AOL, in more or less the form we currently know it today, dates back to 1985. The company itself in earlier incarnations dates back to either 1982 or 1978, depending on how one wishes to interpret Steve Case's involvement and how a couple of older online services run by eventual key AOL figures managed to get folded into AOL Inc later on.
AOL was the greatest. I mean it. The political chat room were fabulous. The people who used the internet in the early days were people who knew computers...academia...military, government..etc. There were no teenagers asking you how big your breasts are.
Oh, they were there. They just kept to the rooms where they thought they stood the best chance of getting some action because they were paying six bucks an hour. ;)
The only other browser was the early netscape and when I think about it today, it's incredible how the world has changed in less than 15 years.
Not to be pedantic, but AOL didn't offer web access of any sort until mid-1995, two and a half years after Mosaic/Netscape was first released for users of real ISPs (which AOL was not at the time).
But I do get angry when people bash AOL so much. It broke the ground for what the internet would become and it was easier to teach someone with no real computer experience the internet starting on AOL than flinging them out on their own.
I think the reason for the overall hatred of AOL is that the service, for the longest time, was not part of the Internet at all, except for some rudimentary email relay capabilities. For many years, including a period well after it became obvious that the Internet was the way of the future, AOL went out of its way to develop proprietary services that could be accessed nowhere else. But when AOL did decide to link itself to the Internet, they did it in a coarse, break-down-the-door fashion that literally destroyed Internet culture as it was known up to that point, drastically lowering the overall IQ of the Net in the process. (For more on this, Google the phrase "The September That Never Ended" sometime.) For obvious reasons, this gave the service a nasty "trailer park" reputation and caused almost everyone already on the Net up to that point to develop a permanent hatred for AOL.
Ironically, as the evidence became overwhelming that remaining a proprietary service was becoming a recipe for eventual bankruptcy, AOL did a 180-degree turn, killing off almost all its proprietary services and turning itself into a regular ISP, except that it was designed as "the ISP that's easy to use." This, naturally, only further cemented AOL's reputation as the online home for people incapable of doing anything online that was more complex than clicking on pretty buttons. (Whether this rep is fair or not is open to debate, of course.)
Even more ironically, now that there's so much competition out there both from other "easy" ISPs such as MSN and from cable modems, AOL is once again trying to build up some proprietary services to give consumers a reason to choose it over all the other services, and it's having no success at this whatsoever; its subscriber numbers continue to plummet.
AOL had its day, but that day is long gone. Steve Case made the very smart move of waiting until the dotcom bubble hit its peak and then using AOL's grossly inflated stock value to eat up a solid, profitable company with a real business plan before the bubble burst. He did, and the idiots at Time Warner were left holding the bag after the Internet collapse. If it wasn't for that merger, AOL would probably have gone out of business two or three years ago. (As it is, I believe Time Warner is now worth only about half of what it was pre-merger, almost entirely due to the drag on earnings caused by AOL.) Now that the old TW management has succeeded in overthrowing the AOL gang and regaining full control of the company, a lot of analysts expect TW to spin off AOL at some point and leave to to sink or swim on its own. Within a year or so after that, it'll likely sink.