[evanelias]

Yeah, this article was clearly written by someone too young to have any solid understanding of the time period they're attempting to describe.

For starters, they don't seem to realize that AOL usage at the time was still very much undergoing the transition/hybrid from the earlier "online service provider" model (like Prodigy, CompuServe, etc), with much of its exclusive content only accessible by "AOL keywords" and not being web/internet-based.

The anecdote about the AIDS patient is especially weird, since the linked post does not reference this AOL outage at all -- they explicitly call out their regional ISP, "The Loop", for being down multiple days. And the BBS they reference in another post is almost certainly a dial-up text based system.

So this article's claim that due to this AOL outage, "perhaps that BBS post would have been bumped off the front page by the time he checked" is simply nonsense: this guy wasn't using AOL, and a dial-up BBS wouldn't be affected by an ISP outage, and forums on a dial-up BBS had no notion of a "front page" whatsoever in the first place.

Not to mention, claiming "bell-bottoms are back in style" in 1996, what?