this post was submitted on 01 Feb 2024
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God, I remember in the early-ish days explaining what browsers were to AOL users.
It honestly felt pretty early in AOL days that people were mostly just using it for email, chatrooms, and otherwise as a web browser on the regular, non-AOL internet. Then AIM becoming more popular as time went on, but eventually third-party clients totally obviated that in a lesson Google would learn from well (and their takeaway was to destroy Jabber/XMPP with great prejudice before they lose control over their users).
Explaining parents that all they needed to do was open another browser -- literally any other browser -- while AOL was running and they could go to the websites with it was rough. "AOL has you connected to the internet already, you don't need to use it to go to infoseek.com" or whatever.
Whenever they finally did it it seemed like magic. WOW, how does this connect to AOL! Then they'd close AOL and disconnect the modem and tell me the other browser was broken.
I remember all my friends convincing me to switch to Opera because it had tabs and that was revolutionary.
Is this mainly a US-centric take though? In the UK, yes we had AOL here and a fair number of people I knew had it, but it was never dominant as far as I could tell (I'd be happy to be corrected, I only came in around 1997). It was MSN messenger that became established as the dominant instant messenger here by about 2000, I don't really remember too many people using AIM.
I had some French cousins we would talk to a little bit at the time, and I remember their descriptions of the early internet were just absolutely bizarre in comparison with the minitels.
In those days, I'm sure every major region and country had vastly different experiences.
But yeah, at least my experience in the US was that AIM was huge. My entire peer group was connected through AIM. That and memorized land line phone numbers.
Yes, the differences are fascinating, I know Minitel was big in France. To my mind it was Freeserve that brought the internet to the masses in the UK (and spawned many dozens of similar ISPs in the late-90s), but seems to be a bit of a footnote now. My peers first started messaging through YIM (Yahoo! Instant Messenger) before MSN took over as the default. I remember AOL was perceived as an expensive ISP which limited the popularity of AIM.
I think my mom still thinks that she has to open Firefox to connect to the internet as she did with AOL. She has broadband so of course she is always connected.
Idk how old your mother is but my dad is 80 (I'm 53) and he doesn't understand windowing at all. I always thought it strange he has never figured it out. Even phone UIs baffle him. Older generations inability to grasp the concepts behind computer interfaces seems so strange to me. I wonder if a command line interface would make more sense. I know that sounds crazy, but using bash, for example, is more straightforward, in a way. You can list what folder you're in, execute commands without any images or windows or other distractions. Mainly, it's memorisation, as opposed to the more abstract concepts behind desktop interfaces. Sorry, I'm rambling now lol.
I was thinking more about what you said. I think at least for my mom her approach is procedural. If she can write down a procedure she can do it... well and has a good reason to do it often. Problem with that, you do not learn UI paradigms on one hand and on the other she is afraid to just try something for fear of breaking something. She is also not good at figuring out what the graphical icons mean. Some of that is context but it is not her strength either. UIs are based on paradigms and on exploring, no documentation needed. The lack of documentation and procedures really bothers her. Exploration is too scary.
As far as CLI, I am not sure she would use a computer at all without a GUI though I think she could do it because she is good a procedures. She would have to have a good reason.
Also she also will not use a desktop computer... She had one for a time and only really started using a computer often after I got her a laptop. She's a very mobile person.
My mom is well into her 90s. She knows how to use her laptop, Libreoffice Writer, her printer, Thunderbird, and Firefox. Pretty much nothing else. She can stream her sports and navigate Facebook. She does not send email any more. Partially forgotten how and partially her contacts are no longer around. She is afraid to do business online so I help her with that, though she is fine researching and using search. Her big fear is making a mistake so she calls me when she needs help. That habit really helps in avoiding social engineering and malware.
She is a little afraid of her iPhone and Apple watch. She can make and receive calls. She can revcieve texts but does not send them. No interest I think. Recently to my surprise, she has gotten excited about the sleep monitoring app and uses that.
She is probably well ahead of her age group. Her mom was too. Back then her mom's friends thought that she was a wonder to be able to use a microwave.