AOL

I ran across a couple of people with aol.com email addresses today and it gave me pause to reflect on how things have changed.

I got my first computer in 1991. That was back in the days of Windows 3.0 and big-ass floppy disks that were really floppy.

I think it was a 386 with maybe a 2 or 4 megabyte hard drive (I'm writing this on a two-year-old Dell with an Intel Core 2 Duo that runs at 1.86 GHz, has 2GB of RAM and internal and external hard drives totaling about 2TB of memory.)

The World Wide Web was in its infancy in those days. The true geeks were playing around with a web browser named Mozilla and the rest of us were subscribing (via ultra-slow dial-up modems) to online services like CompuServe and Prodigy. I started with Prodigy.

America Online soon eclipsed Prodigy in terms of quality and subscribers. I had an AOL account from around 1993 until maybe 1997 when I realized it was just too limiting.

One writer has described AOL as a kind of "walled garden" on the Internet. I like to think of it as the Internet with training wheels. Either way, AOL has become soooo yesterday.

AOL membership peaked at around 27 million in 2002. Since then, it's plummeted to somewhere close to eight million. I have no idea what their demographics are, but I'd bet the average AOL subscriber is old enough to belong to AARP.

That describes me and it also describes the my friends with aol.com email addresses.

I suppose the big difference between me and my AOL contemporaries is that I spend a ridiculous amount of time online and Internet surfing with any of three or four different browsers has become second nature to me.

They, on the other hand, appear to have lives.