I'm Gonna Surf Like Its 1997

For the first time since 1997, I typed in a username and password that belonged to me and heard “Welcome. You've Got Mail.” Yes, I am once again a member of AOL. If you haven't heard, much of AOL is now free, including an aol.com e-mail address and access to it either via the web or the classic AOL software. Will I use it? I doubt I'll use it that much — I have not used my AOL AIMMail account much — but it was just very amusing to see the old service again.

I didn't start out at AOL. Conversely, my start online was Prodigy in February 1993. My address was dpbx52b — something I can still remember off the top of my head without any trouble, for some reason — and later dpbx52b@prodigy.com. I use to love to play around with the Mobil Travel Guide and Ziff Net download service. All of this stuff seemed so cutting edge thirteen years ago. There were a few nifty games, including one where you moved around a maze. You'd see one drawing that looked sort of 3D. Click, then wait. Then another screen. Well, I'm getting off track.

In 1994 or so, my family did try both AOL and CompuServe. This was the golden age of the online service. CompuServe was intriguing just because it was archiac — we first signed on using a MS-DOS based terminal program known as COMit and were greeted by the famous “CIS” prompt. Later, a copy of WinCIM (Windows CompuServe Information Manager) arrived, but it did little to bring the oldest online service up to the fancy standards of AOL or Prodigy.

AOL offered downloads (the best part of AOL to me at the time, since Ziff Net downloads on Prodigy cost a buck or two a piece), forums and some other neat stuff, but Prodigy's EGA color palate on fully graphical pages was more inviting looking than any other option until the Web gained HTML 3.0 or so, I'd say. Prodigy got even more exciting in 1994 when they added real photos to their news section, photos you could watch load one line at a time (it seemed very slow at 2400 bps and was still tedious at 14.4 kbps). Prodigy also introduced its Prodigy Web Browser (pweb.exe) that year and I believe it was sometime late in 1994 that I first surfed on the web, at the time mostly interested in video game sites, like Sega of America. Prodigy offered unlimited service for $14.95 a month, while AOL and CompuServe metered their service at that time.

CompuServe was canceled within a month or so of the end of the free trial, AOL survived a bit longer, but not much. I never used it that much, so I can't recollect my screen name.

In 1995, I was caught up in the excitement about Windows 95 and, after installing Windows 95 on its launch day, we signed up for the new MSN service. It offered charter members some kind of cheap deal — maybe it was $4 or $5 a month — but only offered five hours of service. We suspended our Prodigy account, although I quickly noticed what was missing: the Internet. This was before the infamous direction change at Microsoft that set it on a course to build internet apps. MSN had internet access in certain regions, depending on what MSN's contracted connectivity provider in the area offered, but St. Louis was not one of them. For a number of months, I fell off the Internet. We never reactivated our Prodigy account, as Prodigy had redesigned its service under the designation “the new prodigy” with the hopes of making it seem more Internet savvy, but had, in reality, destroyed the quaint feeling of the Prodigy Classic service. The newer classic service was stark and was also quite a bit slower. MSN won the day for a bit.

But, MSN was still a metered plan and had some problems, so we signed up for AOL again in August of 1996 or so when AOL sent out a win-back promotional flyer. This time, we switched to AOL. My screen name was “twnm.” The service worked fairly well, really, and we kept it for about a year. The advantage to AOL was that, as the hub of the online world, you could find almost everything on it — or so it seemed. The final blow with AOL was that its unmetered plan was $19.95 a month, and MCI was offering Internet access for $14.95. The Internet was seeming more and more useful without the need for an online service, so we moved on.

With the switch to MCI, the curtain came down on my time as a holder of an account with a traditional online service provider… until today. Now, I've got mail again. How interesting.