ABSTRACT
Interactivity and messaging lie at the heart of the Internet. The online bulletin board was a clear forerunner, allowing messages to be both sent and posted. The messages posted could be read by many people. This functionality can now also be seen with the Internet, but in a more advanced form. A company that made this application popular was America Online (AOL). At the end of the 1980s this service was introduced onto the market, and by the early 1990s AOL was one of the first service providers to offer people outside the academic and military world access to the Internet.
