The Future, Brought To You by AOL

In the early 1990s, there was magic in the air.

Television dominated, and newspapers, as they had for generations. But one-sided conversation, the norm since the dawn of time, was being demolished. And the most disruptive upstart of the time was AOL.

Today, the once-mighty AOL is being acquired by Verizon, which didn't exist during AOL's heyday but like so many which came after benefitted from AOL's digital landscaping. The price tag is a mere $4.4 billion — less than one tenth of an Über, or 40 times less than AOL itself paid to acquire Time Warner 15 years ago in what is generally considered the worst merger ever.

But forget all that. Instead, celebrate that AOL changed the world.

By the early '90s we were well into the PC era, but in a funny metaphorical spin on IBM CEO Thomas Watson's famous last words — that there were probably only five legit computer customers in the whole world — PCs still really had no business being in the home at all. Outside of work they were as lonely as solitaire, perhaps the most used computer application of the day.

Like most revolutions, this one started small. A little company then called America Online was reimagined by a guy named Steve Case who, if history is as kind as it should be, will be remembered not for gargantuan over-reach but for realizing before nearly everyone what the computer could do for civilization.

AOL gave computers a purpose almost anyone could relate to. That innovation sparked a revolution that swept away many early movers — notably AOL — and created the world we now know. Nothing so annoying was ever as soothing as the sound of a dial-up modem making contact, which meant you were now on AOL, which put the world — albeit still a walled garden – at your fingertips.

It helped that the tech's collective brain power was focused on giving power to the people. At the same time as AOL was expanding the universe, mobile phones were making it smaller. The tide was unstoppable: We could have what we wanted when we wanted it. We didn't have to accept only what we were given, and when. Or listen to whomever we didn't want to anymore. It was intoxicating. Something that maybe doesn't even happen once in a lifetime.

It also helped that Case was able to leverage an existing platform, the phone network, to build something even bigger and better — an entrepreneur's trick that fuels most of today's breakthroughs but which was a pretty novel idea back then.

Everywhere you looked: Magic.

I've written that my first night with Mosaic was like cheating on my life. It was my Roy Neary moment, when I just knew that I had to pursue an alternate future that was hard to describe.

But AOL had already changed everything, I realized much later, well after the company had become a punchline. Along with Yahoo, AOL defined the internet lifestyle that endures. From content to communication to socialization to rich media, AOL understood what we wanted to immerse ourselves in and served it up in heaping doses. Even though both companies failed to maintain their early lead, what AOL and Yahoo wrought baked the cake we still enjoy.

Email: AOL made it a tool of the masses. Having an aol.com email address may get you laughed at now, but it was the Gmail of its day. Alternatives were snooty (The Well) and nerdy (Compuserv) or tied to your professional identity (Lotus Notes). AOL put the power to communicate electronically in everyone's hands.

Instant Messaging: Email had obvious limitations even in its earliest days. AOL had its homegrown Messenger, and then it bought a upstart, ICQ. Sound familiar? Messaging is a core functionality of every platform to this day. Even Facebook has two, including one it bought for $19 billion also just to kill a potential threat.

Mobility: No, there were no mobile devices. Zero. Or broadband. And you even paid by the minute for some local-ish calls. AOL had a massive directory of numbers that made the call local almost everywhere. So even though you were challenged in between (the most elite among us had acoustic couplers) you were covered at home and at work or a friend's house with your 10-pound laptop.

Real-time news: AOL was one of Reuters' biggest clients and, for a ridiculously long time, my former operation was the only source of news for AOL members. News was on AOL's splash page because the company knew that if you knew that experience was always going to be different, you'd connect a lot.

Community: There were these things called message boards and chat rooms. But you had to phone into each of them individually. So even though you could be part of a bigger group from the comfort of your mother's basement, your group was a hidebound as you'd be by yourself. AOL had groups and rooms (and private rooms ...) for everything, and you could wander among all of them. Sure, Compuserv already had groups, but they were all about COBOL.

All of these notions still animate pretty much every development in personal tech. The internet had been around for a while, mainly as the province of propellerheads testing concepts. AOL's place in history will be that it saw more pieces and realized how to put them together.

I joined AOL when there only a few hundred thousand members. AOL crested at somewhere north of 30 million. And if there had been a way to convert from a dial-up platform to an essential service you still needed when you got broadband, the sky would have been the limit instead of having fallen on its head.

So now, AOL goes from being the ultimate people platform to infrastructure. But there is no shame in that. Verizon is buying some content — The Huffington Post, TechCrunch — but what it's probably most interested in is something else that, once again, is hard to appreciate that AOL does well: How to monetize video.

Video is the new frontier, and how sweet it would be, even if the AOL brand disappeared, that it was still there making what we all want to immerse ourselves in possible, and more palatable.

It's no exaggeration that AOL got me dreaming big. Do you have any memories of AOL — fond or otherwise? Did it play a big role in your career development, or life?