly for chatting with a handful of friends. We also used ICQ and Trillian for a time, but eventually switched back to aim. There were hacked aim clients (most notably deadAIM) which removed the spam from AIM. Those were great, and worked very consistently. When AIM ended, we moved over to using MightyText/SMS messages. No file transfer capability with SMS, unfortunately (other than images).
I really enjoyed the out takes, it make 'show' really relatable
I remember AOL back when it came on floppies or CDs that were in a bin or on a rack and just free to take. I wonder how many people took them just for the floppies. They would have a user name and password you could use to set your own up. Back when I was on AOL there seemed to be a version of the software I liked a bit more or found it easier to upgrade from. Of course back then I was on dial-up and it had a maximum possible speed of 56k so many things took quite a while. You can imagine how nice it was to keep backups of anything like the AOL software once it was installed. It could take a good while to install it on dial-up.
I remember that AOL already had a bad rep in the mid 90s, at least in my country. They still had many users, but many of them just had installed it from an icon on their desktop or from CDs that they would give away for free on the streets and didn't really have a clue about it.
Great one Dave....I liked the bloopers too ;-)
I love these tech stories. I hope you write a book/make an audiobook with all these stories compiled.
Yes, please!
Norwegian here, I still kinda miss AIM. It was our first way to game with voice across the pond.
6:27 The name you are looking for the floppy/CD marketing campaign that made AOL so ubiquitous is Jan Brandt.
Telxon! Yup. My family ran a hardware and animal feed store in the 90's and early 2000's. We used the same thing with our supplier. Was fun looking things up in their giant paper catalog. And those crates they delivered stuff in were great when I was in college and needed to move stuff around.
In Toronto growing up in the early 2000s we were all MSN users. Also remember the MSN Plus add-on that added a ton of cool features.
Late 90s my office (and server room) had it's window covered with AOL CDs to provide some level of privacy.
Didn't take long to get it pretty private!!! 😁
Huh that's actually pretty nice to keep the heat out as well, seems like, at least when you use the data side towards the glass.
Every time I hear the "Uh oh" from a gas station PoS, I relive a random moment from a by-gone era.
I have always been fascinated with the IE, Netscape war also.
I remember as far back as MS-DOS and Win 3.1 we had separate software to enable sockets, ftp, telnet, and a terminal emulator, usually a VT100 or even an IBM 3270.
Thanks Dave. Love the stories.
As an Australian, AOL never got a hold of the marker here as much. Certainly there CDs were everywhere but I think they just got to the party here a little late. Instead we had an ISP called OzEmail (pronounced as Aussie Mail) who was the market leader for awhile.
Ooh really looking forward to this one.
This was also the golden period of third-party multi-protocol chat clients whose hobbyist developers cracked protocols and offered chat for multiple platforms within a single, unified design interface. Then Jabber happened.
How did Trillian Messenger work? I use to use it to chat with MSN and AIM users along with a couple other chat clients.
ISDN's akimbo! That was a god-tier connection back then! I frog leaped from 14.4k to 56k to 1500k (we won't talk about the down...side of things held @ 5k forever!) Currently 160, 000k+ (20+MB/s). Definitely not linear. Yeah, no going back! Love that CD-RW for AOL idea, that would have saved me some coin. Though my first 2x cd burner and 384k buffer could still easily coaster a CD-RW. They were ~10x the cost of a CD+/- R. In 2 years I'll actually be able to see if burnt CD's can be read 30 years later, not a simulated lab test, but actual time!
Dave could do a whole video of just his mistakes and it would probably break the Internet. Or at least the remaining AOL users.
!= Mistakes ¦ Outtakes = Bonus Content
Man you have a great channel.
Ha.. I had ISDN 2D+B in '96. I got upgraded to Cable in '98. The IDSN freaked me out because it connected in about 0.25 seconds. No screeching or scratching.
I remember downloading Firefox as a Cable speed test. All 16MB only took 2 minutes! Blazing!
Ironically this hurt AOL in the UK. They continued to charge an hourly rate way longer than in the US. This meant that less and less people used AOL here over time. Then MSN worked for more people on different ISPs, it very quickly became noticable that Europeans used MSN messenger and the US AIM. I briefly used trillian before dumping it altogether not long after.
I greatly enjoyed this video. Enjoy all you videos. Enjoy the history
Ah, AOL! I remember that coaster manufacturer!
great vid. loved the bloopers!