What it was. What replaced it.
1B+ install CDs mailed worldwide
- FOUNDERS
- Steve Case · Jim Kimsey
- PEAK
- ~26.7M subscribers (2002)
- ANTHEM
- "You've got mail." (Elwood Edwards, 1989)
AOL Inc. sold to Verizon for $4.4B (2015)
Before browsers were universal, AOL was a walled garden so total that for tens of millions of households, AOL was the entire experience of being online. Keywords instead of URLs. Channels instead of websites. AIM instead of email.
Its CD-ROM marketing campaign — over a billion discs mailed and stuck to magazine covers — remains one of the largest physical software distribution efforts in history.
The training wheels of the internet for an entire generation of users.
- ↗ Wikipedia: AOL
- ↗ Wikipedia: AOL CD distribution campaign
- ↗ The Atlantic: An Oral History of AOL Instant Messenger
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