20 Years of AOL Annoyances and Foul-Ups

Once upon a time -- two decades ago this year, actually -- a startup called Quantum Computer Services changed the name of its moderately popular online service to America Online and added a cheery e-mail notification recorded by an employee's husband: "You've got mail!"

As the 1990s progressed, the company lived up to the promise of its new moniker, doing more than any other to introduce the country to the online world. As the Internet took off, it served as the most important on-ramp to what was often called the Information Highway. And although today's AOL is no longer the country's dominant ISP, its services and sites add up to the fourth most popular property on the Web, from instant-messaging kingpin AIM to muckraker TMZ.com to video engine Truveo.

Over the years, it's also found a remarkable number of ways to drive both loyal customers and random bystanders bonkers, shooting itself in its corporate foot again and again through everything from monumental technical glitches to willful strategic decisions. Herewith, a 20th-anniversary retrospective.

Discworld

It's hard to fathom today, but in 1993, most people had never heard of AOL--it only had 250,000 subscribers. And even if they had heard of it, they didn't know how to get it. Then direct-marketing maven Jan Brandt convinced a skeptical CEO Steve Case to spend a quarter-million dollars sending out floppy disks with AOL software and a free trial offer. It worked. So they mailed out more. And more. The company ended up distributing millions of floppies and CD-ROMs; just how many has never been disclosed. They showed up in your mailbox. They were bound into your favorite computer magazines. They were stacked up at retail-store checkouts, doled out in high-school cafeterias, and inserted into cereal boxes. In short, they were like pop-up ads--except that they intruded on your real life, and there was no way to block them.

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