1998

AOL

In 1998, about half of all U.S. homes with Internet access in the United States had it through AOL which had become the dominant online service with more than 33 million subscribers. AOL 5.0 was released that included a new AOL search engine and a new picture sharing service called “You’ve Got Pictures”, but people were disappointed it didn’t include online radio. Just about everyone in the U.S. got CDs in the mail, “American Online, 5.0! with 250 Free Hours” stamped on the front. The free hours were important as it was dial up phone service which you were changed by how many minutes you used. People would think 250 hours was a lot but soon got addicted to the Internet and used up their free house. But AOL brought the cost down such that the average person could afford it at $21.95 a month for unlimited service.  I still used CompuServe for my internet access as that is what I had been using for several years but that would soon end as AOL bought CompuServe in 1997 and were moving CompuServe customers to AOL.

AOL mail, which my dad used, was highly popular and featured in the 1998 movie You’ve Got Mail with Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan. I loved Meg Ryan, she was so cute, You’ve Got Mail became one of my favorite movies.

In November 1998, AOL acquired Netscape, one of the most popular web browsers at the time and the one I used for accessing the Internet through my CompuServe account. AOL users didn’t need a web browser as the AOL program that came on all those CDs you got in the mail had a web browser built into it. The now giant computer company Microsoft had their Internet Explorer (IE) competing against Netscape and their MSN service competing against AOL. It was said that AOL internally used Microsoft’s IE and that AOL looked to replace that with Netscape. In the end that never happened and Netscape faded away.

 In June of ’98 Microsoft released it latest version of Windows, Windows 98 (which included Internet Explorer) which was a significant improvement over Windows 95.

Year's End