AOL tries to navigate the Web it helped you find - washingtonpost.com

Before it was AOL, it was America Online, and before it was America Online it was Quantum Computer Services, and before that it was Control Video Corp., selling online services for the Atari. Remember the Atari? Pac-Man? In Internet time, that was basically 10,000 years ago.

Compared with the Googles and Yahoos of the world, AOL's business of offering a gateway to online tools such as e-mail and instant messaging feels just as dated as Atari. Now, after a disastrous $164 billion merger with Time Warner nine years ago, AOL is being spun off Wednesday into its own company, and the new executives running the firm -- the head honcho comes from Google -- are once and for all breaking free from the we'll-hold-your-hand model to get online, instead creating content that users can surf to on their own...