AOL Sucks. My first exposure to the online world was through the computer company NEC. My dad worked there for years and since I also worked there during summers in college, I always had a year-round NEC email address to communicate with people, which I thought was pretty fancy – not many people were “online” in college in the early 90s.
However, my first exposure to the true consumer internet was AOL, and I remember thinking how revolutionary and huge AOL was going to be. Not because it was incredible or anything – it was simply the lowest common denominator for the internet – catering to anyone – a mile-wide and an inch deep, you know? Oh, how I wish I had the money at the time to plow into that stock! I signed onto AOL in the spring of 1994 and by 1997 they were ruling the world. And they were sending out a LOT of free CD-ROM’s plugging their service.
Well, today I was in the post office sending some CD’s I burned to a friend, and I came across an AOL CD boasting “1025 Hours for Free (first 45 days)!!!!” I hesitated and did the numbers in my head and discovered that 1025 hours is the rough equivilent of 42 days. So to get the maximum benefit of the “1025 free hours,” you’d have to be awake for almost 42 straight days. Imagine food & drink companies did this? “Buy One Cake, Get One Free (eat in the first 10 minutes)!” Yeah, what a bunch of tools. AOL sucks.