AOL was the first major consumer online and internet service provider, so thats why it is so memorable today. Too many people chatting in one room was hard to follow.ĪOL, like Netscape, Myspace, Usenet, CompuServe, dial-up, Flash, are all kaput!Ī lot has come and gone in the online world in just the last 20 years. It is something that would not likely fly today-even on Facebook pretty much the whole gamut of profanity is more or less tolerated with comparably little action taken-it is where it comes to obscene multimedia/pictures/graphics is Facebook more concentrating its censoring. Pictures and other media were not able to be included in AOL chat or IM back then, so it mainly covered speech that was deemed obscene. It did not cover email outside of the service. This included profanity in chat rooms and perhaps IM messages if the recipient reported it. However, AOL took it a few steps more: the department in AOL was actually called the Morals Department (circa 1997-99) and it was formed with the intent to 'keep it clean'.Įven rather light to moderate profanity could easily result in a TOS violation warning, with a second one resulting in termination of the account. I know what you mean of Facebook's terms of service regarding multimedia, etc.
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This is very much like AOL's TOS violations. Just like AOL, people war by turning folks in and getting their accounts suspended. I personally know of a few people with suspended pages and accounts. Today something like that I really doubt would ever fly, but back then the company managed to enforce such strict rules (with termination of account very common for infractions) with relatively few ill-effects to their business for a while.Īctually, FB is getting just as bad with its "Morals Department". There is one more aspect to AOL that gets surprisingly little attention these days: if you had their service before 1999, they had, for a few years, some pretty strict Terms of Service rules-they even had a 'Morals Department" (yes, I kid you not) to enforce the policies against profanity, obscenity, etc.in the end, it just didn't sit too well with the customers and they had to relax the rather arbitrary policy after a few years-or risk loosing larger amounts of customers as more competition came in by 2000.
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Dial-up was fine back in the days of text-based online systems and simple graphics, but once video, high-res animation, etc became common on the Web, people needed much faster speeds to get online and broadband and other fiber-optic systems basically answered that demand. By 2001 or so, dial up modems were loosing to ethernat, cable and DSL modems-the graphics and memory of web sites, browsers and everything else was increasing greatly and slow dial up just couldn't handle all that. I think the thing that really killed AOL (and those old-school type chat rooms) was not only AOL's sale to Time Warner circa 2000, but also a vast increase in competition and changing technology, that AOL simply did not adapt to, or did not fast enough. Had broadband from 2002 on, so it became a pain to also have a dial-up for AOL.
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I started using AOL in early 1994, before it really took off and I stopped using it sometime around 2003, though even by then I had been using it less and less in place of other things like Yahoo and such. I seem to recall AOL allowed up to five separate screen names on an account.