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
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