Been awhile since I worked at AOL. One of the funnier moments for me was when I started working there, someone referred to the client (the one they shipped via CD) as WAOL (pronounced - Whale). IIRC, the executable was waol.exe.
Jokes aside, they had some pretty fierce technology on the backend that, had it seen the light of day of Open Source, would have been the precursor to Docker and Protocol Buffers. All this back in the 90's.
Man. The only purpose of all for me back in the day was that you could call them up and they'd ship you a stack of 5.25/3.5 floppies so you could "share" "the service" with your "friends". i.e. Punch a hole where the write protect window should be and yay, free, really cruddy, media!
An interesting thought, I'll bet that many companies if they had published papers or OSS for the technology they built would have advanced the state of the art today by five to ten years...
Actually a lot of the services that are now "big" existed already for a long time.
I still can't believe that back in 2001 we have been building something like a german Netflix.
Also my colleague who sat right next to me thought it would be a great a idea to have something like youtube for music in 2002 (Soundcloud) And he actually had a working service but he gave it up :)
I proposed a user-edited online encyclopedia in 1996, while working at the New Scientist. Everyone agreed it would never work, so the idea wasn't pursued.
Two years later, Everything launched, a year after that, H2G2, and two years after that, Wikipedia.
Didn't Netflix have what every other service was missing ? Netflix had a deal that they could stream whatever they had on DVDs for a fixed price. So they had boatloads of streamable content, which was the major stumbling block of everything else.
umm... not so much. Youtube was already a roaring success with user generated videos (which included lots of dvd rips, tv captures etc. etc.) before they started engaging with hollywood on a legal basis.
Did you do any work with the FDO language? The world of WAOL.exe was like pure ethanol poured onto the pilot light of curiosity when I was a younger programmer.
I never got the pleasure :-). I did see the manuals, which were a couple of binders full of pages, on a colleagues shelf once. I suppose that was the forefather of xul/xaml+scripting language, though I guess we're still trying to sort that out.
Jokes aside, they had some pretty fierce technology on the backend that, had it seen the light of day of Open Source, would have been the precursor to Docker and Protocol Buffers. All this back in the 90's.