alt Hacker NewsIn the early 1990s, back before anyone was ever sure if this Internet thing would ever take off outside of academic communities (and also ostensibly before Sir Tim-Berners Lee invented the World Wide Web), America Online was a proprietary online community that was reached via dial-up modem over the telephone network.
AOL allowed their users to interact with eachother (chats, forums, multiplayer games), read news, and otherwise kill some time. It was a walled garden that required both money and special software to access.
There were other paid services that were vaguely similar, each with different shapes for how the walls of their respective gardens were arranged. In the US, some of these competing services were CompuServe, Prodigy, GEnie, and Delphi.
Of all of these, AOL became the most-broadly known. As time moved on, they increasingly would mail out floppy disks with their software on what seemed like a continuous basis, with flashy color brochures, to millions of homes. (Some weeks I'd wind up with as many as 3 or 4 new AOL disks to use for whatever, delivered right to the mailbox on the front porch. Later, they'd send CD-ROMs instead that were most-useful as drink coasters.)
These services each vied to get as many users locked into their garden as possible, which was important to them because they tended to be metered services: Unlike something like a Netflix or Hulu streaming account, the more time a person spent using these services, the more money they had to spend.
And then, September came again -- and it never ended[1]. The walls of the gardens began to open up and users of these proprietary services began being exposed to what the greater Internet had to offer.
But at the same time, AOL grew. They got proper-fucking big. They went from being a cheeky dialup service with a friendly interface and some pervasive advertising campaigns to buying Time Warner for $182 billion.
And today, all of that business is just kind of a dusty memory.