[Mpls] aol

[Dorothy Titus]

I must correct a number of errors in Mr. Halfhill's post about aol.  I 
lived and worked in that area for 35 years.

First, Dulles and Langley are 10-15 miles apart.

Second, Langley does not provide a residence to the thousands of CIA 
employees.  Most of them cannot afford to live in the area where homes 
cost in the millions of dollars.  Robert F. Kennedy's home is/was just 
about a mile away from the CIA Headquarters.  Most CIA employees live 
in the far suburbs where government salaries can still purchase a 
house.  There are a lot of employees who commute for more than 90 
minutes each way and who live in places like West Virginia; 
Fredericksburg, VA; and Hagerstown and Columbia, MD.

The internet, in the 70s, was known as DARPAnet.  DARPA was the Defense 
Advanced Research Projects A..... ( I'm not sure what the A stood for). 
  Members of DARPA were, besides government agencies, many Ivy League 
colleges.  I got into computers as a programmer in the 70s, and I can 
remember some of us (government employees) logging onto the net to play 
games at the MIT site because they had the best games.  I think the 
Universities were involved because they were helping develop this new 
technology that has become so useful to us today.

As far as "Dulles" being the corporate headquarters of AOL:  There is a 
corridor that runs from the Washington, DC, suburbs around Falls Church 
to Dulles Airport.  It is known as the Dulles corridor, and it is the 
Silicon Valley of the DC area.  It is filled with high tech companies, 
so AOL being headquartered there is no big deal.  Other companies in 
that area with a large presence include General Electric, TRW, SRA, 
Lockheed-Martin, and many, many more.  WorldCom was  headquartered 
there in Herndon.  In the middle of the corridor is Reston, VA, one of 
the first "new towns" created from scratch and a model for many other 
"new towns" built after that.

The internet was not begun by AOL.  Before AOL was Compuserve and 
Prodigy, all PC-based.  Those of us who used Macintosh computers were 
very frustrated by the inattention paid to Macs.  Then AOL came along.  
It was developed on and for Macintosh users but supported PC 
capabilities.  Over the past 5-7 years, AOL forgot about its Macintosh 
roots and has moved much more strongly into the PC market.  It used to 
be that the Mac upgrade always came out first, followed by the PC 
version a year or so later.  Not any more.

Not only did AOL forget its Mac roots.  It has forgotten its USA roots. 
  All customer service is now handled out of India, primarily New Delhi. 
  It's why I cancelled my AOL membership after 10 years.  When things 
went wrong, I could only speak to people in India who kept saying, "No 
problem," but could not do anything to solve the problems I was 
experiencing.

AOL did not create a suburb called "Dulles."  Those of us who lived 
near Dulles Airport always used that term to refer to the outer ring of 
suburbs such as Sterling, Herndon, Chantilly.  It is a shorthand way of 
referring to the area, much like we refer to Northeast to mean 
Northeast Minneapolis.

According to the article quoted, Lydia Howell did most of her research 
in the encyclopedia and the internet and then made some rather large 
assumptions, trying to find something scary to report.  It's obvious 
she hasn't lived or worked in the area and really does not know the 
area at all.

Dottie Titus, Jordan neighborhood