Was it too little and too early of product, like AOL or other reasons to fail. They all seemed to me pushing the computing side, but did any face the fact the infrastructure of the phone system was not ready for digital data.
My feeling @oldben is that you need to say rather more, and more carefully, to lead off a discussion. Evidently you have a thought, about some technologies and some timescales, perhaps you have some examples, in terms of products or corporations. But for me, I’m afraid it’s not at all clear from your post.
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1800 phone numbers are routed by a C++ program, so I don’t think computing in the phone industry is in decline at all.
How many people used services like AOL?
I used their instant messenger.
Objectively, the answer is millions. For several years, they were very likely the largest private provider of online access to the Internet and other online resources in the world. What point are you trying to support?
Having never used it, I wondered who used it and where from and what for.
Was internet access always supported by AOL?
Heh, When AOL came out, going to the internet for FTP, or Newgroups on Usenet or Email, the World Wide Web and even FidoNet, were separate activities using different “browsers”, different client software to connect. So, what you mean by “internet” was radically different from internet access back then. AOL relunctantly included access to the WWW, but they were pushing their own email and discussion groups and FTP access, etc. I remember “the Web” as being the last of about eight different services displayed on the home page.
TheWorld was the first public internet provider in November 1989.The World is operated by “Software Tool & Die”. The site and services were initially hosted solely under the domain name world.std.com. They also provided Unix accounts, so users could login and use Unix running on substantial hardware from their homes. They get a lot less attention that The WELL in California. But you have to understand BBSes. AOL was kind of a giant BBS, it wasn’t unified “internet access” with email, ftp, http, https all from a single browser. So you will have to be a lot more specific, to have enough background knowledge to even ask answerable questions about the “Internet” back then.
AOL originally didn’t have any sort of internet connectivity, and it was named Quantum Link.
Basically, it was sold as a fun “social” network - in contrast to the serious business minded CompuServe and the digital shopping mall of Prodigy. AOL was the online service for just hanging around in chat or whatever.
Before it was renamed to AOL, Quantum Link had more of a game focus, including the first mass market MMO and MUD type games. But shifting the focus to the “social” aspects really boosted AOL’s popularity big time.
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Good point! It strikes me that the point of a network is to make use of remote resources. In modern times one might think of the Internet and think of all possible remote resources being available - one merely needs to be “online.” But that’s really a special case. A LAN, a BBS, a walled-garden such as AOL or CompuServe, all of them are cases of using connectivity to access something over there from over here. What AOL and Compuserve brought was some idea of universality - that everyone, or everything, was to be found on that network. It wasn’t true of course, any more than it’s true today of the Internet. But it’s true enough - if you can reach some friends, some games, some reference materials, that makes a thing useful.
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(It strikes me that a much better title for this thread might have been “The decline of dial-up connectivity”)
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I read all the replies and still couldn’t figure out what “phone based computing” was supposed to be.