As a gawky kid entering high school, chat rooms were a haven from the awkwardness of real human interaction. This is the era that many people, myself included, remember most vividly. Not a single music CD or Microsoft CD was produced during those weeks.”ĪOL’s subscriber base grew to 17 million in 1999. “When we launched AOL 4.0 in 1998, AOL used ALL of the world-wide CD production for several weeks. Just how powerful was America Online during this time? Reggie Fairchild, product manager for AOL 4.0, shared this little story on Quora: The late ’90s, according to Schober, was when chat rooms hit their peak. For $19.95 a month, users could now linger in chat rooms for as long as they wanted. Then, in 1996, America Online opened the floodgates by introducing a monthly flat rate instead of charging by the hour. Participation in chat rooms started to snowball as more people used them, the variety of chat rooms increased, attracting even more people. : Google Graveyard, meet Microsoft’s Morgue So you started getting to the 9600 and 14,400 baud modems that made the speeds a little more comfortable.” People talk about their cellphones being slow now a slow cellphone might be 256k or 512k, so if you think about something being 100 times slower than that, it’s ridiculous. “In the ’80s, if you had a 2400 baud modem you were pretty hot stuff,” says Schober. And, despite our memories of the slow-dialing modems of the ’90s, connecting to the World Wide Web was faster than ever at the time. Windows 3.1 was released, making personal computers both more affordable and easier to use. The company was positioned perfectly for the onset of the Internet Age. Schober moved from beta tester to full-time employee in 1992, when the service – now officially called America Online – went public. Schober remembers a ticker dubbed “Network News,” a kind of virtual community newsletter that would let people know when certain chat rooms had a special guest or were discussing certain topics. The chat product, called People Connection, had a variety of rooms for people interested in such topics as genealogy and strategy games. Slowly, the service grew, expanding to support DOS and eventually Windows. : 12 unique compouters, tablets and gadgets that are just around the bend So the experience of going into a chat room and getting a response a couple of seconds later from someone who was in the same chat room was just really cool.” “The BBS world, it tended to be a one-line experience – you were the sole user of the service, you could send email, you could leave messages, but it wasn’t interactive in real-time in the same way. “I know for myself, personally, I found it fascinating,” says Schober. It only took 23 people to fill a chat room. When the main chat room filled to capacity, necessitating the creation of Lobby 2, the community celebrated. He recalls a “little frontier town” where you could initially recognize almost every screen name you came across. The beta test was dubbed “Samuel” and for Schober, a teenage fan of BBSes (bulletin board systems), it was an intriguing opportunity. Back then it was called AppleLink, a project commissioned by Apple Computer and a company called Quantum Computer Services to connect Apple II and Macintosh computers. His relationship with the company started in 1988, before it was America Online. I talked with Joe Schober, the longest-running employee at AOL and its current chief architect. But what, exactly, did happen to the chat rooms Parker so fondly remembers? Apparently people don’t feel constrained by interacting with the people they know – they feel comforted by it. So far, Airtime hasn’t exactly been a hit. : Chatroulette 2.0? Napster founders launch Airtime video chat All of your interactions online are constrained by the people you already know.” Last month, Sean Parker of Napster fame launched Airtime.Īmid the hoopla of the launch – attended, for some reason, by Jimmy Fallon and Snoop Dogg – Parker told an anecdote about meeting his business partner, Shawn Fanning, 15 years ago in a chat room, saying, “There’s something exciting about bringing spontaneity to the Internet.
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