Anyway, as I mentioned, last week wasn't exactly AOL's finest moment. The way I heard it, they were trying to install some new software on their servers, and it went haywire on them. A large portion of their network went dowm in several major metropolitan areas on the west coast. AOL's web site (which can be accessed here, at your own risk, so don't sue me when you get brainwashed) was unavailable. While millions of people happily surfed the net (I'd like to figure out who came up with that "Surf" thing for the Internet anyway. I haven't ever heard of any prime surfing conditions on a spider's web.), the six million or so users who have subscribed to AOL (and possibly radical conspiracy theory) sat (from what I've heard about AOL users, possibly dumbfounded) without their online access. Not like it's any major loss of raw speed, especially on their Web browser.
Once the techies managed to do some damage control and get everything back up, they had six million ranting users who needed to be appeased. (Those of us that are fortunate enough to avoid AOL probably laughed our heads off.) They did some damage control by throwing a free day to the masses. Since I have intentionally avoided use of AOL (none of the disks sent to me have ever reached beyond the "format A: /q" stage), I don't know how this is to be done.
Although we now know that the following (unfortunately) won't happen, an interesting scenario with this "free day" was presented, where all six million or so subscribers take the free day all at once, crashing the system, forcing another free day. Now the same thing happens all over again, repeating itself until one of two things happen. The first thing is that the cost of all of these free days has to be absorbed, and AOL eventually falls into bankruptcy. The second one is that they have to stop the free days, and users start becoming angry about the unreliability of the network, leading them to cancel in rapid succession. This sends AOL stock into a tailspin, leading to panic selling, and eventually, this scenario plays out to leave AOL bankrupt too. This won't happen, so these two scanerios end up as just a little bit of wishful thinking on the part of those of us that fight for truth, justice, and ISDN access.
Although many of us may laugh at this little mishap on AOL's part, it serves as a warning. There have been several reputable computer experts and orginizations that have made a "doomsday prophecy" about the amount of traffic on the Internet leading to a possible backbone meltdown, which would effectively shut down the Internet. As easy as it was for AOL to be the victim of a misbehaving piece of software (hey, everyone has that problem every now and then, thanks to Microsoft,) imagine how easily the whole Internet could bottom out on us and leave all of us staring dumbfounded at our computers...
Hundreds of years into the future, archeologists will be looking at what remains of our society, and the UFOlogists will probably think that all of our computers were alien designed. They will even be able to find "indisputable proof" when they find a working computer, and are totally confused when they try to operate it. Heck, people in this day and age get confounded by technology (it's a sad commentary on our society when we think of how few people can actually program their VCRs.) They will have questions as to where our society's downfall came from. They will also be curious as to what all of these triangles with symbols inside with slight resemblance to the design of many of the shoes they have dug up mean. One day, it will all fall into place, and they will realize that we all sacrificed ourselves to the force behind this mysterious symbol.
At least, that's what will happen if AOL keeps sending out disks faster than the DOS Format command can work.