[jhayward]

> they did not want to confuse their very technically unskilled customers

That's not really a good explanation for the design.

AOL kept the "AOL client" paradigm because your browsing was actually done via an L2TP tunnel back to an AOL datacenter. AOL provided some proprietary content, caching, and had things like parental controls (a very big deal for many users) as value adds over your broadband service. The idea was that you could get the same AOL experience no matter the provider or service type.

There were other benefits, such as masking your home IP address from advertisers - all they saw was an AOL tunnel endpoint address. AOL invented the "ad id" pseudonymous identifier to satisfy some of the tracking desires of advertisers w/o letting them re-identify you (given then current techniques). Apple uses the same concept today.