During the late 1990s, I (and countless others) accessed the internet by running software provided by America Online (mailed to my house on free CD-ROMs) and using a dial-up modem to access their service. This would have been AOL version 4.0 or 5.0 for Windows 95/98. The AOL software at that time was a semi-walled garden in that a lot of the available content was AOL-specific and could only be accessed using functionality provided by the AOL software, but there was also a built-in web browser that could freely access any website on the broader internet.

I also remember that the AOL software exposed TCP/IP connectivity to the whole system -- As long as the AOL software was connected and running in the background, I could use Windows software like Internet Explorer, CuteFTP, ICQ (and I confess, Napster and Gnutella) without having to explicitly configure anything that I can remember. On one occasion I was even able to run a freeware HTTP server and allow a friend to connect to it by IP address, although I don't recall if he was also an AOL customer at the time.

In those days I didn't give much thought to how or why that worked, but thinking back now there must have been some kind of network driver or protocol that was bundled with AOL's software to expose it to the other applications. I'm curious how that worked -- if this was a capability designed into Windows' networking components, or if it was more of a custom development that AOL needed to do. Does this broad approach still work in modern versions of Windows?