The Internet was pushed on everyone. AOL and all other ISPs would mail CDs to everyone completely unsolicited. You’d buy a new PC and there would be a link to AOL on the desktop.

Are you 15? If so, you might read this and believe the above is true. Those of us elderly folks who lived through the 80s and 90s laugh at this AI shill propaganda.

They “would mail CDs to everyone completely unsolicited” - yeah, that was called advertising, because there was huge consumer demand and a race to be the company to meet that demand. AOL sent CDs (incredibly inexpensive to manufacture) as advertising hoping consumers would choose AOL instead of the competition, by making AOL the easiest choice - consumers already had the required software (software distribution was a challenge in this time before internet was ubiquitous).

The dot com boom was not the claim of a new technology being pushed onto consumers, the dot com boom was the opposite - a new technology existed and consumers were embracing it, and many companies speculated on how to gain ownership of markets as they shifted online. (The following bust was fueled by over-ambitious speculation on scales and timeframes.)

Anyway, AOL mailing CDs was late in the era, it was much better when they were mailing floppy disks we could reuse.

“It got almost all of it right, only hallucinating when it came to details I had to fix.”

What does this even mean? It did a great job, the only problems were the parts I had to fix? 🤣