The online service was launched in 1989 in nearby Vienna, Virginia, with a relative handful of workers. When it began growing wildly in the mid-1990s, the company started looking for a wide-open site to turn into a major campus.
In 1996, AOL settled on the Loudoun County site, where a large office building was available for occupancy. Since then, construction has been nearly constant.
Not only was AOL frantically adding workers and subscribers during the late 1990s, it was snapping up companies such as CompuServe, MapQuest, MovieFone, ICQ, Netscape and Quack. With the January merger, it gained access to the extensive information and entertainment products and services of Time Warner.
But at the same time, it lost something else: its independence. In January last year, when America Online Inc chairman Steve Case announced that his young company would acquire the venerable Time Warner Inc, many analysts predicted the Internet wunderkind would end up running the sprawling corporation.
Since the merger closed seven months ago, however, Rockefeller Center has emerged as the headquarters, and AOL Time Warner chief executive Gerald Levin has been calling the shots.
Though Case, 42, holds the title of chairman, he continues to live in northern Virginia and stays away from day-to-day operations.
"From our perspective [in Dulles], you could say we lost a little bit of our identity because we're a part of a much bigger organization now," Stavish said. "But what we gained was access to this enormous array of brands," such as CNN and Warner Bros movies.
Now the pressure is on Barry Schuler, 47, chairman and chief executive of AOL, to pull those assets together to make AOL indispensable to its US subscribers and to attract new ones overseas.
Outside the US, AOL already has 6.6 million subscribers and is trying hard to pick up more in Europe, Latin America and Asia.
In the next few years, Schuler's biggest challenge will be the coming battle with another behemoth, Microsoft Corp, for the eyeballs of Internet users.
This fall, Microsoft is rolling out its next-generation Windows XP operating system and its .Net Internet-based business plan. The moves are intended to shift Microsoft away from reliance on software licenses and toward subscription and transaction fees for software and services.
Microsoft wants to make sure that in the future, when consumers are making decisions about how to go on line to communicate, gather information, shop, entertain themselves or seek out business services, they will turn to Microsoft.
AOL, likewise, wants to be the singular source of online happiness for consumers. As the two companies square off over key technologies, such as instant messaging and video teleconferencing, AOL will be counting on the brains in Dulles to out-think the opposition.
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