Share your memories of old-school online services and their effect on today's Internet
July 15, 2009 (Computerworld) Everyone's abuzz about Web 2.0, and it's no wonder. Facebook, MySpace and Twitter are some of the Internet's most popular destinations, offering users unprecedented freedom to share content, engage in conversations and exchange ideas like never before.
How short our memories are. Before everyone connected to one massive Internet, a variety of smaller commercial online services with names like CompuServe, GEnie, Prodigy, Delphi and, of course, America Online (AOL) ruled the roost. Some were launched as long ago as the late 1970s, and many were text-based with nary a graphic to be found. Each charged hourly or monthly fees to a national (and sometimes international) audience in exchange for access to its private network. In addition, there were many smaller Bulletin Board Systems, or BBSs, that were also accessed by use of modems and phone lines.
These services peaked in the mid-'90s, with millions of subscribers accessing their forums, download libraries, roundtables and special interest groups, discussing everything from computer programming to coupon clipping. They also provided a way for businesses to connect with their clients before the Web became ubiquitous. Be the content corporate or user-generated, kilobytes upon kilobytes of data -- which seemed like a massive amount of information in those days -- were available as fast as dial-up modems could download it.
Around the mid-'90s, the Internet, previously available mostly to universities and government organizations, expanded onto citizens' desktops, seriously threatening the online services' hegemony. Some online services became Web gateways, while others morphed into full-fledged Internet service providers (ISPs). One way or another, most tried -- and failed -- to compete with the more comprehensive and affordable Internet.
The recent ending of support for the old CompuServe Classic service prompted us to look back at some of the most popular commercial services. We'll explore where several of the most popular of those old-school services came from, what made them unique, and where they are now. Some of their characteristics may sound familiar, and you may wonder if Web 2.0 is really a new phenomenon, or if we've we simply come full circle.
Whatever their individual fates, these services live on not just in memory, but in their impact on the development of subsequent online communities. Even today's social networks could learn a lesson or two from the old online services.
Founded: 1969 (as Compu-Serv Network); 1979 (as CompuServe Information Service)
Status: Available at CompuServe.com
CompuServe was founded in 1969 as a way for Golden United Life Insurance's computers to earn their keep via time-sharing to other businesses. The service expanded to the consumer market in 1979 (formally known as the CompuServe Information Service, or CIS) and was acquired in 1980 by tax firm H&R Block, which would also gobble up rival online service The Source in 1989.
The company contracted with networks such as Tymnet to share dial-up access numbers, giving CompuServe subscribers widespread access across the U.S. Access fees depended on your modem's rate: 300 bits per second cost $6 per hour, 2400 bps cost $12, and so on. (2400 bps seemed lightning fast back then but is inconceivably slow now.)
CompuServe never strayed far from its corporate roots, with a primary audience of professionals and executives. It provided daily news, stock tickers, weather reports and encyclopedias to CompuServe members, often adding surcharges above the standard connection rates (wags liked to abbreviate the service "CI$"). Early adopters found several unique features, including a "CB Simulator," or group chat room, which also offered one-to-one real-time messaging, similar to today's instant messaging.
Users were given numeric IDs, such as 75162.3001 -- an artifact of the Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) PDP-10 computers upon which the service was founded -- but members could create handles by which to identify themselves in the various message boards and chat areas. CompuServe contracted with private individuals and parties to run its forums, with each forum's contract holder receiving a percentage of the billed time users spent in that forum. The most successful forums became full-time jobs for their system operators, or sysops.
Message boards sported easy-to-follow threaded conversations, though each forum could hold only a set number of messages, with old posts being automatically deleted as new ones were written. Program and data files could be downloaded from the libraries, where member-contributed uploads were verified by the forum's staff before being approved for public consumption. Each file had a description and keywords -- metadata that could be used to refine complex searches. By 1995, over three million members were making use of CompuServe's assorted resources.
The text-based interface allowed any computer to dial into CIS, though a graphical interface was also available by installing a client application that used CIS's proprietary HMI (Host-Micro Interface) protocol. In 1999, the text service was dropped in favor of a Web-based interface, but by then it was too late. "The burden of trying to support two types of services [text-based and graphical] at the same time opened the door for a competitor to come in and do a better job with the next iteration of what online services were to be," says Mike Schoenbach, sysop of several of CompuServe's gaming forums.
CompuServe was ultimately purchased by AOL, which "never supported a text system and entered the market with a much friendlier Windows-based point-and-click service," says Schoenbach, whose company, Fun Online, continues to operate various commercial forums.
CompuServe and its forums and "content channels" still exist today at CompuServe.com. Membership costs $19.95/month or $199/year, with access via either a Web browser or proprietary software called CompuServe 2000, which "offers support for the latest Windows operating system, Windows XP." Support for CompuServe Classic's HMI software and numeric accounts was discontinued on June 30, 2009.
NEXT: Delphi
Founded: 1981
Status: Available at DelphiForums.com
Unlike some of its competitors, which were started as side projects at larger organizations, Delphi was founded in 1981 with the goal of providing online access to information. It was launched by author Wes Kussmaul as Kussmaul Encyclopedia, the first online encyclopedia. By 1982, it featured message boards, e-mail and chat rooms as well.
Delphi was a small but persistent contender for online revenue well into the '90s, at which point the company tried several tactics to remain competitive in the face of the growing popularity of the Internet. In 1992, Delphi became one of the first national online services to offer consumer access to many elements of the Internet, such as telnet, Usenet and gopher. Around this time, Delphi membership peaked at 125,000.
The service languished in 1993 after being bought by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation, which in turn sold Delphi in 1996 to a group that included Bill Louden, former General Electric employee and founder of GEnie. Louden and company made Delphi accessible from the Internet, with Web pages for each member and forum.
This transition coincided with the elimination of membership fees, with the expectation that Web-based advertising would generate sufficient revenue to replace it. As with many dot-com era initiatives, reality fell short of expectations, and Delphi was soon for sale once again. Its management team merged with a company called Wellengaged to form Prospero Technologies, which in 2001 sold Delphi to a group that discontinued Web access. Prospero then repurchased Delphi just a year later and replaced the text-based access with a new Web interface that exists to this day, despite a buyout of Prospero in 2008 by Mzinga.
Delphi learned its lesson with its first attempt at an ad-based existence. Tony Ward, who has been a staff member on the service's Showbiz forum for more than a decade, notes that while the company does offer a free ad-based account, users must sign up for a paid account to get features such as an e-mail address, personal Web space, a blog, spell-checking, a custom signature and the ability to search old messages.
In this age of free Web communities such as Facebook, many still find Dephi a valuable service, says Ward: "I think a lot of people prefer the moderated message-board format over the free-for-all blog format that has become so prevalent in recent years. It's nice to know that most forums are well run and well organized thanks to their staff members. Some of the more popular Delphi forums get hundreds of messages per day. One, the Opinion Forum, gets over a thousand almost every day."
NEXT: Prodigy
There was a time when even online services like CompuServe seemed cutting edge compared to dial-up bulletin board systems (BBSs), which were how many people got online back in the day. Starting in the late '70s, the average computer enthusiast could use specialized software and a modem to create a BBS. This host computer would wait for an incoming phone call and then present the caller's computer with a text interface used for accessing the host's files, posting messages, and chatting one-to-one with the board's sysop.
The first BBS was the CBBS, established in Chicago by Ward Christensen and Randy Suess. Christensen, who a year earlier had developed the XMODEM transfer protocol, used the Great Blizzard of 1978 as an opportunity to write the software.
BBSs were primitive by today's standards. Most systems had only a single dedicated phone line, limiting use to one caller at a time. More significantly, most BBSs did not talk to each other: A message posted on one computer could be read only on that computer, and e-mail could be sent only to other users of that same BBS.
BBSs were primitive by today's standards. Most systems had only a single dedicated phone line, limiting use to one caller at a time. More significantly, most BBSs did not talk to each other: A message posted on one computer could be read only on that computer, and e-mail could be sent only to other users of that same BBS. That said, many local systems ended up joining larger BBS networks such as FidoNet, which allowed them to access files and exchange e-mail with other BBSs.
Though many BBSs were run by hobbyists, a few commercial BBSs charged for access to hundreds of phone lines and gigabytes of data. (Some BBS software packages, such as TBBS, were themselves commercial products.) Several commercial BBSs evolved into full-fledged Internet service providers, but for the most part, the Internet quickly dwarfed these smaller networks into obsolescence.
At their height, there were 150,000 BBSs in North America alone; today, there are only a few hundred, most of which can be accessed via telnet. For more information, check out BBS: The Documentary, a three-DVD set that features interviews with many BBS legends.
Founded: 1984 (as Trintex);1989 (as Prodigy)
Status: Subsumed into AT&T/Yahoo
In the early 1980s, an experiment in shopping and on-demand news delivery using television set-top boxes led three corporations to launch a colorful new online service. It was called Trintex, and unlike older services such as CompuServe and The Source, it wasn't tied to a dull ASCII interface. When it launched in four markets in 1984, this joint venture between IBM, Sears and CBS looked like a consumer product. Within four years, CBS had dropped out of the venture, and the service had a new name -- Prodigy.
Prodigy's colorful splash screens attracted snobby criticism from techies who considered graphical interfaces wimpy and a waste of processing power, but subscribers were drawn to the service because it aggregated the kind of information we now associate with Internet portal pages: news, weather, syndicated columnists, ESPN sports, games, Consumer Reports, and shopping services ranging from groceries to airline reservations. In 2009, this is part of the Internet landscape, but in 1989, it was a hallmark of Prodigy.
Another appealing feature was flat-rate pricing: Instead of charging by the hour, Prodigy offered tiered blocks of services for a flat monthly fee, starting at $9.95.
Despite the fact that subscribers were assigned such alphanumeric salads as PXTB03Z for usernames, Prodigy grew from 100,000 to half a million subscribers in the first year, then doubled to almost a million by 1991. However, Prodigy's subscriber base was fickle, and it suffered major attrition as it increased its monthly rates and began charging for previously free services such as e-mail and chat. The stable subscriber base probably peaked at around 460,000.
The service also lost goodwill when it interfered with the content of postings, deleting posts automatically based on key words without regard to context (zoological forums, for example, had to refer to the beaver by its Latin name).
But Prodigy rallied in 1993 by providing its members access to Internet content, starting with newsgroups and rapidly expanding to include an integrated Web browser. From there, it was a short step for Prodigy to morph into Prodigy Internet, an ISP with specialized content.
It changed ownership a couple of times, ending the millennium as part of SBC Communications. When SBC and Yahoo formed a strategic alliance and portal in 2002, SBC stopped offering new Prodigy accounts but allowed diehard subscribers to retain their @prodigy.net addresses. SBC subsequently purchased AT&T and adopted its brand, so what's left of Prodigy now appears in the att.my.yahoo.com portal and a few e-mail addresses.
NEXT: GEnie
While the online services highlighted in our story set out from the start to be national commercial ventures, most BBSs began as homegrown efforts -- some of which went on to achieve national status anyway. Following are three worth knowing about.
Exec-PC was at one point the largest BBS on the planet, with an estimated million or so subscribers. But it began in 1983 as a 1200-baud Hayes modem hooked up to a 4.77-MHz 8088 IBM PC with a 30MB hard drive. It sat in the den of founder Bob Mahoney's Milwaukee-area home. Exec-PC's main draw was its downloadable files (it had more shareware than anybody else), but it also had hopping social and informational forums. Oddly, it never had live chat -- that feature was available on a parallel service called Exec-PC Chat.
The WELL (Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link), a northern California BBS that grew into a worldwide meeting place, claims to be the birthplace of the online community movement. Its founders were on the bus with author Ken Kesey (One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest), so from its 1985 outset, the WELL drew in subculture denizens from Deadheads to Dada art fans. Arranged into forums called conferences, the community attracted techies and intellectuals of the likes of cyberpunk author Bruce Sterling and Electronic Frontier Foundation co-founders John Perry Barlow and Mitch Kapor. The WELL predictably became an ISP in the early '90s and is now a tiered subscription Web site in the Salon.com network.
Variously called The Jungle and Mofonet, a tiny online bulletin board run by Penn Jillette ("more than half of Penn and Teller") had a certain cachet in the late 1980s. Many people claim to have been regular visitors, but like the hordes of people who claim they saw the Velvet Underground perform in the 1960s, they can't all be telling the truth. You can still find repostings of Mofonet articles on the Web, often on obscure subjects such as whether computing pioneer Vannevar Bush was involved with UFO cover-ups. And really, that's what online communities are all about, right?
Founded: 1985
Status: Defunct
GEnie -- named for its owner, General Electric -- was founded in 1985 as a time-sharing service, like CompuServe. But GE rarely gave this side business the resources necessary to compete with its more industrious kin; for example, while CompuServe and AOL offered both text and graphical interfaces, GEnie was almost exclusively text-based.
Whereas CompuServe appealed to professionals, GEnie had much to offer consumers and hobbyists. Members could interact with each other in flight simulators, trivia games and MUDs -- multi-user dungeons, the text-based precursors to today's massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs). The forums, or "RoundTables" (RTs), were frequented by heavy hitters in the science fiction realm.
"Several famous writers, television producers, and so forth were active members, including J. Michael Straczynski, the creator of Babylon 5 -- which was in fact originally announced on GEnie," recalls Eric Shepherd, former sysop of the service's PowerPC Programmers RoundTable. "The Science Fiction RoundTable got so much traffic that it eventually had to be split into four RoundTables to support all the activity."
Without the support it needed from General Electric, GEnie was unable to maintain its momentum. "They were slow to add Internet-compatible features as the Internet became increasingly popular," Shepherd says. "Eventually, usage dwindled to the point where GE sold it off" in 1996 to Yovelle Renaissance Corp.
Yovelle changed the service's name from GEnie to Genie to reflect that General Electric was no longer the owner and, more significantly, changed the pricing structure without prior notification to its members. In protest of the unapproved charge to their credit cards, many users cancelled their subscriptions. Genie, once at a peak of 350,000 members, soon had only 10,000. IDT Corp., which bought Yovelle and with it Genie, was left with a service that was not worth the investment of making Y2k-compliant.
Genie closed its doors on December 30, 1999. Though the service exists in no official capacity today, some of its sysops went on to found AOL forums, Web sites and blogs that have continued the spirit and discussions of Genie's RoundTables.
NEXT: AOL
Founded: 1985 (as Quantum Link); 1988 (as AppleLink and PC Link); 1989 (as America Online)
Status: Available at AOL.com
AOL's road to being the largest dial-up Internet service provider in the world started humbly with a gaming site for Commodore computer users in the mid-1980s. Quantum Computer Services provided dial-up access to gaming servers that pioneered the massively multiplayer online experience enjoyed by World of Warcraft aficionados today. Quantum's first service, Quantum Link (or Q-Link), was launched in 1985, featuring graphical chat environments designed by LucasArts and online interactive serial fiction.
These features attracted the interest of Apple Computer and the electronics retailer Tandy. Joint agreements with these companies resulted in branded services using Mac and PC client software: AppleLink and PC Link, both launched in 1988. In 1989, when Apple pulled the plug on its joint venture, Quantum rebranded the service America Online, popularly abbreviated as AOL. A DOS-based version followed in 1991.
From the outset, AOL was focused on a nontechnical audience of gamers, and used a proprietary graphical operating environment instead of text-based terminal software. But there was more to America Online than a pretty interface. It gave its users the ability to build their own networks of contacts.
"AOL allowed users to create their own chat room spaces," says Mike Schoenbach, who was a sysop on then-competitor CompuServe, "and brought instant messaging to a system-wide level with buddy lists. Social online sites that millions of people use today -- Facebook, MySpace -- are very much built upon that online experience."
At the beginning, AOL was playing catch-up to such established communities as CompuServe and GEnie. In 1993, AOL opened up access to Usenet newsgroups, and followed up with the ability to send e-mail from AOL addresses to the Internet at large. At the same time, the company clung to the "walled garden" approach, spending a fortune developing its own content and giving users access to the Internet only where it saw fit. But the writing was on the wall and by 1995, the AOL client software included a full-fledged Web browser.
Despite its missteps, the service enjoyed almost ludicrous growth, fueled by ubiquitous trial floppy disks (and, later, CDs) bound into lifestyle magazines, bulk-mailed into physical mailboxes, and stacked in bins at supermarket checkouts. People were also driven to its forums by popular television. AOL keywords flashed along the bottom of TV screens on such daytime shows as Oprah, where Ms. Winfrey reinforced the common misconception that AOL was the Internet by referring to her AOL forum as a "Web site."
By the mid-'90s, America Online had expanded into foreign markets and officially rebranded itself as AOL. It also became the victim of its own success. AOL subscribers flooding into Usenet became unpopular as "clueless newbies," and there was hostile behavior inside AOL itself as password phishing and spamming spoiled the community experience for many.
But the company still grew, like the Internet market in general. At its peak in 2002, AOL had more than 26 million subscribers, but not all of those were necessarily active members in the AOL community. By then, AOL was favored as a dial-up ISP rather than a community in its own right. When broadband subsequently ate away at AOL's dial-up business, its subscriber base fell back down to around 6 million dial-up subscribers worldwide at the beginning of 2009.
While still enjoying its turn-of-the-century growth spurt, AOL bought a string of technology companies and, in 2001, the media leviathan Time Warner. When the Web bubble burst in the early 2000s, the merged company quietly deemphasized AOL, dropping the AOL Time Warner brand. After 8 years of trying to make sense of the merged corporate structure, Time Warner decided in May 2009 to spin AOL off into its own publicly traded company by 2010.
NEXT: Lessons learned
So what can the online services of old teach the online communities of today? Here are some truths universally acknowledged:
In a 2008 USA Today interview, bSocial Network's Bill Eager identified about 850 active social networks and predicted there would be a quarter of a million within the year. With that kind of competition, it's inevitable that many of today's social networks will go the way of The Source and GEnie.
Tharon Howard, a professor at Clemson University who specializes in sustainable social communities, believes that to prevail, social networking sites must reward their members at a fundamental level. "People need to believe that they will obtain some return on the investment of their time and energy," says Howard. "Remuneration doesn't need to be financial; it needs to satisfy some basic, psychological or emotional need. With World of Warcraft [an online game played with thousands of other participants], entertainment is the reward. And don't underestimate the sense of achievement [users] get from filling LinkedIn's completion percentage bar."
Right from its start in the mid-'80s, the online community known as the WELL had one of the best-defined policies about self expression, and it came in slogan form: You Own Your Own Words. YOYOW was a double-edged sword: There was no fear that the WELL would try to claim ownership over your intellectual property, but you were also responsible for what you said. On the WELL, anybody could trace your real name, so the iconic New Yorker cartoon "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog" didn't apply.
Howard Rheingold (an early WELL host) described the attraction of owning your own words from his first experience of the WELL in 1985: "Writing as a performing art! I was hooked in minutes." (As a counterpoint, Rheingold described his wife's reaction in his book The Virtual Community: "intelligent misfits...having a high old time." Both descriptions define the appeal of a successful online community.)
Too bad Facebook didn't follow the WELL's lead. In early 2009, Facebook angered users with its new terms of service that seemed to indicate that it owned users' content -- forever. Its reaction to the consumer backlash was an object lesson in damage control.
First, the company backed off the clauses that sparked the revolt, then it set up a group called Facebook Bill of Rights and Responsibilities to allow its members free and open discussion of the issue. A couple months later, Facebook agreed to let users help decide what the terms of service should be, and the new terms were voted in by Facebook users in April.
If members of any community, online or otherwise, don't play nice, someone has to bring them into line. It's best if a community polices itself, but in every playground scuffle, the teacher has to get involved sooner or later.
AOL in particular got lambasted for overdoing it in the mid-1990s, which led subscriber David Cassel to spearhead a counter-AOL movement called, inevitably, AOL Sucks. "Your service can be revoked if you say certain words in public chat rooms," Cassel observed in a posting to the newsgroup alt.aol-sucks in 1996. "Anyone seeing you use such a word can page an AOL Guide, who will appear in the room to monitor its content within 5 minutes. This has been used by ultra-conservatives that taunt gay users into using profanity, then summon a guide to get their access revoked."
Facebook and MySpace are sometimes flagged for doing the same thing. Both sites' terms of service leave the door open for removing postings at their sole discretion (in MySpace's case, expressly "with or without prior notice or explanation, and without liability"). And earlier this year, bloggers raised the specter of political censorship at Facebook after experiencing difficulty with postings containing words like "Gaza" or "Palestine."
It's a perception that needs to be nipped in the bud to avoid the growth of a Facebook Sucks movement. Perhaps Facebook could take a leaf from its own public-relations book (see "Encourage true self expression" above) and put the tough issues on the table for the Facebook community to decide.
Customers want to know up front what costs are associated with the service they'll be getting. Economic factors may require price increases over time, but should only be proportionate to value -- and subscribers should have plenty of notice to changes in either.
When GEnie was sold to Yovelle, its new owners changed the basic subscription plan overnight, offering its users no option to avoid the surprisingly higher charge. Members left the service in droves. Similarly, Prodigy saw its membership dwindle when previously free services became surcharged.
There may come a day when Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg wants to cash in on its estimated $5 billion worth by selling his social network to the highest bidder. Many Facebook users, accustomed to using its resources at no charge, worry that a change of management will spell doom for the service. One such Facebook group, Keep Facebook FREE, currently has more than 143,000 members.
"If Facebook is sold to a large corporation, there is a major possibility that they are going to start charging a fee to use it," declares the group's charter. "We all need to join this group and let Facebook know that we WILL NOT pay to use it, and if they start charging a fee we will go somewhere else." With 850 social networks competing for a piece of Facebook's pie, that's a threat Zuckerberg -- or any company looking to buy the service -- must take seriously.
Many popular groups grow to the point where the original members look around and say, "It's not like it used to be." Whether it's London punks or Bay Area hippies, fashionable movements attract people who don't really get it, and they make it less desirable for the real fans.
Back in the '90s, for instance, AOL's business plan involved massive growth and marketing. As newcomers flooded in, longtime users found that they couldn't get onto the service, and when they did, their favorite haunts were crowded with what seemed like clueless strangers.
Fortunately, Facebook and other successful new-school social networks have learned from AOL's mistakes. Their services are more stable than AOL was in its rapid-growth phase -- and better designed for crowd control. They let you choose who's in your circle (and protect your privacy from everybody else), so it doesn't matter if the service is 95 percent full of dross -- your five percent is all that counts.
This keeps the longtime users happy while welcoming newcomers. And new users with new ideas and new needs can be a good thing. Give people the platform and the tools and they'll use them in ways that could surprise you, as was shown when microblogging service Twitter emerged as an important communications tool for Iranians during a recent government crackdown on communications following a disputed election. (Twitter wisely delayed a planned service outage for network maintenance during the height of the turmoil.)
"Thanks to its simplicity and its chameleon-like ability to be many things to many people, Twitter in many ways has come to represent the zeitgeist," opined venture capitalist and business blogger Om Malik in April. The knack of giving people the tools they want and then getting out of the way is a tough one to manage, but the online communities that can carry it off will be the ones to survive the ages. Or at least, an age or two in Internet time.