Aol is still around, you know. It's mostly an advertising company now, though. BTW, if any one with AWS or devops experience wants a job at Aol, let me know, we're hiring like mad right now.
It's cyclical. Having one protocol with multiple open clients prevents rapid (if any) innovation, and creates an opportunity for walled gardens to steal the market. And then once the walled garden converges on the local maximum, it creates an opportunity to build a stable open protocol. Which then lasts until someone comes up with the next big innovation that the open standard is too ossified to support.
For all the shit that AOL gets, they basically got the entire country on the Internet. Even the biggest unicorns today have nothing on AOL at its peak.
AOL offered an easy way to get on the Internet using a MODEM and an Install Floppy or CD-ROM.
I ran a PC Shop in 1995-1997 I was run out of business by Big Box stores offering low cost PCs using the AOL $500 Internet Rebate that locked people into a 3 or 5 year AOL $35/month contract. I tried to convince people that they could get on the same Internet with Brick.net and if they paid for a year in advance they would only pay $9.99 a month total and save money over using AOL. I sold a $700 PC Clone with GNU/Linux or Windows 95, and the Big Box stores sold the Packard Bell system with the same specs for $200 after the $500 Internet rebate.
I hear there are people still paying AOL for dial-up access on older Macs and PCs. So I am not surprised to see the old AOL clients still work mostly.
The Basilisk II emulator needs some system files to get CD and TCP/IP networking to work in Windows. http://basilisk.cebix.net/
You also need an old version of SDL and GTK+ to make it work with Windows.
These Mac emulators could be upgraded to the latest technology for the latest SDL and GTK+ libraries, the source code is available.
The hard part is getting the Macintosh ROM, Apple made System 7.X available for free, but getting the ROM is hard. You'd need access to a 68K Mac and a floppy drive to copy the ROM to and copy it over to a modern computer using a USB floppy drive and only the 1.44M format is supported not the 880K format. Some ROMs are on the Internet and I won't link to them for piracy issues, but they should be found via web searches.
In the case of SheepShaver at least, there’s a Mac ROM that can be extracted from a freely available Mac OS update that works just fine. Not sure of the legality of that, but it’s got to be better than downloading ROMs of Macs you don’t own.
There was once an Apple Development CD that was given out with all sorts of Mac ROMs and System install files and other things. I used to have a copy of it but lost it.
I think it was given out before Steve Jobs came back to Apple. It was at a developer conference. They wanted developers to support the Macintosh at a time when Apple was struggling financially. The files on the CD could be used with emulators so they could get more Mac developers that way.
I remember people well selling copies of that CD online for a while. Then it ended up on The Pirate Bay before it was taken down or lost seeders.
Actually for years if you were a registered developer (which cost ~$500/year iirc) you got a monthly CD-ROM and issue of develop magazine (which was very good). The CD-ROMs periodically had archives of pretty much every major stable OS release (along with the current and bleeding edge releases, developer tools, and an On Location free text retrieval index that worked better than Spotlight does now).
because most people are not explorers. They want a packaged tour.
Most people presented with a blinking ftp or gopher or even browser address prompt, stare and blink right back. At a total loss what to do, at a loss to even figure out what the need to do to start learning what they could do. But given a brightly colored display of few constrained, familiar options (weather, celebrity gossip, sports, etc) they can ingest and start to learn new medium.
Distribution is a big reason. Distribution hasn't become a protocol and won't for the foreseeable future. Medium shows folks really want to be heard above all else and will trade a lot for distribution.
Google and Seo was a good hope but Seo takes a long time. A good medium post can get blown up in a day.
We all have living rooms. We can all go to the store and buy liquor. And yet... So many of us would rather go line up to get into a bar and pay outrageous prices for liquor... Because those places are more crowded than our living rooms.
Because ISPs have made it damn hard to run servers on on consumer connections.
This is particularly a port-web phenomena, as now everyone expects to do everything via the web. And it is quite a bit more connection straining than say IRC.
I think (at least hope) people do care about freedom, but they're just not even aware that freedom is an option. So we should at least try to educate them about the option of freedom.
I believe a lot of people aren't aware that with AOL internet, you could run a web browser while connected and have access to the normal www. That was the case in the early 2000's - was it different before then?