Posted By: Webmaster
The AOL Lighthouse Collectors... - 02/19/13 10:15 PM
Before the founding of the Collector Forums in 1996, there was AOL - America Online. AOL was an online service for subscribers and included it's own content. Included in that content were places where different interest groups could gather and exchange messages.
AOL and similar services (Prodigy, eWorld and Compuserve) came before there was a world wide web. These services provided graphic content setting themselves apart from text services that existed as BBS (Bulletin Board Services) which mostly shared code and tips, rather than social content.
I "discovered" AOL in the Fall of 1996 after getting started collecting Harbour Lights during a summer trip to Michigan.
This group of Lighthouse Collectors initially just traded messages back and forth and eventually had scheduled "chats" online through AOL. There was some "sales" of retired items that went on and when AOL decided to force all such sales to go through their "store" (for a fee), that was my impetus to create the LighthouseKeepers.com website and the Forums.
Most AOL members knew each other only through their posts and chat participation. When the first Harbour Lights Reunion was held in San Diego in 1997, many of the AOL members met for the first time at that event. We prepared "Connected Collectors" badges so we could spot each other and we, as a group, presented Bill Younger with something (What was it?)
Among the members of the AOL group were:
Ken Reese
Paul Brady
Fred Kuhlman
Betty Darren
Sean Thompson
Bob Hayes
Tim Aucreman
Mark Wagner
Rod Watson
John & Betty O'Brien ?? Did they participate?
Mary Heuvelhorst
Mary ? (from Holland MI)
Warren Diamond
John Chidester
I know there were others which I've left out. At my age it's CRS. My purpose in starting this post is to recognize those who were members of the AOL Lighthouse Collectors group and to see if there is anyone who might have saved portions of our posts including logs of online chats? If you were one of these early pioneers, please post about your experiences. If you can recall the names of others, please post them here.
AOL and similar services (Prodigy, eWorld and Compuserve) came before there was a world wide web. These services provided graphic content setting themselves apart from text services that existed as BBS (Bulletin Board Services) which mostly shared code and tips, rather than social content.
I "discovered" AOL in the Fall of 1996 after getting started collecting Harbour Lights during a summer trip to Michigan.
This group of Lighthouse Collectors initially just traded messages back and forth and eventually had scheduled "chats" online through AOL. There was some "sales" of retired items that went on and when AOL decided to force all such sales to go through their "store" (for a fee), that was my impetus to create the LighthouseKeepers.com website and the Forums.
Most AOL members knew each other only through their posts and chat participation. When the first Harbour Lights Reunion was held in San Diego in 1997, many of the AOL members met for the first time at that event. We prepared "Connected Collectors" badges so we could spot each other and we, as a group, presented Bill Younger with something (What was it?)
Among the members of the AOL group were:
Ken Reese
Paul Brady
Fred Kuhlman
Betty Darren
Sean Thompson
Bob Hayes
Tim Aucreman
Mark Wagner
Rod Watson
John & Betty O'Brien ?? Did they participate?
Mary Heuvelhorst
Mary ? (from Holland MI)
Warren Diamond
John Chidester
I know there were others which I've left out. At my age it's CRS. My purpose in starting this post is to recognize those who were members of the AOL Lighthouse Collectors group and to see if there is anyone who might have saved portions of our posts including logs of online chats? If you were one of these early pioneers, please post about your experiences. If you can recall the names of others, please post them here.