Internet to AOL: Goodbye!

After America Online announced that it would give up selling Internet access last week, I shoveled some ceremonial dirt on this company's long-gone dominance of the online world in an extra column that ran on Friday.

Writing that felt a little like closure: My first online account was with AOL back in 1994, when the service had well under a million users and I had to seek out a starter disk instead of choosing one out of the pile in my mailbox. (That floppy disk, or one that arrived not long after it, is thumb-tacked to my cubicle wall as a little souvenir.)

AOL remained my primary form of online access until October of that year, when I got an account with a "real" Internet provider. I was tired of paying extra for every hour online above the quota in my account, and I needed Web access, which AOL didn't get around to offering until the summer of 1995. Have any AOL confessions of your own to make? Share them in my Web chat at 2 p.m. today. And if you miss the chat, you can read the transcript here.

Passport Prison

My Sunday column looks at how effective three wireless music receivers are at getting your computer's music into your stereo: the Roku SoundBridge, SlimDevices' Squeezebox and the Sonos ZonePlayer system. A big part of that involved checking their compatibility with songs downloaded from the major online stores (the short answer: not very good).

So, to test that, I copied songs bought off the MSN Music site to a new laptop that I'd use as a server for these devices. But I got stuck when I tried activating these songs for playback -- while I remembered the Yahoo address I'd used to set up the Passport log-in used by that MSN Music account, I couldn't recall the password. And after I'd tried enough different passwords without success, MSN locked me out of the account (an understandable precaution; repeated login attempts can indicate a "brute force" break-in attempt).

No problem, I thought, I'll just click the forgot-my-password link and go through the usual reset routine. After some typing and clicking, I logged into my Yahoo mailbox and looked for the password-reset message. It wasn't there. I waited a few minutes, and it still wasn't there. I went through the password-reset dance a second time, but I still didn't see the e-mail I was expecting. I tried yet again, then did some other computing chores for the next half hour. Still no reply.

At that point, with deadlines approaching, I gave up and did my music-receiver testing with a laptop that was already authorized to play these MSN downloads. The password-reset messages--three of them--arrived the next afternoon, more than 24 hours after my first attempt.

But wait, there was more! After I clicked the link in that e-mail and entered my new password, I was dumped onto a page that read "The Passport Network is experiencing technical difficulties. Please try again later."

Hours later, I tried clicking the link in the password-reset e-mail again, only to be told that it wasn't valid anymore. So I had to begin this reset routine from scratch on Friday morning. And as of Friday afternoon, I still hadn't received the necessary password-change e-mail.

This certainly doesn't make me want to do any more business with this music store, or with any other part of the Microsoft empire that requires a Passport sign-in.

Help File Help