AOL's History In Photos

It has been more than a decade since America Online dominated headlines as the future of media. Oh how times have changed! AOL rose from a company that originally made video games to a paper-behemoth that managed to purchase Time Warner in 2001. After a long series of disappointments AOL announced on Thursday that it would be separating from Time Warner.

Check out this slideshow by HuffPost's Cara Parks on the history of AOL.

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			America Online Begins In 1989, Quantum Computer Services, becomes America Online, and begins competing with more established services such as CompuServe by providing a user-friendly experience for the technically disinclined. Source: Wikipedia

Comments

[Mulvaney]

The decline of AOL makes me wonder what collateral effect it had on the related businesses -- like the people who made the cds and cases that AOL kept sending me in the mail even when I had never expressed any interest in signing up.

[haimchaim]

this is my fab. deal this year Good for Time Warner for pulling this AOL deal of the year AOL is a hot company

[mudshark12]

Got too big and failed, no bailout for you AOL.

[JaneQCitizen]

Good luck, Mr. Armstrong.

Photo number 4 took me back.

[Blutodog]

I was one of the first AOL users back in the 80's. In those days Steve personally tried to sell us stock. I thought he was nutz. Who would have known? It was kind of sad how it turned into a scam after he left. Anything good that goes BIG CORP. goes to the darkside.

[Bitsko]

Somebody here at HuffP0 has too much time on their hands. Is this one of those investigative pieces you said you were financing?

[Mike Butson]

Unfortunately for AOL, they failed to change with the Times (no pun intended). This lesson tends to be repeated over and over--see GM, Circuit City and the U.S. Postal Service. To revive this company seems akin to taking over a VHS vendor.

As a former AOL junkie though, I hope the new leadership will send them in a direction that makes sense. Start by tossing out the irritating gremlin that says "You've got mail!"

[Deaninphilly]

AOL became bloated and linked their software to M$. They could have held the market on searches, chat rooms and email but blew it. Their software slowed your computer and left traces all over it, kind of like that mess of a windows operating system does. They didn't see the future and didn't change.

[Cycadeoidea]

Oh yeah, brings back memories.

[VictoriaP]

i didn't realize that tim armstrong took over at aol. he was the founder of the search engine goto.com in the the 90's, which morphed a few times and was eventually purchased by yahoo.

is aol's implosion the last of the dot com bubble dinosaurs?

[VictoriaP]

heck, i am surprised that they lasted this long. i had aol in the 90s and couldn't wait to get the hell out of there. they started out with terrible business practices and horrible customer service. after cancelling their service, it took forever to make them stop billing my card. their extraordinarly long hold times make people just give up and hang up, when trying to get through to cancel the service. are they still doing this scam?

clearly, they were able to survive on the backs of the masses who are too technically illiterate to log into their accounts and check and send emails without someone holding their hand.

[MIKEinNYC]

Let us not forget, in a tail is wagging the dog scenario, it was AOL which bought Time Warner. AOL was THAT big.

[notAMoron]

Time warner removed AOL from their buddy list.

[MIKEinNYC]

I never had a problem with AOL. In fact, if truth be told, I owe them a debt of gratitude for getting me online in the first place. In fact, I still have a couple of free AOL accounts.

I know people look down their nose at me when I give out my email as aol.comol.com", ("oh,,,, you still use AOL", snobbery), but why is that worse than msn, gmail, att, yahoo or other domains?

[Cycadeoidea]

I was a big AOL user in the early 90s. I had a 1200 baud dial-up modem and their chat rooms were awesome. Then AOL started doing this thing where they began adding more and more content to the pages, especially images, which dramatically slowed the interactivity down. Then came the day when it took me over ten minutes just to log in because I had to wait for all the content on the AOL main page to download. I called them up then and there and canceled my account and never looked back.

[VictoriaP]

me too, but they were the only game in town at that time and early adopters who were consumers without access to resources in universities used aol then dumped them asap, when they transitioned from www to the graphical web as we know it today.

[Cycadeoidea]

I participated in CompuServe forums and partook of downloads before joining AOL, but CompuServe never had chat rooms.

BTW, I got my first Web access via a CompuServe product (I think it was called "Sprynet"), but then CompuServe and Sprynet went separate ways leaving me with a monthly bill and no Internet access, but that's another story.

[lynettema]

They did have great chat rooms. Then Liz Cheney came on board and anything liberal was banned.

[ubeman]

Their suckage knew no bounds.