All they needed was some marketing flair that also included some persistence as part of the package. They had already recruited the technical brains that would elaborate on and stick with the program until the bitter end.
Marc Seriff, the nerdy neuronal package and former ARPANET engineer behind AOL's technical presentation, is the sole main player in the story without an obvious ideological ax to grind. Every other participant--Case, Kimsey, Caufield, and Haig--each of whom the public more readily associates with AOL, adhered to a patriotic Republican paradigm that spoke adoringly of free enterprise while profiting consistently from socialized support processes.
Nevertheless, whatever value that AOL has added to the human sum has emanated from Seriff's intellectual orchestrations of code that depended on government-created programming languages. The smiling stalwarts of the faux-free marketplace needed this brainiac foundation to back up their self-serving and opportunistic world-views.
A marketing whiz was still lacking, however, until this final piece of the AOL chain-reaction fell into place. Steve Case, probably trolling for more than music downloading capabilities, attended the 1983 Las Vegas Consumer Electronics Show, on vacation from his humdrum marketing gig as manager of new pizza products for Dominos.
His brother Daniel, at twenty-six a year older than the baby-faced former rocker, was a lawyer in San Francisco, already on a partnership track at the venture capital firm of Hambrecht and Quist, formed in 1968 by a Bank of America dropout, six years in advance of KPCB's Fairchild semiconductor blossoming. Daniel was the go-between for Billy Von Meister with the Japanese and personally introduced brother Steve to what turned out to be a billion-dollar opportunity.
Steve Case, in another anomalous turn of the AOL story's phrasing, often appears on stage as a boy of humble beginnings. This belies his family's Hawaiian legal and business holdings, which paid for the private schooling in Honolulu that sent both him and Daniel to Williams College, from whence the younger sibling left with a Masters in Political Science in 1981 and from whence the latter went on to Hastings Law School and immediate riches as venture capital impresario.
That Daniel, as a lawyer in his mid twenties, at a tender age when most people are still orienting themselves to life, helped to get his year-younger brother started in the technology field, also suggests that any notion of 'log cabin' beginnings here is disingenuous. Anyhow, Daniel's feting of 'Wild Willy' conjoined Steven to the voluble New Jersey German who soon induced Steve Case to leave Monaghan and bread dough behind.
Jim Kimsey, as skeptical about Von Meister as was his Ranger-buddy Caufield, immediately cottoned to Steve Case. Many narratives talk of his 'grooming' the young Hawaiian for super-stardom as early as 1985, when he became Vice President for marketing.
However, another obstacle, insolvency, first had to be negotiated. When the necessary data to operate the Gameline's downloads increased to 8 kb, the kids lost interest in the necessary wait: CVC appeared to be headed for the rocks. Von Meister headed for the exit and Caufield, Kimsey, Seriff, and Case, the nexus of a strategic partnership that lasted for twenty-odd years, pondered what to do.
Quantum Computer Services became the vehicle to pick up the pieces when CVC threatened to come apart at the seams. The product focus would shift to the provision of virtual encounters and communications, based on BBS pioneering and the data-transfer protocols which Seriff had honed from their strictly gaming-oriented origins.
Target markets also turned out to be the early hardware vendors of the computer marketplace: Commodore and Apple were especially critical. Case's elevation to the level of executive Vice President followed shortly after he camped out at Apple HQ and, in a marathon presentation, convinced the Macaholics to set up an Apple-link service to parallel the Q-link operation already in place for Commodore.
Through one step forward and a couple of steps sideways for the next several years, involving contracts with Compuserve, Apple and solidifying the arrangement with Commodore, Quantum survived, though it never came close to finding any pot of gold at some idealistic rainbow's end. At this juncture, though, the service model was in place and the professionally trained soldiers in charge of financing and execution never wavered.
In 1989, after Apple abandoned ship, Case and Kimsey coined the phrase America Online to describe a planned broadening and improvement of the overall package, which became the first AOL offering. Many tendentious and little-analyzed--but for their 'personality' interest--negotiations ensued with Bully-Bill and his Harvard pal Paul Allen up in Seattle, who famously threatened to bury AOL before it left its infancy.
Vastly more riveting and important story-lines are likely available from this critical period. They revolve around the early-on decision to locate in the Northern Virginia suburbs; they intertwine with the role that AOL was assuming as guardian of the gates to the web for more and more average Americans; they concern the forces that were behind these and other empirical facts that no one has yet come close to fully explicating.
Section Four
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