Computer
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By
Faith
Mitchell
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AOL & Microsoft ......
Even though AOL uses the Microsoft Internet Explorer for it's web browsing, you'd never recognize it because AOL covers it with it's own pretty desktop and toolbars. It differs from other browsers in that e-mail and Internet browsing are integrated into one program.
In 1995 when I first went online, America Online was one of only a few services that gave the general public easy access to the Internet. But you couldn't actually go surf the net the way you do now. AOL gathered Internet information and called it AOL Services. You could only access AOL computers and the stores of information they'd collected. You paid by the minute for this.
Then along came the browser and independent ISP's (Internet Service Providers). Netscape was not the first browser but it became the most popular. With it's Internet communications program (the browser), and a way to connect to the Internet (ISP), you could search the Internet yourself for stocks, travel, news and the rest.
AOL soon found itself antiquated .. mostly because the ISP's offered lower access fees and direct access. Remember in 1995 people used DOS or Windows 3.1 and 28.8 bps modems were still unheard of.
But the point of this historic trail of progress is that AOL programmers had their own protocols (computer network language) and their own view of what consumers wanted and could have. Somewhere along the way, probably 1996, Microsoft put out it's own browser, the Internet Explorer. The savvy surfers already online laughed at it. But you know the rest of the story. Microsoft improved it's product, built it into the Windows operating system eventually and ended up in an Anti-Trust suit because it successfully marketed out it's competition, Netscape.
That left AOL and Microsoft as the primary software browsers. Even though AOL has adapted the Microsoft Internet Explorer for it's own software for years, it still uses some of the unique programming from the old reign of sovereignty. That is why you and I, the consumers, are stuck with two incompatible worlds of e-mail.
When you the AOL user sends mail to a non-AOL user, you will find that it arrives with a lot of programming gibberish included in the message. And if you send a picture or other attachment it may or may not arrive as you sent it. The same applies to non-AOL users sending to AOL. That lovely signature, background and cheerily formatted text often arrives in the AOL mailbox as junk text.
AOL version 6 cures all but the inserted picture problem in this annoying and messy incompatibility. But not everyone is advised to upgrade to this version. Each time a company upgrades it's software it becomes bigger and sloppier in its use of your computer's storage and memory. So unless you have the newest computer, it will actually slow down your system and present compatibility problems that offset it's new bells and whistles.