Four US companies competed to bring people online by 1991 and only AOL survived.

Evidence

In 1991, when Steve Case, just thirty-three years old, was promoted to CEO of AOL, there were four companies, all but one lost to history, that shared the goal of trying to get Americans to spend more leisure time within an abstraction known as an “online computer network.” Their names were CompuServe, Prodigy, AOL, and GEnie, and merely to state their mission is to make clear why theirs was no easy sell. — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 693

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Anonymous sexual titillation drove AOL’s early chat room popularity — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 709

Broader Connections

• Anonymous sexual titillation drove AOL’s early chat room popularity #qualifies (0.75) — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 709