OK, I know the whole thread is OT, but it's really funny to watch people argue about stuff they don't remember based on other stuff they read on the Internet.
Coupla things:
* America Online, the service, did not exist in 1982. What did exist was Control Video Corporation, a young company preparing to launch GameLine, an online service for the immensely popular Atari 2600 videogame console. Sadly, the videogame market went kablooey the next year, and GameLine never launched. CVC went out of business, but the same employees formed Quantum Computer Services, and went on to launch Q-Link, an online service for Commodore 64 computers, in 1985, in partnership with Commodore. Though it had the same staff, in the same building, running the same computers, Quantum was a completely different company than CVC. You hear me, creditors, IRS? Completely different company. Total coincidence.
Quantum went on to launch other partnered services: PC-Link (for Tandy computers), AppleLink Personal Edition (for Apple II and IIgs), and Promenade (for the IBM PS/1). In 1989, just as version 1.0 of the Mac software for ALPE was about to launch, Apple pulled out of the deal, and AppleLink Personal Edition was renamed America Online. In 1991 the company itself was renamed to America Online.
(In 1993, Apple once again paid America Online big bucks to launch eWorld, which required an exact replica of the AOL server farm and software to be shipped to Apple in Cupertino, where they would operate their own service for Macs. Within a year, eWorld was gone, all the new eWorld-specific features were folded back into the main AOL software, and the user bases were merged. Thus, Apple paid AOL twice to not run an online service, which has always made me giggle.)
* There was no version 2.4. There was 2.0, possibly a 2.1 bug release, and then 2.5. There was a 1.4, I think, for PCAO (the DOS version of America Online that ran under PC/GEOS).
* AOL, CompuServe, GEnie, Prodigy, The Source, Delphi, and others were all considered "online services", not BBS's, although the term "online" was general enough to refer to both. BBS's were run by individuals or small companies and usually had a single phone line - the larger ones had maybe a dozen lines. AOL itself briefly ran a tech support BBS for people who could get their modems and computers configured well enough to use a terminal program, but not well enough to use the fickle AOL software.
* People were e-mailing in the 1960s, well before online services and even BBS's. Ray Tomlinson started using the @ sign for e-mail in 1971.
* Tech-savvy businesses did operate "online" well before the Internet. I remember seeing Comp-U-Card shopping on CompuServe circa 1984. And although there was little other "e-commerce", many businesses had an online presence, perhaps an e-mail address, a BBS, or a forum or area on an online service.
Hope this clears a few things up.
Jay Levitt
Chief Mail Systems Architect and many other roles at America Online
1989-2001