The Social Media Experiment

(Photo of Steve Case by Russell Hirshon)

AOL celebrated 25 years this last year and what a journey. I remember installing America Online, choosing a local phone number to dial into and then hearing that familiar scramble of the audible “handshake” followed by the  connection that would allow me to leave my room and enter the infant internet. 14.4 kb per second seemed like a leap forward as I was able to view web pages at the blistering speed of one every 15-20 seconds. The big upgrade was 28.8 and then…wait for it…. 56.6 kbps. The time it took to download a single page of content seemed reasonable until you made the big upgrade to 56.6 KB per second. Should you happen to click a link, it was still a role of the dice as to how long the next page would load.

It was worth the wait.

Even with all of the issues of accessing content at sometimes painfully long load times, America Online introduced the masses to Internet access. Receiving a disk in the mail every 4 weeks may have been one of the largest and most successful mail marketing campaigns in history. The sometimes confusing and slightly more difficult steps of setting up internet access through a typical internet access provider of the time was no longer an issue.  I will be always be able to say, “I remember when” but for our kids on FiOS enjoying 25 MB upload and download speeds, it is but a piece of history easily ignored.

So I owe a big thanks to Jim Kimsey, who went to my high school, St. John’s College High and has given them a nice facilities upgrade and Steve Case. who has always been cordial in the several times we have met. Although AOL’s journey has changed and its focus is now on content, its legacy will live on for those of us who carelessly surf the web as if it was naturally programmed into their DNA. This DNA was actually  created by those two guys and the thousands of people that worked at AOL.