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jaxdomino
join:2001-12-01
Jacksonville, FL
| Re: AOL? You are absolutely WRONG! AOL did in fact create a Walled Garden approach and that is why they were originally called an Online Service Provider versus an Internet Service Provider. I remember the old days of CompuServe, AOL and Prodigy fighting over who had the best Online Service. CompuServe and Prodigy allowed their users to "surf" the Internet and it was not unitl the early 1990's that AOL opened up the gates. They did it first with an in-house built "browser" solution then integrated IE into the AOL client. I still remember the uproar when AOL did this, because they screwed with people's IE settings without telling them first. | |
|  Pictor Guy
join:2004-06-21
Sammamish, WA
| Re: AOL? That was 1995-1996. In the early 1990's AOL still allowed people to use AOL via TCP/IP access to many points on the Internet. At that time IE wasn't more than an idea and Mosaic was the browser of choice. CS used the same approach. In fact, even when AOL used it's own "booklink" browser you still had the option to use any TCP/IP based browser you wished. Both AOL and CS let users use email go out on to the Internet and AOL also had Gopher access as well as Newsgroup and IRC access. AOL even owned a few IRC reflectors that was part of it's "give back to the Internet" plan. Newsgroups were open but searching newsgoups may have been limited giving people the impression that they didn't offer access to all groups. Some of the alt groups didn't come up on the searches due to parental control issues but if you knew the address you could still access it. CompuServe and AOL had very similar services but CS had better support groups and message boards but (at least with the CompuServ WinSim graphical client) both CS and AOL gave everyone access to the rest of the Internet but didn't give the Internet access to it's internal content (online-service). | |
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was because of the focus on in-house content, not because they didn't allow Internet access at all. I don't remember which one was first, but by late '95 or early '96 all of them provided access to the full Internet one way or another.