History of Internet Service Providers - Part 2
America Online (AOL)
In 1992 America Online was released for Windows 3.1 (DOS version was
released a year prior). Myself and millions of other people all over
the world received a AOL CD in the mail, I was blown away. Prodigy was
great but AOL had more, not only did they have their own network (much
like Prodigy) but it got your on the REAL Internet. Meaning once online
you could use Internet Explorer and browse the new World Wide Web, play
Quake, chat using irc. The possibilities literally were endless. AOL's
success was enormus, at one point having 30 million subscribers world
wide. At first they actually charged access by the hour, I remember
getting an angry phone call from my Dad after I ran up a $150 AOL bill.
The chat rooms were widely popular, I remember reading about how people
formed real relationships and marriages through AOL chat rooms. I even
remember a woman wanting to sue AOL because she was disconnected from
a chat room while talking to a guy she was in love with, crazy!
AOHELL
With the rise of AOL along came the rise of AOHELL. AOHELL was released
in 1994 by a hacker that calls himself 'DaChronic'. Something happened
between AOL and DaChronic, evadently AOL would close his 'Hacker' chat
rooms but not close offensive sexual chat rooms. DaChronic was so upset
that he made this program to basically cause problems for AOL.
AOHELL Features:
- Fake account creator
Would auto fill out their account creator with fake information (name, address, credit card info, etc). Basically users could use this fake account for a limited amount of time before AOL caught on and shut it off. - AOL for Free
When AOL charged hourly fees they had some portions of AOL that actually did not cost any money, this would include areas where you would manage your account, help centers, etc. AOHELL would trick the software into letting you into these areas and then let you into chat rooms. Unforatuntely this doesn't result in you not being billed as I found out first hand :( - IM / Email Bombs
Basically flooding an inbox or users IM box with junk until their 28.8bps connection would explode.
Anyway, you can imagine the havoc caused
by this program and the copycats that soon followed. Anyone else remember this stuff? Coming up next a ISP that I left out, Imagination. This was a neat one that today there is nothing close.
History of Internet Service Providers
This is really more of a nostalgic post of remembering the older, first Internet Service Providers (ISPs). I'll but turning 28 this year, so I'm exactly old enough to have experienced computers both pre and post Internet. Back then things were very different than today. I was very fornunate to have a family that got me my first computer when I first eight. We'll get into all details of old computers another day, for now let us discus the Internet.
Well back then there was no Windows, I know thats crazy to think of a world with no Windows. I was using a IBM with MS-DOS and my family had just suscribed to Prodigy Online.
Prodigy Online
Prodigy Online was actually the second internet service provider and made its debut in 1991. CompuServe was the first provider and made their appearance in 1979, however it was much different and not directed torwards home users (no graphical interface). Of course this would be the begining of me using my Dad's phone line and the loud 
screaching modem noises. Thinking back Prodigy was a lot like AOL today, of course there was no such thing as 'web pages', but the software allowed you to access different parts of the Prodigy network, including forums (where I traded comic books online) and even games. I remember a very basic game where you were in some sort of a labrinyth and you had to try and get out. Each command would present a choice and the wrong choice would of course mean death. Prodigy also had weather, news, other boring features a kid would not be interested in. Well Prodigy was great no doubt about that, but times were changing it was almost 1994 and I was almost 14 and then came something no one was ready for, the World Wide Web.
Prodigy was too late on this front and before you know it Windows 3.1 was out and a rival competitor came along and crushed my beloved Prodigy, we all know them and now I hate them but it was 1994 then and welcome America Online.
To be continued? Yes I will continue.
Upgrade from Internet Explorer 6 ... Please?
Are you still using Internet Explorer 6? If so, do me a favor and upgrade, I don't care if you go to Internet Explorer 7 or Firefox but please just upgrade. My job is basically two fold - fix computers and design web sites. Both of them are harder when my clients use Internet Explorer 6.
Lets take a look a few things that you are missing out on if you still use Internet Explorer 6.
Security
Simply put, you are at a higher risk of getting a spy ware infection if you are using Internet Explorer 6. Its also harder to remove an infection from Internet Explorer 6. Internet Explorer 7 has a nice 'Manage Add Ons' option that allows you to easily remove 'bad' add ons.
CSS
This is probably the biggest reason. CSS works differently in every web browser but its just even worse in IE6. Everytime I design a site I always must make exceptions and different variations due to different web browsers.
PNG
Yes I love PNG's, they are so great compared to our old outdated friend the GIF. Basically for those of you that don't know, PNG files allow transparency that is major better looking than a GIF file. They are easier to work with and just plain look fantastic. Only probably is IE6 doesn't recongnize the transparency so it puts a white background making it look very ugly.
Hopefully this will convince someone out there to upgrade, than I can say I tried to make a difference. My personal recommendation is to download Firefox but if you absolutely must Internet Explorer 7 is somewhat acceptable too (just my personal opinion).
Blue Screen of Death? Or a hoax?
Recently I've had a few virus programs that was really interesting. I would start up the computer and Windows would start up and then give me the dreaded blue screen of death. Then I would hit CTRL+ALT+DEL, only to see task manager come up. The blue screen was actually just a fake graphic being displayed! Talk about weird. I just wanted to help spread the word of this fake blue screen of death.
After that I just started MSCONFIG, disabled pretty much everything and restarted and proceeded to clean it with out too much trouble. So just remember next time you see the blue screen of death try hitting ALT+TAB or CTRL+ALT+DEL to see if you can get around that, you just never know.
Different code for different browsers
Every web developer has had this situation at one time or another. You come up with a great design, everything looks perfect ... until you test it in another browser. Without fail there is some difference, its always something small but its so extremely annoying. Now what? You make a change in your CSS to fix that, but then you go back to your first browser of course its now wrong in that browser!! Talk about frustration.
Thankfully there is an easy way around this nightmare, something called..
Condtional Comments
Conditional comments only work with Windows so there is limitations, however it is very functional and a huge time saver. So lets see how this works in a real world example.
<link rel="stylesheet" href="/firefox.css" type="text/css" />In the above example you can see we load our firefox.css style sheets and if the user has Internet Explorer 7 it will then load the ie.css style sheet. The idea is that the Internet Explorer style sheet would over write anything that is needed. This is a very handy fast way for when something looks correct in Firefox but looks terrible in Internet Explorer.
<!--[if IE 7]>
<link rel="stylesheet" href="/ie7.css" type="text/css" />
<![endif]-->
Web Site Developer Resources
We are proud to announce that Certified Computer Experts has expanded their Web Site Developer Resources. Right now this resource section is kept up to date pretty much by yours truely. Over time hopefully more people will consider sending in tutorials and other interesting tidbits for viewers that want to learn more about web site developement.
Resources include:
- Adobe Flash
- JavaScript
- PHP
- Coldfusion
Soon I plan to add CSS Tricks and whatever else I think might be interesting to see. If anyone has any suggestions or would like to contribute please email me personally using tom@ccexperts.com.
Activation Issues with Windows Vista
I had an interesting service call the other day. I had previously installed Vista on someone's workstation and for whatever reason it was not activated when I was done. This was 30 days ago exactly. Of course now things are a problem because after 30 days Microsoft disables Vista until you successfully activate their product.
I wasn't really too worried when I got the call because I thought it would be an easy fix. Unfortunately I was unable to activate because of an incorrect product key. The PC originally had Windows Vista Home, I installed using Anytime Upgrade to Vista Ultimate. The issue is I have no idea where that original key went and I don't know what login or email I used to purchase it.
Now I had a real problem because this person had a lot of important work to do. Here is where I will share with you a great trick to allow you to use Vista after an expired activation, this will give you an additional 30 days and can be repeated 3 times and is totally legit! Microsoft themselves even showed me how to do this on a support call.
- What you do is when it asks you to activate, click on the link that says to use Windows in a reduced functionality mode.
- This will start Internet Explorer, hit CTRL+O and type EXPLORER then hit Enter. Yep - it starts Explorer, the Start menu returns. We aren't done, at this point almost nothing actually works. Click on start and type CMD, now right click on CMD above where you typed and select 'Run as administrator'
- Now type in slmgr.vbs - rearm
That's it - you now have 30 more days. Oh and don't even try after doing this 3 times, you won't be able to start the command prompt in administrative mode to do this. Enjoy.
