God, I remember the commercials where some dumb kid would push this narrative: “AOL is the Internet!” They would just directly say the lie outright. And after polluting the world in AOL CD-ROMs, it worked for a time.
Such a scummy corporation. I’m glad Time-Warner got burned when they bought them for a high price, right at the peak where they were going to drop like a cliff in popularity.
Sure it was marketing speak, but Usenet's eternal September started in late 1993, and that's also about when AOL opened up their email to the internet. By late 94 there was a functional browser and they were effectively an ISP with extra stuff (that no one wanted anymore). In some ways, the "AOL is the Internet" angle was an admission that "the Internet" was what people wanted, and AOL itself was redundant. It probably did cause people to spend more on internet service than they needed, but it was already a rear-guard action, whether AOL knew it or not.
I remember a very specific commercial where they were listing stuff that was “on” AOL, most or all of which was just on the broader actual Internet , and then closed with some pitch like, “AOL has things you can’t get anywhere else,” clearly implying everything they just listed was exclusive to AOL. I couldn’t understand why every other ISP wasn’t suing them into oblivion for that crap.
I remember the CDs, they were everywhere lol. Luckily my brother was tech savvy and when I got my first PC, I asked what the deal was with AOL links and he laughed saying no one uses “AOL internet”. I remember they all but died in a year.
To be honest, if I could go back in time for a day or two. I would go back to 1994 and find a nice cozy internet Cafe to log into AOL and chat with my friends. The interface is super dated for today’s standards but I miss it so much. I still use their sound notifications on my phone
As another commenter mentioned, the 90s as peak Reaganomics, the war on drugs were destroying poor neighborhoods, and prescription drug abuse was skyrocketing. Reaganomics were robbing the middle class of what little wealth they had. The war on drugs was ensuring that poor families were being destroyed. Prescription drug over prescription as feeding families directly to the war on drugs.
That’s the 90s I remember. The entire system had been broken to make as many people as possible poor, and keep them there.
90s "prosperity" was entirely fake, still being driven by the "reaganomics" of the 80s, and were the peak before the long, drawn out collapse you're seeing now that actually started in the 70s but we had managed to stave off. 9/11 was the beginning of the end.
The interface is super dated for today’s standards but I miss it so much.
I still remember "AOL for DOS," which was really just the core functionality of the Windows alternative "GEOS," nerfed to only allow the AOL app to run. Teenage me had a guild on Neverwinter Nights and everything. Topped out at 8 people, IIRC.
meh, these bundled access terminals were required back in the day for internet access. those applications started out dialup, no internet providing inter-system communication... and then added the internet connectivity until eventually that feature was the only reason to use it. see also; prodigy,msn
yeah they should at least mention how allowing America to easily get Online caused a dramatic downturn in the quality of online discussion at the time.
I discovered it only a few weeks ago and I am sad to say that 1994-1995 was when I went online for the first time. With an AOL "Free 20 hours access". I undoubtedly contributed to degrade the quality of discussions, not mentioning choking several dial-accesses with the freakinig 50x50 pixels pictures I uploaded on my very first homepage.
Fun fact: Kodac had digital cameras back in the 1970s - this was declassified a few years ago. I used to know someone who flew Vulcans in the RAF, he always told me he was testing prototype Kodac long range photography at the time.
They did actually make lots of digital cameras and were a pioneer in their development. But they were always a film business, not a camera business. The camera was just the vehicle for recurring payments in the form of film, an early subscription model business basically. Selling a single digital camera without the years of film purchases after was way less profitable for them. Even with a full switch to digital their business would have needed to rapidly decrease in size and scale, shuttering most of their factories aimed at producing chemicals for film. There was no real way for Kodak to continue on in the massive form it once had no matter how the switch to digital happened. Even the remaining camera industry is still shrinking in size now compared to where it was with the advent of camera phones. Market cap of Kodak in the 90s was like 30 billion not even accounting for inflation and higher valuation of stock in the 30 years since, compare that to something like Nikon who has a current market cap of 3.71 billion. So yeah, the executives were right to avoid transitioning if the goal was to maximize profits for share holders, and they’re a corporation so that’s definitely their goal, right or wrong.
It takes 8 years of being a 3.71B company to make the money of just that one single year of being a 30B company. Now, if the next year after that peak were 26B, then there’s another 7 years. Just two years at their peak is better than 15 years at 3.71B. Now do that area under the curve for 30 years. Yes, it is down to near zero now; but it was so high in the past that it would take a very long time at 0 profit to make up for it.
Also, I had a digital camera in 2001. They absolutely sucked and were only fun for nerds like me. They did not replace the film camera I had. So Kodak could have focused on selling a niche product that people wouldn’t have wanted for 15 years or ignored a very long term future profit to make a shitload then.
Even if they went hard at making digital cameras, it probably wouldn’t hurt their business too much since they would replace film revenues with camera revenues. They would still be a 30B company, since valuations take into account future revenues. If it hurts current profits a little, but has good future prospects, that often still increases stock value
Example: AMD is breaking even right now, but the stock price is still high due to future AI chip sales.
Now, yeah they would, but that would have required giving up the massive profits they were still making at the time just to become a less valuable company faster. Past shareholders don't care about future shareholders after all.
Your’re mixing market cap and profits, but that’s the wrong comparison anyway.
There’s no reason Kodak couldn’t invest in sensor development while keeping film production going - their expertise in colour and image processing would’ve given them a major advantage on the sensor market.
Nikon was never a film company so they make for a poor comparison anyway, their expertise is in lenses. Fujifilm is a more direct competitor and a better match, they pioneered digital cameras and diversified their business while still producing film and as a result are still worth 22b today.
Point taken. But I think bringing profits into it just makes things even more clear. Profit margins on film were as high as 80% for Kodak at times. I doubt any digital camera based company is making anything close to those kind of margins. Bringing people away from film cameras was definitely not in their best interest, but they did make digital cameras too, only beaten to the market by two years by Fuji Film (1991 vs 1989). They kind of even still do make digital cameras apparently? No idea how much involvement they have with them, but their branding is at least on them. Even if they had been more successful in digital cameras they would have needed a massive downsizing and shuttering of most of their chemical based jobs in Rochester, NY and other places. I think a transition to pharmaceuticals or other ways to leverage their core chemical manufacturing business would have made more sense, which they kind of tried too by purchasing at least one pharmaceutical company, but not very successful either. I think a lot went wrong at Kodak, but I don’t think leaning even more heavily into digital photography would have saved them, and pushing in that direction certainly wouldn’t have looked too appealing at the time given their massive monopoly and profits in film.
Yeah Kodak decided they were a consumer imaging company, so after the end of film they invested in stuff like digital cameras, printers etc (all dead-end products, growth-wise), and sold off all their industrial products like chemicals. E.g. they spun off Eastman Chemical which is now worth $10 billion, sold off their medical imaging stuff, etc etc.
Fujifilm decided they were a technology company and they live to this day.
Fwiw, the digital cameras they invented were rather garbage. Most were up until a couple decades ago and didn’t even really become serviceable until about 10-15 years ago.
But Kodak never wanted to get into the digital business and did everything they could to stop it. They made most of their profits from selling film and the equipment and chemicals to develop them.
Digital camera tech can be traced back to the 60s. Used in satellites.
Fijifilm and Kodak were both creating CCD tech in 1975 for military, hosiptals and aerospace when the Cromemco Cyclops released to consumers the same year.
The first colour consumer digital camera was by Sony in 1981.
The first commercially manufactured webcam was released by SGI in 1993, the Indycam for the Indy workstation, the same year the coffee pot went public on the web.
There were small scale video calling systems around even before that, although they weren’t based on web/IP technologies.
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