Subj : Re: BBS Population, DWeb, Re_AOL
To   : boraxman
From : Spectre
Date : Wed Oct 19 2022 14:20:00

 bo> Oh really?  I never heard of it!   I did find an "Australia Online", which
 bo> still seems to exist, but is a regular ISP.  There were ISP's with
 bo> "accelerator" software which came on CD's.  The ISP was with (Netspace)
 bo> also had its own dialer which cames on its own CD.  IT also had some dial
 bo> up accelerator, which I think was just caching and compression and various
 bo> other "tricks" to make web pages load faster.

These were early dialup days.. There were ISP CD's everywhere. As you mention
most tried to either hide the dialup information and settings, making it more
easily digestable for the masses, or involved some kind of compression or
other jiggery pokery to make it at least appear faster. For what its worth
Netspace actually started in life as a BBS run by a disabled kid. I forget
what was "wrong" with him now... something physical but he's s'posed to be a
bright spark.

 bo> Was the AOL back then different to Australia On Line today?

Yes... it was a subsidiary of AOL, I don't recall what happened to it or over
what kind of time frame now.  Most of our early internet adopters were BBS
users and the AOL package was to dumb and restrictive for them, at a time
when there weren't enough new or "dumb" users in the market.

Australia Online today, is at least partially the remains of a company called
ozonline. Oz was bought out by someone, and some years after AOL had thrown
in the towel they adopted the Australia On Line moniker.  In short the two
aren't really related at all.

Spec


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