AOL, every mention
43 scenes (2024), the whole family · ← back to AOL
tap a year for its mentions
every year 2024 anyone David Rosenthal 59Ben Gilbert 35Brendan Eich 12Jason Calacanis 8Brad Gerstner 1Anthony Gonzalez 1
Verbatim, from the transcripts: the passages where AOL comes up
Meta (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 12:25 David Rosenthal And then, speaking of family and friends chat, in 1997, when Mark is 13 years old, AOL launches AIM.
- ▶ 12:25 David Rosenthal And then, speaking of family and friends chat, in 1997, when Mark is 13 years old, AOL launches AIM.
- ▶ 12:37 David Rosenthal AOL Instant Messenger.
- ▶ 12:40 Ben Gilbert Many, many, many hours lost to AIM, and, uh, warning my friends and other dynamics of the AIM system to gang up on people, and to have other people gang up on me, and.
- ▶ 12:53 David Rosenthal Oh man, punting people off AIM, and.
- ▶ 13:08 David Rosenthal The crazy thing about AIM, to go on just a quick little digression here, I had no idea until doing the research.
- ▶ 13:13 David Rosenthal It was actually like a rogue skunkworks project within AOL.
- ▶ 13:38 David Rosenthal They ended up using it internally at AOL to communicate, and that's actually where away messages come from.
- ▶ 14:26 David Rosenthal So the other important thing about AIM, when it came out that I had no real conception of at all as a kid, was that it was free.
- ▶ 14:36 David Rosenthal So my family was an AOL family, like we were AOL subscribers, we had the You Got Mail, etc.
- ▶ 14:42 David Rosenthal But you didn't have to be a paying AOL subscriber to download and use AIM and join the network.
- ▶ 14:42 David Rosenthal But you didn't have to be a paying AOL subscriber to download and use AIM and join the network.
- ▶ 14:50 David Rosenthal AIM goes on to become this total viral thing in North America.
- ▶ 15:43 David Rosenthal And basically all of them and certainly all the young people were on AIM.
- ▶ 15:48 David Rosenthal So the other important thing about AIM and AOL here is it was pretty easy to hack, but
- ▶ 15:48 David Rosenthal So the other important thing about AIM and AOL here is it was pretty easy to hack, but
- ▶ 15:54 David Rosenthal like, oh man, there was just a field day that kids and teenagers had with like AIM bots, punting software, wares, hacking programs.
- ▶ 16:15 David Rosenthal And it let you kind of be a punk and like kick people off of AIM by bombarding them with messages.
- ▶ 16:22 David Rosenthal You know, you could do some like teenage punk stuff, but it also let you extend the functionality of what AOL and AIM was.
- ▶ 16:22 David Rosenthal You know, you could do some like teenage punk stuff, but it also let you extend the functionality of what AOL and AIM was.
- ▶ 16:48 David Rosenthal It's like all this personalization of like, hey, I don't want just what AOL gives me.
- ▶ 17:18 David Rosenthal He was doing ZuckNet, he was doing all these little projects, but like, you know, here's AOL, this sort of unintentionally, infinitely hackable and extensible canvas that he can play around on.
- ▶ 18:58 David Rosenthal And there, Mark meets another kid who's a lot like himself, who also is really into computers, really into AIM and everything going on there, and Mark's like, yeah, man, I really made the right choice.
- ▶ 20:44 David Rosenthal And in fact, AOL, I think, would acquire Winamp a couple years later.
- ▶ 25:35 David Rosenthal BuddyZoo takes your buddy list from AIM, from AOL, and effectively turns it into a social network.
- ▶ 25:35 David Rosenthal BuddyZoo takes your buddy list from AIM, from AOL, and effectively turns it into a social network.
- ▶ 26:46 David Rosenthal This feels like something more on the order of AIM itself.
- ▶ 27:16 David Rosenthal They're staying in touch the whole time and collaborating and working through coding challenges together on, what else, on AIM.
- ▶ 42:36 David Rosenthal In addition to, technically, because of open source and the LAMP stack, and also socially because of AIM and everything going on, the world sorta, for the first time, something like Facebook being able to be built for no money and no…
- ▶ 50:24 David Rosenthal You put in your AIM screen name, you put in your cell phone, you put in your interests, you put in your classes.
- ▶ 1:29:55 David Rosenthal Adam D'Angelo does go back to Caltech and then through AIM, I guess, remotely helps collaborate with the company until he graduates and in 2006 and becomes CTO officially.
Microsoft Volume II: The Complete History and Strategy of the Ballmer Years (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 6:33 David Rosenthal But if you rewind just a little bit back to, like, 92, 93, 94, even into early 95, going online for consumers meant using a service like CompuServe or Prodigy or, of course, the big one, AOL.
- ▶ 7:18 Ben Gilbert It was like you had to have some negotiating power and know someone at AOL to go do a deal to get your content on their platform.
- ▶ 7:57 David Rosenthal So in 1993, they start sniffing around AOL and see if maybe Microsoft could acquire AOL.
- ▶ 8:05 David Rosenthal Steve Case, the founder of AOL, isn't interested in selling, but there's this whole thing where Paul Allen goes off by himself and he buys a large stake and that creates all sorts of headaches because Microsoft is like, well, if we can't…
- ▶ 27:26 David Rosenthal Anyway, ok, meanwhile, remember the online services, the CompuServe, you know, Prodigy, AOL, etc.
- ▶ 27:45 Ben Gilbert So I think it was late 93 or early 94, but this was a seminal moment where the AOLs of the world interconnected with the internet, and now you could not just navigate the proprietary services, but also surf the open web.
- ▶ 28:46 David Rosenthal And all of a sudden, AOL comes in and buys the whole company of Booklink for thirty million dollars.
- ▶ 29:02 David Rosenthal There's Booklink that AOL just bought.
- ▶ 42:36 David Rosenthal Microsoft has now done deals with AOL, CompuServe, and Prodigy, all the old online services to ditch whatever browsers they were using and bundle in Internet Explorer.
- ▶ 48:18 David Rosenthal So, to close the book on Netscape, in November, 1998, AOL acquires Netscape in an all stock deal for just over four billion dollars, but again, all stock.
- ▶ 1:23:42 Ben Gilbert Sun, AOL, real networks.
- ▶ 4:16:56 Ben Gilbert You had Yahoo, AOL, the whole cable and media sector.