AOL 8

Welcome back

The welcome screen is back

AOL 8 signs on again. Not a video of it, not a screenshot - the original client, unmodified, talking to a server that answers the way the original one did. The welcome screen builds, the channel bar fills, and the browser window loads today's web.

It runs on Windows 2000 through Windows 11.

Three steps

1. Install AOL 8 the way you always would.
2. Run the setup package. It installs the tunnel adapter and the browser engine, and it clears out the old dial-up driver that no 64-bit Windows will load any more.
3. In the connection settings, put aol.puppenspieler.net into the Server name field, then sign on.

The setup guide has it with every field named, and the download is a single package.

What works

Sign-on, the welcome screen, the channel bar, and the tunnel that carries IP traffic the way the dial-up connection used to. The browser window runs on a current engine instead of an Internet Explorer that stopped being safe twenty years ago, and it reaches the web through the project's own proxy.

What does not, yet

Mail and the member directory. Both are being rebuilt. The status page says what is answering right now.

What this is

A one-person project from Bremerhaven, on its own hardware and its own network. Not an offering by AOL, not connected to the company, and not a revival of their service - it answers in their place, for a client that would otherwise sign on to nothing.