Wrong Hands by John Atkinson for September 11, 2018

Let us not also forget: Altavista, Infoseek, RIP.

Sadly, AOL is still kicking. They run the email that verizon gave us to after they jumped ship. I use the term “run” loosely.

My mother used AOL religiously. If she wanted to search something, she’d log onto AOL and use its search engine. Never mind that we have cable and she could use Explorer or Firefox…she had to go through AOL.

webcrawler…the OG

Wait…AOL is gone? Then who has been cashing my monthly subscription checks?

Excite should be in there, if only because the second largest search engine (at the time) passed up the opportunity to buy Google for $750,000. http://www.internethistorypodcast.com/2014/11/the-real-reason-excite-turned-down-buying-google-for-750000-in-1999/

Probably too late for anyone to see now…

But I had a MySpace account BEFORE it was a social networking site.

It was a web, or as we now say, “cloud” storage site… I subscribed at the free level.

I think I had a huge 25 Mb! Free! You could pay something like $10 a month and get 100 Mb of you had tons of stuff to store.

My hard drive was, I believe, 120 Mb at the time…. Huge compared to the 40 on my previous computer.

A 25 Mb back-up, with built in FTP, so you could just browse to your files and click upload…. and with easily sharable directories, was still new, and sort of useful.

But soon, hard drives and web space got bigger and cheaper, and I wandered off….. didn’t even realise when MySpace went belly up…

I believe the domain name was auctioned off….

When I saw its current incarnation, I tried my log-in, for the heck of it. Nope.

The name still sounds better for storage space to me than for social networking.

I heard Google+ is closing down too.

I just went onto MySpace. I can’t even understand what it’s about anymore.