Early Days of AOL Homeschooling Forums
Dateline: December 12, 2002
By Ann Zeise
December 2002 marks my 13th year online. I had seen a November
1989 magazine offering a charter membership to some sort of thing
called America On Line, and since I had recently inherited a
free 1200 baud modem from someone, and had hitched it up to my
MacPlus, I was looking for some place to go with it. Soon I had
the first of what would prove to be many, many AOL disks arrive
in the mail.
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In the early days of AOL they sent out a little monthly magazine
much like a TV Guide, telling when the chats would be and other
interesting features they had. I would consult the guide and
sign on when there were specific chats. Back then AOL had two
tiers of costs: Over night was $6 an hour and mid-day was $10.
Bills could get pretty high real fast, so I never went online
mid-day! It was not unusual to have a $200 bill each month.
At first, AOL was primarily a Mac-only service, with one other
system that has long since vanished. I spent a lot of time in
the Mac forums, and especially enjoyed the Mac Education chats
where we talked about using computers in education. When the
forum leader was coming out for MacWorld,
I invited her to stay at my home and we'd go up to San Francisco
together. Make a party of it. Invite other AOLers who happened
to also attend the conference. That's when I found out that the
forum leaders and guides didn't have to pay for AOL and could
be online as long as they wanted. I had thought they were all
in Virginia and paid employees! Where do I sign up?
I went on to various unpaid, but free access jobs in forums
such as in LaPub, the very first AOL chat room, as a virtual
bartender (If any of us really drank, we wouldn't be in a virtual
"Cheers."), and as a game host, and then when Knight
Ridder opened up The Mercury Center, I managed to talk the San
Jose Mercury News Editor into letting me manage the chats. I
trained the hosts and organized 20 hours of chat each week for
three years. AOL and the Mercury Center had a "parting of
ways," and so I went on to work in the Mac Communications
forum where I fell in with a group of people starting up a First Class bbs service. This
is where A to Z Home's Cool made its first appearance back in
1994.
In 1993 we had started homeschooling and somehow I got pointed
to the Homefront
Hall homeschooling forum on AOL. Now, these days people just
hang around a chat room all day if they want to. Back then they
still had this TV Show mentality. I remember someone named Lorihon
chasing me out of there right in the middle of a most interesting
homeschool discussion because the chat room could not be occupied
unless there was a host present, and she wasn't going to hang
around. Her shift was over! No one really knew how to host chats
and message boards back then, training was off the cuff, and
there were lots of hard feelings when posts were removed for
what seemed to be spurious reasons. It was some of these frustrations
with AOL that spurred me to attempt to start my own homeschool
forum.
About the same time I was working for the Mercury Center,
the Hegeners started their homeschool forum on AOL. Much more
relaxed, they attracted many of the online homeschool parents
who were into making a movement happen, though they may not have
been thinking that's what they were doing at the time. The old
AHEMers, (say with a throat-clearing cough, to be said correctly),
have a Yahoo Group going now. If you think you belong in this
forum, join ahem-oldtimers.
Many in this forum went on to found the National
Home Education Network just by discussing online the need
for such an organization.
Enter browsers and easy Internet access. I still remember
being in the Mac Communication Forum when some AOL staff told
us to download and play with this program called Mozilla
which would make looking at the internet far more easy than using
Gofer, Telnet or FTP. It was from this little company that would
eventually become Netscape. You still see that early logo, the
little dragon, around in the Mozilla
Museum.
Around this time Helen Hegener asked me if she thought they
should get their own domain and move their forum to the Internet.
That was one time I could not forsee the future and told her
that I thought the Internet would be too hard for most homeschoolers
to use and that she should stick with AOL. Man! Am I glad they
ignored me! The Hegeners moved to their own website, Home
Education Magazine now; I moved to start A to Z Home's Cool
on a BBS, on AOL Hometown, and then on the Mining Company. Soon
we had lots of company. The rest, as they say, is history!
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