This is actually a serious post with a pretty serious request, but I thought I would make the title comical and memorable. So, before getting into what I'm looking for in this post in particular, let me give you a quick summary of what the title means.

The main conclusion article will be titled Oatmeal Wants Oatmeal.

You are what you eat.

The title is talking about me, Oatmeal Joey Arnold, you are what you eat and Oatmeal is my nickname. AOL Oatmeal means the text and other things I typed on AOL and AIM in particular.

The next article in this series will be titled Oatmeal Wants Yahoo Oatmeal.

I want to see a time capsule of some of my online activity from the 1990s.

This current post is titled Oatmeal Wants AOL Oatmeal.

My first email account was probably with American Online (AOL).

Let me be clear and let me be frank, I don't really think I have enough time right now to fully explain in exhaustive manner all the things I want which I may try to address in the conclusion article titled Oatmeal Wants Oatmeal at the end and also in different chapters leading up to that.

So, I'm not going to be crazy boring at the moment to mention all the things I'm looking for on the Internet that may be related or relevant to me, my family, my relatives, my ancestors, my friends, etc, etc, let alone offline related items.

But to be as general as possible, I'm looking for all sorts of things which may no longer be on the Internet or may be lost somewhere and may be extremely challenging to find.

That is why I need your help to help me find these items.

What Ever Happened to AIM? America Online Connected a Generation of Early Internet Users. By Shawn Knight on February 3, 2021 on Techspot.com.

Remember hearing "You got mail?" That is what you would hear when you opened up your browser after calling up or dialing up American Online which had to manually or slowly boot before you could access the Internet. Well, technically, modems still have to do that even in 2021 but the difference is we usually keep our Internet modems on all the time.

I plan to write a summary of things I'm looking for from the 1900's for example, that will be titled Oatmeal Wants 1900s Oatmeal.

In that post, I plan to briefly outline some of things I remember regarding the 20th century which I'm trying to discover or rediscover.

One of the main categories to the 1900s includes American OnLine (AOL) which brings me to this post in particular.

SmarterChild and Other AIM Bots: December 21, 2016 by Noah on Kirsle.net.

One of my first experiences on the Internet was via AOL in the 1990s. I don't really have any memory of being on the Internet in the 1980s apart from anything that might have been a toy or indirect like my mom would access the computers at the library to order books via an online catalog system. Some books were at other city libraries in our county and they would ship or mail them over when requested.

About Me

Oatmeal Daily - 2021-05-12 - Wednesday | Published in May of 2021

What Ever Happened to AIM? America Online Connected a Generation of Early Internet Users. By Shawn Knight on February 3, 2021 on Techspot.com.

By Oatmeal Joey Arnold

This post serves as an opening chapter to my life on the world wide web. My desire would be to create an official post later on regarding my life on the Internet in the 20th century.

The main goal of this post is to bring up how I created American Online Instant Messenger accounts in the 1990s and 2000s. If you or anybody you know could find screenshots or text of some of the things I would write, read, see, watch, I would encourage you to contact me or to simply publish it or something.

The Oatmeal Wants series is dedicated on trying to find items which may be sitting around on hard drives at random Internet databases, server farms and such. I know my requests for finding offline and especially online items is a shot in the dark but I thought I would give it a go regardless.

Library Internet

Like I said already, my first indirect experience with the Internet was probably at the Forest Grove Library possibly in the 1980s as I was born in 1985 in that same city in Oregon or I at least started remembering seeing the computers in the 1990s at the latest. I would love to find screenshots and such of things relating to early online library catalog systems.

Macintosh

Our neighbors in space number 164, Bhakti Sa, his brother, his siblings, his parents; that family had this black and white monitor and the computer was an Apple Macintosh operating system. Pretty sure it was not Windows and it looked interesting and different. In other words, it was a Mac for sure. It might have been a computer monitor hybrid. I saw some simple games on it I think. And I think we played a few games. They lived next door to us from 1993-1994. I don't think they had any Internet on it. I think I saw the Mines game on it.

Windows

My dad had a friend and/or a yard client in Cornelius towards the Community Baptist Church which I grew up attending in the 1900s, the first fifteen years of my life, generally speaking as I sometimes attended other churches in the 20th century but it was mostly that church and then I went on to attend many different churches and many different things after that in the 21st century. Well, this friend might have been Corky or however you spell his name. He had a family with at least 2 daughters who went to my high school including April and I think Summer or something. Not sure about Summer but pretty sure the one girl was April. I think we helped them paint. Maybe they were moving out and were trying to sell the house. While there, I played the snake game on their Windows computer and maybe a few other games. This may have been around 1995 back when I was ten. But I can't say exactly which year it was.

Southern Oregon

I went with my brother (Rick) and my dad in the spring of like 1997 to see my dad's relatives and friends in southern Oregon where he was adopted into. Dad was born in 1950 in Los Angeles, was adopted and ended up living in Goldhill, Oregon. And then like Medford. And then Roseburg for the Umpqua Community College. So, we were down there for a weekend starting on like a Friday. Got there late Friday night and stayed at a two-trailer house with a satellite which Rick was trying to fix. We went back home like on Monday. But like on Saturday, we stayed at this one house and we slept in their like RV. They had a computer room which was like in a shed separate from the house. I was able to use it. And it may have been AOL Internet or I don't know exactly but what I remember is seeing a pretty simple menu of things to click on with categories and sub-categories. I was like in a place designed for children and teens. Probably mostly for kids. I was twelve years old. I remember seeing some of the topics being related to Disney and other cartoons. I don't know if it was all Disney or what. This may be my first experience with navigating on the interwebs. I saw text and photos. I may have saw some videos. I don't know if there were games or not. I don't remember any instant messengers or ability to chat or send emails or messages back and forth with people.

We Go Way Back

I started using AOL and AIM around 1997. I would love to find a way to access some of my older instant messenger and email accounts I might have had with American Online, that is one of my goals in life; same thing with Yahoo, MSN, Xanga, Diary Land, etc.

Quick Update Regarding American Online, etc

One of my newest AOL email addresses (Original Oatmeal) was from like 2013 and when I went to login today, it said deactivated due to inactivity and I believe similar things with Yahoo, etc. Still trying to figure out Xanga and I sent Diary Land about $19 because they say they send user content after you pay them kind of thing as a way of verifying it is really you kind of thing. I was actually on this Discord hoping somebody would say they cloned AIM and some of the content on it. If only there were some screenshots on Archive's Wayback Machine. I also lost some YouTube channels and some people on Instagram told me to send them money so they can recover them. But I decided not to test out that theory.

I use Ubuntu Mate (Linux) and have used the Pidgin instant messenger which allowed for multiple accounts from different services including AIM. But this project you're talking about brings back nostalgia and is really cool, so I may consider creating an account since I enjoy trying new things.

Oatmeal Wants Oatmeal

This first chapter regarding my life on the Internet begins mostly with whenever we got Internet at our house or I mean at our trailer home and I'm saying this as my previous experiences before this was not much when compared with when we actually had our own dial-up Internet service. So, we probably got Internet for the first time the Christmas of 1997 or perhaps it was earlier that same year.

Top 5 Web Designs from the 90s

AIM

My main aim is AIM, the American Online Instant Messenger, I'm trying to remember the different email addresses, display names, usernames, profile photo avatars (PFP), etc, I may have had, the pictures and the things I may have typed and read on AIM and then later on Yahoo as well during that same decade, the 1990s. I can't exactly remember what my usernames were for AIM and Yahoo, but I can give you a few wild guesses.

My Usernames

A quick disclaimer, some of this may be inaccurate like totally, like completely, and some of it may be a little bit accurate to a degree, this is from the top of my head, this is a quick brainstorming summary of some of the usernames, display names, emails, etc, which I may have had on AOL's AIM, Yahoo, etc; and some of this goes back to the 1990s and some of it maybe not until the 2000s.

I'm just going to randomly list random usernames and display names which comes to mind and this is not accurate completely and not thorough either, this is just a few random names and such:

Darth Lazer
Joey
Joe
Joeyarnold
Star_JSA
Oatmeal Joey
Bumbaloe
Bumbalo Joe
Cooooool_Kid

Darth Lazer may have been just for Yahoo or at least Yahoo Chat going back to the late 1990s is what I remember. Bumbaloe was a Yahoo username and email account which I made in the early 2000s and probably not before that. I may have made Bumbaloe accounts on AOL's AIM as well. There may have been different variations or versions of Bumbaloe including Bumbalojoe or not sure of the exact spelling of that one. Cooooool_Kid was a Yahoo account which probably started in the late 1990s at the earliest and I don't remember making a counterpart for this username at AOL. Oatmeal Joey was a Yahoo account which I probably didn't create until the early 2000s and maybe I made one for AOL as well but I don't remember. And outside of that, there may have been other accounts as well. I don't think I ever made a Darth Joey account or other things. There may have been other accounts I made for AIM, Yahoo Chat, etc. But these are the ones I can estimate and some of them may not be accounts but I tried my best to include some of them here.