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Games on the Net Before the Web, Part 1: Strategy and Simulation

Right from the beginning, games were a component of the commercial online services that predated the World Wide Web; both The Source and CompuServe included them among their offerings from the moment those services first went online. In the early years, such online games were mostly refugees from 1970s institutional computing. Classics like Star Trek, Adventure, and Hammurabi had the advantage of being in the public domain and already running without modification on the time-shared computer systems which hosted the services, and could thus be made available to subscribers with a minimum of investment. Eventually even some text-only microcomputer games made the transition. By 1984, CompuServe, now well-established at the vanguard of the burgeoning online-services industry, had a catalog that included the original Adventure along with an expanded version, nine Scott Adams games, and the original PDP-10 Zork (renamed for some reason to The House of Banshi). And those were just the text adventures. There were also the dungeon crawls Dungeons of Kesmai and Castle Telengard and the war games Civil WarFantasy, and Command Decision, while for the less hardcore there were the CompuServe Casino, board games like Reversi, and curiosities like a biorhythm charter and an astrology calculator.

The fact that so many games were on offer so quickly indicates that they must have paid their way, at least to some extent. The hard reality remained, though, that these single-player games which happened to be played online were a hard sell to many subscribers. Paying $6 or more per hour to play a text-only game didn’t make a whole lot of sense to many of them when they could buy or even type in something just as satisfying for their local machines.

Group discussion about games, on the other hand, was something only the online services could offer with any degree of convenience or regularity, and it absolutely thrived in consequence almost from Day One. Adventure games were an especially popular topic, and for very good reason; given the non-sequiturial puzzles those early adventures were so rife with, outside help was about the only way most players had a reasonable chance of solving many of them. When Sierra in 1982 released perhaps the most absurdly unfair early adventure of them all in the form of Time Zone — twelve disk sides and more than a thousand rooms of complete inscrutability — The Source’s users mounted a pioneering crowdsourced effort to solve it. Its home was called The Vault of Ages:

Welcome to the Vault of Ages. Here we are coordinating the greatest group effort in adventure-solving: the complete mapping of On-Line’s Time Zone.

Herein we are gathering, verifying, and correlating information about each time zone. Feel free to visit here anytime, but remember that for the Vault to fill, we need your contributions of information. Any time you have new information about mapping, puzzle solutions, traps overcome, items found, email this info to me. After verification, your contributed jigsaw-puzzle piece will be added to the Vault file, and your name will be entered upon the rolls as a master solver.

Unsurprisingly, the first person known to have solved Time Zone, a tireless adventure fanatic and gaming journalist named Roe R. Adams III, was a Source and Vault of Ages regular.

The online services would continue to be a vital meeting point for gamers, gaming journalists, and, increasingly, the developers that made the games for many years to come, right up until they were superseded by the modern World Wide Web. Countless gamers who weren’t subscribers nevertheless benefited from the walkthroughs and strategy guides that filtered down from the likes of CompuServe onto the network of local bulletin-board systems and into the halls that hosted users-group meetings, to eventually be passed from hand to hand on playgrounds and in lunch rooms as smudged printouts whose unassuming appearance belied the precious information they contained.

But, while it’s certainly noteworthy in itself, our main concern today isn’t with this far-reaching game-solving grapevine. We’re rather concerned with the games that subscribers were actually playing online in increasing numbers by the middle of the 1980s — games which by and large weren’t the roll call of golden oldies that opened this article. We’re interested, in other words, in how the online services learned to take advantage of their uniqueness as interconnected real-time communities of tens or hundreds of thousands of people to offer players something they couldn’t get from an offline game. In doing so, they would give the world a sneak preview of its online future in yet one more way.


One of the executives who worked under Jeff Wilkins at CompuServe in the early 1980s was named Bill Louden. He was an unusual character there in several ways, not least in being a living embodiment of where computing was going as opposed to where it had been. Unlike most of CompuServe’s management, who had been raised at the bosom of institutional computing, Louden had come to his current job through microcomputers. He had been working as a Radio Shack store manager in CompuServe’s hometown of Columbus, Ohio, when the TRS-80 arrived in 1977, and he became such an instant home-computing zealot that he founded the Central Ohio TRS-80 Users Group shortly thereafter. He joined CompuServe in 1979, hired by Wilkins to be a bridge between the hobbyist-oriented personal-computing community which he knew so well and the dominant culture of business-oriented big-iron computing inside CompuServe.

Among the many things which Louden understood but CompuServe’s other managers largely did not was the appeal of games. He became the foremost advocate for them inside the company — an advocate for, that is, going beyond just scooping up the low-hanging fruit of Adventure and Hammurabi and calling it a day. He believed that games, if given the proper priority, could become not just an occasional distraction for the service’s subscribers but the primary reason some of them chose to sign up in the first place. By acting upon that belief, he would become another forgotten pioneer, one of the most important architects of online gaming’s future.

The first of Bill Louden’s pet projects to hint at the true potential for online gaming was at first glance just another tired institutional refugee. Back in 1978, a new game had appeared on the DEC PDP-10s that lived at the University of Texas at Austin. DECWAR was at bottom yet another variation on the tried-and-true Star Trek strategy game, but some of its embellishments to the formula were very significant. Instead of a single player hunting computer-controlled Klingons and Romulans, DECWAR had room for up to eight players, who faced off against one another in two teams of four, with the balance of the teams filled up by the computer when fewer than eight humans could be rounded up. Just as significantly, the game was played in real time.

DECWAR first came to Bill Louden’s attention in 1982; he saw the potential it held for CompuServe immediately. Making inquiries with the university, he found the game’s developers were willing to sell him its source code for $50. When his superiors refused to part with that princely sum, he bought the source himself using his own money. Louden then did much of the work that was required to adapt the game to CompuServe himself, excising in the process the last vestigial remnants of the Star Trek intellectual property. (Out of similar legal concerns, the original Star Trek game had itself become the thinly veiled Space Trek on CompuServe by this point.) Louden also added innovations like a leader board which saw players progress in rank from cadet to admiral as they won games and blew up other players’ ships, adding at least a dollop of long-term persistence to tempt them to keep playing. And he gave DECWAR a new name: MegaWars.

CompuServe advertised MegaWars widely for the first year or two, even as their marketers ignored other pioneering initiatives like CB Simulator. Garish MegaWars depictions like these contrasted strangely with the company’s usual staid image. (One can only imagine what those members of the board who had been against launching the consumer service from the start thought of this sort of thing.) As was par for the course during this time period, the imagery of the advertising had almost nothing to do with the game, which featured neither interpersonal combat nor scantily-clad warriors of either sex.

MegaWars went up on CompuServe circa August of 1982, much to the dismay of the University of Texas’s student coders, who had neglected to copyright or attach any legal restrictions whatsoever to the source code they had given to Louden for $50. Playing it was a daunting proposition: it usually required about two to three hours — meaning as much as $20 in connection fees — to finish a complete match, and the player had to learn 32 separate textual commands, which had to be typed in real time as the galaxy exploded in battle all around her. Yet, despite or because of its challenging nature, it proved enduringly popular, spawning a cult of hardcore players who stuck with it for years and years. In fact, it would become CompuServe’s most durable single game of all, remaining on the service for the next fifteen years. “The people that play MegaWars are extremely serious,” CompuServe’s communications director was soon warning. “The expertise level is very high.”

It didn’t take long for MegaWars players to form themselves into consistent teams that themselves sometimes stayed together for years. Intra- and inter-team politics could come to fill as much space as actually playing the game. Team Dune, for instance, was made up of fans of Frank Herbert’s iconic series of science-fiction novels; everyone on the team was expected to take the name of a Dune character as a handle. “Dictators” were selected from among the team’s members for three-month terms in hotly contested elections that could sometimes turn violent. It was all a part of the fantasy. A Team Dune member named Martin Maners, better known on CompuServe as “Leto II,” had this to say:

I’ve always had a vivid imagination. I like science fiction and Star Wars. When you sit down in front of your computer and play MegaWars, you really leave the earth, you’re really out there. It helps me relax, especially with the way MegaWars lets me talk to other players on my team. It’s nice to be able to sit back and do something completely different for a change.

With MegaWars, Bill Louden had put his finger on the real strength of gaming on a service like CompuServe: the opportunity for subscribers to play against one another rather than alone with the computer. “MegaWars is a challenge and is entertaining as well, but the real enjoyment comes from the multiplayer aspect of the game,” said one subscriber. “Interacting with other human players is what makes it interesting in a way that a ‘man vs. computer’ game just can’t match.” Another subscriber noted that it was “not like a game you would run on your personal computer. Here you get to pit yourself against a real person who could be across the street or the country. A much more formidable foe! It’s both entertaining and challenging, and at the same time it’s a great way to meet people and make new friends.”

If CompuServe was to continue to develop their games in this direction, however, they would need to move beyond public-domain institutional refugees like DECWAR/MegaWars. Luckily, Louden had recently been fielding inquiries from a pair of outside programmers with aspirations to do just that. They called themselves Kesmai.

Kelton Flinn and John Taylor, a duo better known as Kesmai.

Kesmai weren’t your stereotypical teenage bedroom coders. John Taylor, who had a masters degree in computer science, worked for General Electric’s High Performance Division, writing software for industrial robots, while Kelton Flinn was working on a PhD in applied mathematics at the University of Virginia. They picked their company’s name as their favorite from a long list of random ones that had been spit out by a name-generating program.

Several years before, while still an undergraduate, Flinn had written a very ambitious game on his university’s computer which combined Star Trek-like space combat — played in real time, no less! — with a conquer-the-universe strategic layer of economics and politics. He called it simply S. He remembers one particular incident as the turning point in its development: “One person’s favorite planet was taken, and he picked up a chair and stalked across the room with it to clobber the culprit. ‘Bob, put the chair down, it’s only a game…’ I guess I should have known then we had a potential hit!”

After much lobbying on Kesmai’s part for a development contract, Bill Louden agreed to let them bring S to CompuServe as a sort of trial project, renaming it in the process to MegaWars III. (MegaWars II had been an ill-fated attempt to add graphics and sound, at least of a sort, to the first MegaWars using the character graphics and simple bells and whistles allowed by some otherwise textual communications protocols. Dismissed by Louden himself as “poorly done and abysmally slow,” it didn’t last very long.) Kesmai greatly expanded on the already ambitious S template for CompuServe, making the universe much larger, adding more diplomatic options, and adding a veritable sub-game all its own of starship design. It seems safe to say that, by the time they were done, there was nothing of comparable complexity available even in single-player form on the microcomputers of the time. Indeed, the end result can’t help but remind one of the so-called “4X” games — “explore, expand, exploit, exterminate” — that wouldn’t become really practical on PCs until the early 1990s, when the steady march of technology would lead to strategic epics like Civilization and Master of Orion. In contrast to most of those later games, though, MegaWars III offered all the unpredictability of dozens of human opponents, with whom one could communicate at any time using “hyperspace radio,” whether to make or break trade deals and military alliances or just to shoot the breeze.

A single game of MegaWars III could host up to 100 players, and ran for four to six weeks. At the end of that time, the player who had earned the most points through conquest and the economic development of her colonies would be crowned emperor (this system would later be cheerfully nicked by Master of Orion as one of its own victory conditions, thus further cementing the similarities between the two games). With a victor thus declared, it would be time to wipe the slate clean. A brand new universe would be generated, and players who had been disappointed by their performance last time could try their luck on this new playing field. Some modern online games could perhaps take a lesson from this constant rolling-over of the virtual universe, which was done with conscious intent: Louden notes that it “kept newbies from feeling they had no way to catch up and were just meat for the slaughter.”

That said, little else about MegaWars III was forgiving; it was even more demanding than the game to which it had been billed a sequel. Eight hours of real time corresponded to about a month of game time. Those who hoped to have a shot at the winner’s circle knew that they had to sign on every night, sometimes for hours at a time, to maintain their empires. The subscriber known as “L’Eagle,” a self-described “corporate lawyer” in real life, became something of a community legend for winning the very first game of MegaWars III, which ran from January 19 until March 15 of 1984. He was already a veteran grognard at that time, with a history with war games which dated back well into the previous decade. For someone like him, MegaWars III provided an experience that could only have been approached in the past by some of the more elaborate play-by-mail campaigns run by companies like Flying Buffalo. The CompuServe version, however, had the added allure of instant feedback, along with the instant gratification of real-time chat — always useful for taunting a vanquished foe.

Just as with the first MegaWars, interactions with other players in MegaWars III were, even more so than all of the complicated rules, the heart of the game’s appeal. L’Eagle described the game, with its delicate tissue of alliances, in terms that actually smack as much or more of Diplomacy as Master of Orion. Such is the effect of adding the human element to the 4X equation.

The game has very few limitations. That’s part of the charm. But everyone has to work to keep the game good-spirited. At one point, the game’s authors thought that team members would turn on one another, that friends would become enemies. But after six weeks of planning together, the last thing you would do is back-stab.

L’Eagle is perhaps overstating the case just a bit. Back-stabbing was hardly unknown in MegaWars III; in fact, just as in Diplomacy, it was a virtual necessity for those with serious aspirations to win. Still, MegaWars III co-creator Kelton Flinn wasn’t wrong when he noted that “it’s a social game, as well as a competitive one.” Already in 1984, the year of MegaWars III‘s debut, CompuServe hosted a gathering of players in Columbus that attracted several dozen attendees. It was only the first of many.

Journalists, conditioned to think of computer games as strictly kids’ stuff, frequently expressed surprise when they were informed that the average age of a hardcore MegaWars I or III player was somewhere north of thirty. Really, though, it couldn’t have been any other way. The great disadvantage of these early online services, the necessary temper to any nostalgia for the era of the net before the Web, was how expensive they were. The whole time you were playing, the meter was running. Just as with CB Simulator, some people got addicted to the games, often to the detriment of the rest of their lives. Regulars soon noticed cyclical patterns to some of their comrades’ comings and goings. L’Eagle:

You can tell when the MasterCard bills come. People disappear. Later, they come back and say, “Yeah, I just had to cut down a bit.” Teenagers, you might never see them again. Fortunately, I make a lot of money.

As always, digital utopianism only got you so far in a world that at the end of the day still ran on money.

By mid-decade, then, multiplayer gaming — as opposed to the older species of single-player games that happened to be played online — was establishing itself as a staple of online life, not only on CompuServe but also on services like PlayNet and QuantumLink. As we saw in an earlier article, the latter pair offered a variety of simple board games that more casual players could enjoy with the added benefit of graphics, an area CompuServe would soon push into as well. The potential of online games remained sharply limited, however, by the fact that the vast majority of subscribers to the various services were still using 300-baud modems, which transferred data at the glacial pace of approximately 30 to 35 bytes per second — or a little over 2 K per minute.

When that logjam finally broke, it did so, as so often happens in technology, with head-snapping speed. The breakthrough was helped along by GEnie, the new online service which launched in October of 1985 to become the most serious challenger yet to CompuServe’s dominance. A big drag on the adoption of faster modems had actually been CompuServe itself, which charged $6 per hour for 300-baud access but a well-nigh absurd $12 per hour for 1200-baud connections. GEnie, on the other hand, launched at $5 per hour for both 300 and 1200 baud, soon forcing even the industry leader to adjust their own rates in response. With a new standard pricing model thus established, subscribers rushed out to buy the new, faster modems that were also coming down rapidly in price. GEnie reported at the beginning of 1986 that less than 40 percent of their subscribers had upgraded to 1200 baud; by the end of the year, that number had topped 90 percent. And 1200 baud was itself only a beginning rather than an end: 2400 baud was coming on strong, with 9600 baud out there on the not-too-distant horizon. What might developers of online games be able to do with those sorts of connection speeds? Bill Louden and the boys at Kesmai had some ideas.

Louden had left CompuServe in 1984, disaffected by what he saw as too many “corporate people” encroaching on his domain. After some misadventures trying to set up a regional online service of his own called Georgia Online, he was tapped by General Electric to run GEnie. Like any good manager of an upstart, he surveyed the leading company in his industry — i.e., his recent employer CompuServe — for weak spots where GEnie could offer something more to customers. As we’ve just seen, one of these was making higher-speed connections affordable. Another, unsurprisingly given Louden’s reputation as the “games guy” even while he was still at CompuServe, was games. Louden strove to make GEnie a haven for gamers, both for talking about offline games — the service would verge on displacing CompuServe in the years to come as the foremost source for walkthroughs and strategy guides — and for playing online games.

For their part, Kesmai were happy to work for any service willing to pay them. The fact that John Taylor was still going to work every day at GEnie’s corporate parent General Electric, not to mention Kesmai’s established relationship with Louden, made a development contract with the new service a natural step. MegaWars III therefore soon came to GEnie as well in thinly disguised form as Stellar Emperor. But that was merely an old CompuServe glory being revisited. GEnie’s crowning gaming glory would be a radical departure from anything seen online to date.

Air Warrior, a multiplayer air-combat simulator using aircraft from both of the world wars, was first offered to owners of the Apple Macintosh in late 1986. Although the game ran through GEnie, it was provided as a standalone application which handled all of the minutiae of logging in and communications for itself, in lieu of the text-only terminal programs subscribers normally used to access the service. This approach allowed it to make use of cutting-edge 3D graphics, the likes of which had never before been seen in an online context. It was nothing short of revolutionary, the very first game of its kind, and those who wished to play it had to pay for their spot at the bleeding edge — to the tune of no less than $11 per hour, more than twice GEnie’s normal going rate. Luckily for Kesmai, who had expanded greatly and invested a lot of money in the project, a fair number of well-heeled users proved willing to pony up.

Choosing a plane to fly — or, alternately, a vehicle to drive — in Air Warrior.

Ported to the Commodore Amiga and Atari ST in 1987, Air Warrior used what we today would call the “software as a service” model to perpetually evolve throughout its long lifespan, with players expected to download the updates which appeared almost monthly on GEnie and merge them into their local disks. By 1988, this process had brought the game to a certain maturity. Three “theaters” — one for World War I, two for the more popular World War II — were kept in constant operation, complete with leader-board tallies of aircraft shot down and ground targets destroyed. Similarly to MegaWars III, a winner of each campaign was declared every three weeks and the theater reset to keep anyone from running away with things for too long.

During a campaign, players could cast their lot with any of three opposing militaries. Some players preferred to be lone wolves, Red Barons lurking in the cloud cover to swoop down on their prey, but most took it upon themselves to further organize into squadrons, with all the resultant social interaction you might expect. Indeed, Air Warrior became more and more team-oriented as time went on. Lumbering B-17 bombers took off on strike missions with not only a pilot but no fewer than six other players filling the various gun turrets, escorted by more players in single-seater Mustangs and Spitfires. Meanwhile still other players would be mounting a coordinated ground assault in jeeps and tanks. All were bound together by the magic of chat — or, in in-game terms, by their multi-band radios. And on the other side, of course, was a similarly well-coordinated group of defenders hoping to add to their point tallies by taking down some of those juicy B-17s.

The Air Warrior application incorporated a terminal layer for handling logging into GEnie and other command-oriented tasks. Here a player is checking out his personal history.

The obvious forerunner to modern multiplayer wargasms like the Battlefield series, Air Warrior was distinguished, like so many of these early online games, by a devotion to the game’s fiction that would be very foreign to most of today’s eager gibbers and fraggers. Air Warrior billed itself as a flight simulator the equal of the ones being made by companies like subLogic and MicroProse, and many players took it very seriously indeed on those terms, implementing historical tactics and even radio protocols. Inevitably, some new players tried to single-handedly run roughshod over the place, but such respectless cretins usually didn’t live very long; one sign of the game’s worth as a simulation was the fact that the historically accurate tactics were mostly the ones that worked. And of course the fact that you were paying $11 per hour for the privilege had a way of driving up the average participant’s age and assuring that only those who really, really hankered after a vintage air-combat experience stuck around.

In the air in Air Warrior. Note the chat window, vital to squadron coordination, that’s open to the right.

Newbie pilots wishing to find acceptance within a squadron’s ranks had to contend with the realistic flight mechanics while tranquilly accepting their designated role in each operation; true to history, new pilots were usually given sheltered positions as wingmen to more experienced fliers which gave them little opportunity to run up their personal kill tallies. Still, greenhorns quickly learned to appreciate the extra cover, as nothing about Air Warrior was forgiving. Woe betide the pilot who forgot that the escape key was meant literally in this game: it led to an instant, no-questions-asked bailout.

Death meant that you had to start over with a new character, so all serious players practiced their wheels-up landings and their water ditchings extensively using the game’s weapons-less offline practice mode. Even the effects of fuel usage were modeled accurately; planes became faster and more maneuverable as they got lighter. But this too, of course, was a double-edged sword: many an Air Warrior pilot wound up dead because of inattention to the fuel gauge. To help the youngsters out, the experienced pilots instituted a flying-and-tactics clinic which ran every Thursday night for years. The life saved, they reasoned, might just be their own if they got saddled with one of these greenhorns on their wing.

Lining up on a bridge, one of the ground targets which players got points for destroying.

In marked contrast to the Kesmai games that had preceded it, Air Warrior remained always on the cutting edge of audiovisual technology. It shone most of all on the Amiga when that machine was the audiovisual class of the industry; it wasn’t even ported to MS-DOS until 1989. Once there, though, it continued to evolve apace, becoming in early 1993 one of the first games of any stripe to support the new generation of “Super VGA” graphics cards. The Air Warrior community would always remain a relatively small one; a 1993 magazine report describes about thirty players active in each theater most evenings, the very same number cited by another report from 1989. But despite such limited numbers of active players, Air Warrior became, like the MegaWars games, rather astonishingly long-lived, actually managing to outlast its original host service GEnie to make it all the way to 2001. For those seeking a certain kind of historically grounded multi-player combat experience, emphasizing real-world tactics, it was in many ways a better take on online gaming than most of what’s available today. And even for those who didn’t know the difference between a Hellcat and Zero, it remained a living example of the potential for online gaming, an aspirational ideal at the vanguard of the field for many years.

While it may be a little hard to recognize today, the SVGA Air Warrior looked spectacular in its day — not just spectacular for an online game, but spectacular, period.

This survey, sketchy though it’s been, has hopefully been enough to demonstrate both how influential the online services of the 1980s really were on online gaming as we know it today and how compelling the games they offered could be even when taken entirely on their own terms. Yet the creations we’ve seen so far, groundbreaking though they’ve been in their various ways, have all been relatively short-form experiences: games with beginnings, middles, and ends that spanned no more than a handful of weeks. What persistence these games did possess was thanks to players like the desert rats of Team Dune, who found ways to make the fiction last even when the game proper was over. But what of games which truly have no ending? What of games which aren’t so much games at all as virtual worlds, even virtual societies — real Second Lifes for their inhabitants, one might say. Today such virtual worlds consume the free time of millions of rabid players, and stand as the most complex virtual spaces ever created. Next time, then, we’ll find out how game developers discovered the power of persistence, many years before Warcraft — much less World of Warcraft — was a twinkle in its creators’ eyes.

(Sources: the books On the Way to the Web: The Secret History of the Internet and its Founders by Michael A. Banks and Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution by Steven Levy; Softline of May 1982; Online Today of June 1987, January 1988, and February 1989; Byte of September 1982; Antic of November 1984; Compute!’s Gazette of May 1985; Family Computing of June 1986; InfoWorld of October 21 1985 and December 2 1985; Compute! of July 1987; Amazing Computing of August 1987 and March 1989; the STart “games issue” for 1988; Computer Gaming World of January 1990 and May 1993; CompuServe’s games catalog/brochure from 1984; the Games of Fame online articles on MegaWars and MegaWars III; the history page from a recent MegaWars revival.)

 
 

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A Net Before the Web, Part 5: The Pony

Even as Bill von Meister and company were flailing away at GameLine, a pair of former General Electric research scientists in Troy, New York, were working on the idea destined to become Control Video’s real future. Howard S. Goldberg and David Panzl had spent some time looking at online services like CompuServe and The Source, and had decided that they could never become a truly mass-market phenomenon in their current form. In an era when far more people watched television than read books, all that monochrome text unspooling slowly down the screen would cause the vast majority of potential customers to run away screaming.

Goldberg and Panzl thought they saw a better model. The Apple Lisa had just been released, the Macintosh was waiting in the wings, and you couldn’t shake a stick at any computer conference without hitting someone with the phrase “graphical user interface” on the lips. Simplicity was the new watchword in computing. Goldberg and Panzl believed that anyone who could make a point-and-shoot online service to go up against the SLR complexity of current offerings could make a killing.

But how to do so, given the current state of technology? It was all a 300-baud modem could do to transfer text at a reasonable speed. Graphics were out of the question.

Or were they? What if the graphics could be stored locally, on the subscriber’s computer, taking most of the load off the modem? Goldberg and Panzl envisioned a sort of hybrid service, in which as much code and data as possible was stored on a disk that would be sent out to subscribers rather than on the service’s big computers. With this approach, you would be able to navigate through the service’s offerings using a full GUI, which would run via a local application on your computer. If you went into a chat room, the chat application itself would be loaded from disk; only the actual words you wrote and read would need to be sent to and from a central computer. If you decided to write an email, a full-featured editor the likes of which a CompuServe subscriber could only dream of could be loaded in from disk, with only the finished product uploaded when you clicked the send button.

The PlayNet main menu. Note that system updates could be downloaded and installed on the user’s disks, thus avoiding the most obvious problem of this approach to an online service: that of having to send out new disks to every customer every time the system was updated. The games were also modular, with new ones made available for download to disk at the user’s discretion as they were developed. All told, it was an impressive feat of software engineering that would prove very robust; the software shown here would remain in active use as PlayNet or QuantumLink for a decade, and some of its underpinnings would last even longer than that.

Goldberg and Panzl were particularly taken with the possibilities the approach augured for online multiplayer games, a genre still in its infancy. CompuServe had put up a conquer-the-universe multiplayer strategy game called MegaWars, but it was all text, demanding that players navigate through a labyrinth of arcane typed commands. Otherwise there were perennials like Adventure to go along with even moldier oldies like Hangman, but these were single-player games that just happened to be played online. And they all were, once again, limited to monochrome text; it was difficult indeed to justify paying all those connect charges for them when you could type in better versions from BASIC programming books. But what if you could play poker or checkers online against people from anywhere in the country instead of against the boring old computer, and could do so with graphics? Then online gaming would be getting somewhere. The prospect was so exciting that Goldberg and Panzl called their proposed new online service PlayNet. It seemed the perfect name for the funner, more colorful take on the online experience they hoped to create.

When they shared their idea with others, they found a number who agreed with them about its potential. With backing from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, the New York State Science and Technology Foundation, and Key Venture Corporation, they moved into a technology “incubator” run by the first of these in May of 1983. For PlayNet’s client computer — one admitted disadvantage of their approach was that it would require them to write a separate version of their software for every personal computer they targeted — they chose the recently released, fast-selling Commodore 64, which sported some of the best graphics in the industry. The back end would run on easily scalable 68000-based servers made by a relatively new company called Stratus. (The progression from CompuServe to PlayNet thus highlights the transition from big mainframes and minicomputers to the microcomputer-based client/server model in networking, just as it does the transition from a textual to a graphical focus.) Facing a daunting programming task on both the client and server sides, Goldberg and Panzl took further advantage of their relationship with Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute to bring in a team of student coders, who worked for a stipend in exchange for university credit, applying to the project many of the cutting-edge theoretical constructs they were learning about in their classes.

PlayNet began trials around Troy and Albany in April of 1984, with the service rolling out nationwide in October. Commodore 64 owners had the reputation of being far more price-sensitive than owners of other computers, and Goldberg and Panzl took this conventional wisdom to heart. PlayNet was dramatically cheaper than any of the other services: $35 for the signup package which included the necessary software, followed by $6 per month and $2 per hour actually spent online; this last was a third of what CompuServe would cost you. PlayNet hoped to, as the old saying goes, make it up in volume. Included on the disks were no fewer than thirteen games, whose names are mostly self-explanatory: Backgammon, Boxes, Capture the Flag, Checkers, Chess, Chinese Checkers, Contract Bridge, Four in a Row, Go, Hangman, Quad 64, Reversi, and Sea Strike. While they were all fairly unremarkable in terms of interface and graphics, not to mention lack of originality, it was of course the well-nigh unprecedented ability to play them with people hundreds or thousands of miles away that was their real appeal. You could even chat with your opponent as you played.

In addition to the games, most of the other areas people had come to expect from online services were present, if sometimes a little bare. There were other small problems beyond the paucity of content — some subscribers complained that chunks loaded so slowly from the Commodore 64’s notoriously slow disk drive that they might almost just as well have come in via modem, and technical glitches were far from unknown — but PlayNet was certainly the most user-friendly online service anyone had ever seen, an utterly unique offering in an industry that tended always to define itself in relation to the lodestar that was CompuServe.

Things seemed to go fairly well at the outset, with PlayNet collecting their first 5000 subscribers within a couple of months of launch. But, sadly given how visionary the service really was, they would never manage to get much beyond that. Separated both geographically and culturally from the big wellsprings of technology venture capital around Silicon Valley, forced to deal with a decline in the home-computer market shortly after their launch that made other sources of funding shy away, they were perpetually cash-poor, a situation that was only exacerbated by the rock-bottom pricing — something that, what with prices always being a lot harder to raise on customers than they are to lower, they were now stuck with. An ugly cycle began to perpetuate itself. Sufficient new subscribers would sign up to badly tax the existing servers, but PlayNet wouldn’t have enough money to upgrade their infrastructure to match their growth right away. Soon, enough customers would get frustrated by the sluggish response and occasional outright crashes to cancel their subscriptions, bringing the system back into equilibrium. Meanwhile PlayNet was constantly existing at the grace of the big telecommunications networks whose pipes and access numbers they leased, the prospect of sudden rate hikes a Sword of Damocles hanging always over their heads. Indeed, the story of PlayNet could serve as an object illustration as to why all of the really big, successful online services seemed to have the backing of the titans of corporate America, like H&R Block, Readers Digest, General Electric, or Sears. This just wasn’t a space with much room for the little guy. PlayNet may have been the most innovative service to arrive since CompuServe and The Source had spawned the consumer-focused online-services industry in the first place, but innovation alone wasn’t enough to be successful there.

Still, Goldberg and Panzl could at least take solace that their company had a reason to exist. While PlayNet was struggling to establish an online presence, Control Video was… continuing to exist, with little clear reason why beyond Jim Kimsey and Steve Case’s sheer stubbornness. Kimsey loved to tell an old soldier’s joke about a boy who is seen by the roadside, frantically digging into a giant pile of horse manure. When passersby ask him why, he says, “There must be a pony in here somewhere!” There must indeed, thought Kimsey, be a pony for Control Video as well buried somewhere in all this shit they were digging through. He looked for someone he could sell out to, but Control Video’s only real asset was the agreements they had signed with telecommunications companies giving them access to a nationwide network they had barely ever used. That was nice, but it wasn’t, judged potential purchasers, worth taking on a mountain of debt to acquire.

The way forward — the pony in all the shit — materialized more by chance than anything. Working through his list of potential purchasers, Kimsey made it to Commodore, the home-computer company, in the spring of 1985. Maybe, he thought, they might like to buy him out in order to use Control Video’s network to set up their own online service for their customers. He had a meeting with Clive Smith, an import from Commodore’s United Kingdom branch who was among the bare handful of truly savvy executives the home office ever got to enjoy. (Smith’s marketing instincts had been instrumental in the hugely successful launch of the Commodore 64.) Commodore wasn’t interested in running their own online service, Smith told Kimsey; having released not one but two flop computers in 1984 in the form of the Commodore 16 and Plus/4, they couldn’t afford such distractions. But if Control Video wanted to start an independent online service just for Commodore 64 owners, Commodore would be willing to anoint it as their officially recommended service, including it in the box with every new Commodore 64 and 128 sold in lieu of the CompuServe Snapaks that were found there now. He even knew where Kimsey could get some software that would make his service stand out from all of the others, by taking full advantage of the Commodore 64’s color graphics: a little outfit called PlayNet, up in Troy, New York.

It seemed that PlayNet, realizing that they needed to find a strong corporate backer if they hoped to survive, had already come to Commodore looking for a deal very similar to the one that Clive Smith was now offering Jim Kimsey. But, while he had been blown away by the software they showed him, Smith had been less impressed by the business acumen of the two former research scientists sitting in his office. He’d sent them packing without a deal, but bookmarked the PlayNet software in his mind. While Kimsey’s company was if anything in even worse shape than PlayNet on the surface, Smith thought he saw a much shrewder businessman before him, and knew from the grapevine that Kimsey was still tight with the venture capitalists who had convinced him to take the job with Control Video in the first place. He had, in short, all the business savvy and connections that Goldberg and Panzl lacked. Smith thus brokered a meeting between Control Video and PlayNet to let them see what they could work out.

What followed was a veritable looting of PlayNet’s one great asset. Kimsey acquired all of their software for a reported $50,000, plus ongoing royalty payments that were by all accounts very small indeed. If it wasn’t quite Bill Gates’s legendary fleecing of Seattle Computer Products for the operating system that became MS-DOS, it wasn’t that far behind either. PlayNet’s software would remain for the next nine years the heart of the Commodore 64 online service Kimsey was now about to start.

The best thing Goldberg and Panzl could have done for their company would have been to abandon altogether the idea of hosting their own online service, embracing the role of Control Video’s software arm. But they remained wedded to the little community they had fostered, determined to soldier on with the PlayNet service as an independent entity even after having given away the store to a fearsome competitor that enjoyed the official blessing of Commodore which had been so insultingly withheld from them. Needless to say, it didn’t go very well; PlayNet finally gave up the ghost in 1987, almost two years after the rival service had launched using their own technology. As part of the liquidation, they transferred all title to said technology in perpetuity to Jim Kimsey and Steve Case’s company, to do with as they would. Thus was the looting completed.

Well before that happened, the looter was no longer known as Control Video. Wanting a fresh start after all the fiasco and failure of the last couple of years, wanting to put the Bill von Meister era behind him once and for all, Kimsey on May 25, 1985, put Control Video in a shoe box, as he put it, and pulled out Quantum Computer Services. A new company in the eyes of the law, Quantum was in every other way a continuation of the old, with all the same people, all the same assets and liabilities, even the same philosophical orientation. For all that the deal with Commodore and the acquisition of the PlayNet software was down to seeming happenstance, the online service that would come to be known as QuantumLink evinced von Meister’s — and Steve Case’s — determination to create a more colorful, easier, friendlier online experience that would be as welcoming to homemakers and humanities professors as it would to hardcore hackers. And in running on its own custom software, it allowed Quantum the complete control of the user’s experience which von Meister and Case had always craved.

The QuantumLink main menu. Anyone who had used PlayNet would feel right at home…

Continuing to tax the patience of their financiers — patience that would probably have been less forthcoming had Daniel Case III’s brother not been on the payroll — Quantum worked through the summer and early fall of 1985 to adapt the PlayNet software to their own needs and to set up the infrastructure of Stratus servers they would need to launch. QuantumLink officially went live on the evening of November 1, 1985. It was a tense group of administrators and techies who sat around the little Vienna, Virginia, data center, watching as the first paying customers logged in, watching what they did once they arrived. (Backgammon, for what it’s worth, was an early favorite.) By the time the users’ numbers had climbed into the dozens, beers were being popped and spontaneous cheers were in the air. Simultaneous users would peak at about 100 that night — not exactly a number to leave CompuServe shaking in their boots. But so be it; it just felt so good to have an actual product — an actual, concrete purpose — after their long time in the wilderness.

In keeping with the price-sensitive nature of the Commodore market, Quantum strove to make their service cheaper than the alternatives, but were careful not to price-cut themselves right out of business as had PlayNet. Subscribers paid a flat fee of $10 per month for unlimited usage of so-called “Basic” services, which in all honesty didn’t include much of anything beyond the online encyclopedia and things that made Quantum money in other ways, like the online shopping mall. “Plus” services, including the games and the chat system that together were always the centerpiece of QuantumLink social life, cost $3.60 per hour, with one hour of free Plus usage per month included with every subscription. The service didn’t set the world on fire in the beginning, but the combination of Commodore’s official support, the user-friendliness of the graphical interface, and the aggressive pricing paid off reasonably well in the long term. Within two months, QuantumLink had its first 10,000 subscribers, a number it had taken CompuServe two years to achieve. Less than a year after that, it had hit 50,000 subscribers. By then, Quantum Computer Services had finally become self-sustaining, even able to make a start at paying down the debt they had accumulated during the Control Video years.

One of QuantumLink’s unique editorial services was an easy-to-navigate buyer’s guide to Commodore software.

Quantum had the advantage of being able to look back on six years of their rivals’ experience for clues as to what worked and what didn’t. For the intensely detail-oriented Steve Case, this was a treasure trove of incalculable value. Recognizing, as had Goldberg and Panzl before him, that other services were still far too hard to use for true mainstream acceptance, he insisted that nothing be allowed on QuantumLink that his mother couldn’t handle.

But Case’s vision for QuantumLink wasn’t only about being, as he put it, “a little easier and cheaper and more useful” than the competition. He grasped that, while people might sign up for an online service for the practical information and conveniences it could offer them, it was the social interchange — the sense of community — that kept them logging on. To a greater degree than that of any of its rivals, QuantumLink’s user community was actively curated by its owner. Every night of the week seemed to offer a chat with a special guest, or a game tournament, or something. If it was more artificial — perhaps in a way more cynical — than CompuServe’s more laissez-faire, organic approach to community-building, it was every bit as effective. “Most services are information- and retrieval-oriented. It doesn’t matter if you get on on Tuesday or Thursday because the information is the same,” said Case; as we’ve seen from earlier articles in this series, this statement wasn’t really accurate at all, but it served his rhetorical purpose. “What we’ve tried to do is create a more event-oriented social system, so you really do want to check in every night just to see what’s happening — because you don’t want to miss anything.” Getting the subscriber to log on every night was of course the whole point of the endeavor. “We recognized that chat and community were so important to keep people on,” remembers Bill Pytlovany, a Quantum programmer. “I joked about it. You get somebody online, we’ve got them by the balls. Plain and simple, they’ll be back tomorrow.”

Indeed, QuantumLink subscribers became if anything even more ferociously loyal — and ferociously addicted — than users of rival services. “For some people, it was their whole social life,” remembers a Quantum copywriter named Julia Wilkinson. “That was their reality.” All of the social phenomena I’ve already described on CompuServe — the friendships and the romances and, inevitably, the dirty talk — happened all over again on QuantumLink. (“The most popular [features of the service] were far and away the sexual chat rooms,” remembers one Quantum manager. “The reality of what was happening was, if you just let these folks plug into each other, middle-aged people start talking dirty to each other.”) Even at the cheaper prices, plenty of subscribers were soon racking up monthly bills in the hundreds of dollars — music to the ears of Steve Case and Jim Kimsey, especially given that the absolute number of QuantumLink subscribers would never quite meet the original expectations of either Quantum or Commodore. While the raw numbers of Commodore 64s had seemingly boded well — it had been by far the most popular home computer in North America when the service had launched — a glance beyond the numbers might have shown that the platform wasn’t quite as ideal as it seemed. Known most of all for its cheap price and its great games, the Commodore 64 attracted a much younger demographic than most other computer models. Such youngsters often lacked the means to pay even QuantumLink’s relatively cheap rates — and, when they did have money, often preferred to spend it on boxed games to play face to face with their friends rather than online games and chat.

Nevertheless, and while I know of no hard numbers that can be applied to QuantumLink at its peak, it had become a reasonably popular service by 1988, with a subscriber base that must have climbed comfortably over the 100,000 threshold. If not a serious threat to the likes of CompuServe, neither was it anything to sneeze at in the context of the times. Considering that QuantumLink was only ever available to owners of Commodore 64s and 128s — platforms that went into rapid decline in North America after 1987 — it did quite well in the big picture in what was always going to be a bit of an uphill struggle.

Even had the service been notable for nothing else, something known as Habitat would have been enough to secure QuantumLink a place in computing history. Developed in partnership with Lucasfilm Games, it was the first graphical massively multiplayer virtual world, one of the most important forerunners to everything from World of Warcraft to Second Life.  It was online in its original form for only a few months in early 1988, in a closed beta of a few hundred users that’s since passed into gaming legend. Quantum ultimately judged Habitat to be technologically and economically unfeasible to maintain on the scale that would have been required in order to offer access to all of their subscribers. It did, however, reemerge a year later in bowdlerized fashion as Club Caribe, more of an elaborate online-chat environment than the functioning virtual world Lucasfilm had envisioned.

But to reduce QuantumLink to the medium for Habitat, as is too often done in histories like this one, is unjust. The fact is that the service is notable for much more than this single pioneering game that tends so to dominate its historical memory. Its graphical interface would prove very influential on the competition, to a degree that is perhaps belied by its relatively modest subscriber roll. In 1988, a new service called Prodigy, backed by IBM and Sears, entered the market with an interface not all that far removed from QuantumLink’s, albeit running on MS-DOS machines rather than the Commodore 64; thanks mostly to its choice of platform, it would far outstrip its inspiration, surpassing even GEnie to become the number-two service behind CompuServe for a time in the early 1990s. Meanwhile virtually all of the traditional text-only services introduced some form of optional graphical front end. CompuServe, as usual, came up with the most thoroughgoing technical solution, offering up a well-documented “Host Micro Interface” protocol which third-party programmers could use to build their own front ends, thus creating a thriving, competitive marketplace with alternatives to suit most any user. Kimsey and Case could at least feel proud that their little upstart service had managed to influence such a giant of online life, even as they wished that QuantumLink’s bottom line was more reflective of its influence.

QuantumLink’s technical approach was proving to be, for all its advantages, something of a double-edged sword. For all that it had let Quantum create an easier, friendlier online service, for all that the Commodore and PlayNet deals had saved them from bankruptcy, it also left said service’s fate tied to that of the platform on which it ran. It meant, in other words, that QuantumLink came with an implacable expiration date.

This hard reality had never been lost on Steve Case. As early as 1986, he had started looking to create alternative services on other platforms, especially ones that might be longer-lived than Commodore’s aging 8-bit line. His dream platform was the Apple Macintosh, with its demographic of well-heeled users who loathed the command-line interfaces of most online services as the very embodiment of The Bad Old Way of pre-Mac computing. Showing the single-minded determination that could make him alternately loved and loathed, he actually moved to Cupertino, California, home of Apple, for a few months at the height of his lobbying efforts. But Apple wasn’t quite sure Quantum was really up to the task of making a next-generation online service for the Macintosh, finally offering him instead only a sort of trial run on the Apple II, their own aging 8-bit platform.

Quantum Computer Services’s second online service, a fairly straightforward port of the Commodore QuantumLink software stack to the Apple II, went online in May of 1988. It didn’t take off like they had hoped. Part of the problem was doubtless down to the fact that Apple II owners were well-entrenched by 1988 on services like CompuServe and GEnie, and weren’t inclined to switch to a rival service. But there was also some uncharacteristically mixed public messaging on the part of an Apple that had always seemed lukewarm about the whole project; people inside both companies joked that they had given the deal to Quantum to make an online service for a platform they didn’t much care about anymore just to get Steve Case to quit bugging them. Having already a long-established online support network known as AppleLink for dealers and professional clients, Apple insisted on calling this new, completely unrelated service AppleLink Personal Edition, creating huge confusion. And they rejected most of the initiatives that had made QuantumLink successful among Commodore owners, such as the inclusion of subscription kits in their computers’ boxes, thus compounding the feeling at Quantum that their supposed partners weren’t really all that committed to the service. Chafing under Apple’s rigid rules for branding and marketing, the old soldier Kimsey growled that they were harder to deal with than the Pentagon bureaucracy.

Apple dropped Quantum in the summer of 1989, barely a year after signing the deal with them, and thereby provoked a crisis inside the latter company. The investors weren’t at all happy with the way that Quantum seemed to be doing little more than treading water; with so much debt still to service, they were barely breaking even as a business. Meanwhile the Commodore 64 market to which they were still bound was now in undeniable free fall, and they had just seen their grand chance to ride Apple into greener pastures blow up in their faces. The investors blamed for the situation Steve Case, who had promised them that the world would be theirs if they could just get in the door at Cupertino. Jim Kimsey was forced to rise up in his protege’s defense. “You don’t take a 25-pound turkey out of the oven and throw it away before it’s done,” he said, pointing to the bright future that Case was insisting could yet be theirs if they would just stay the course. Kimsey could also deliver the good news from his legal department that terminating their marketing agreement early was going to cost Apple $2.5 million, to be paid directly to Quantum Computer Services. For the time being, it was enough to save Case’s job. But the question remained: what was Quantum to do in a post-Commodore world?

In his methodical way, Case had already been plugging away at several potential answers to that question beyond the Apple relationship. One of them, called PC-Link, was in fact just going live as this internal debate was taking place. Produced in partnership with Radio Shack, it was yet another port of the Commodore QuantumLink software stack, this time to Radio Shack’s Tandy line of MS-DOS clones. PC-Link would do okay, but Radio Shack stores were no longer the retail Ground Zero of the home-computing market that they had been when CompuServe had gotten into bed with them with such success almost a decade ago.

Quantum was also in discussions with no less of a computing giant than IBM, to launch an online service called Promenade in 1990 for a new line of IBM home computers called the PS/1, a sort of successor to the earlier, ill-fated PCjr. On the one hand, this was a huge deal for so tiny a company as Quantum Computer Services. But on the other, taking the legendary flop that had been the PCjr to heart, many in the industry were already expressing skepticism about a model line that had yet to even launch. Even Jim Kimsey was downplaying the deal: “It’s not a make-or-break deal for us. We’re not expecting more than $1 million in revenue from it [the first] year. Down the road, we don’t know how much it will be. If the PS/1 doesn’t work, we’re not in trouble.” A good thing, too: the PS/1 project would prove another expensive fiasco for an IBM who could never seem to figure out how to extend their success in business computing into the consumer marketplace.

So, neither of these potential answers was the answer Quantum sought. In fact, they were just exacerbating a problem that dogged the entire online-services industry: the way that no service could talk to any other service. By the end of the 1980s Quantum had launched or were about to launch four separate online services, none of which could talk to one another, marooning their subscribers on one island or another on the arbitrary basis of the model of computer they happened to have chosen to buy. It was hard enough to nurture one online community to health; to manage four was all but impossible. The deal with Commodore to found QuantumLink had almost certainly saved Quantum from drowning, but the similar bespoke deals with Apple, Radio Shack, and IBM, as impressive as they sounded on their face, threatened to become the millstone around their neck which dragged them under again.

Circa October of 1989, Case therefore decided it was time for Quantum to go it alone, to build a brand of their own instead of for someone else. The perfect place to start was with the moribund AppleLink Personal Edition, which, having just lost its official blessing from Apple, would have to either find a new name or shut down. Case wasn’t willing to do the latter, so it would have to be the former. While it would be hard to find a worse name than the one the service already had, he wanted something truly great for what he was coming to envision as the next phase of his company’s existence. He held a company-wide contest soliciting names, but in the end the one he chose was the one he came up with himself. AppleLink Personal Edition would become America Online. He loved the sense of sweep, and loved how very Middle American it sounded, like, say, Good Morning, America on the television or America’s Top 40 on the radio. It emphasized his dream of building an online community not for the socioeconomic elite but for the heart of the American mainstream. A member of said elite though he himself was, he knew where the real money was in American media. And besides, he thought the natural abbreviation of AOL rolled off the tongue in downright tripping fashion.

In the beginning, the new era which the name change portended was hard to picture; the new AOL was at this point nothing more than a re-branding of the old AppleLink Personal Edition. Only some months after the change, well into 1990, did Case begin to tip his hand. He had had his programmers working on his coveted Macintosh version of the AppleLink software since well before Apple had walked away, in the hope, since proven forlorn, that the latter would decide to expand their agreement with Quantum. Now, Quantum released the Macintosh version anyway — a version that connected to the very same AOL that was being used by Apple II owners. A process that would become known inside Quantum as “The Great Commingling” had begun.

Case had wanted the Mac version of AOL to blend what Jeff Wilkins over at CompuServe would have called “high-tech” and “high-touch.” He wanted, in other words, a product that would impress, but that would do so in a friendly, non-intimidating way. He came up with the idea of using a few voice samples in the software — a potentially very impressive feature indeed, given that the idea of a computer talking was still quite an exotic one among the non-techie demographic he intended to target. A customer-service rep at Quantum named Karen Edwards had a husband, Elwood Edwards, who worked as a professional broadcaster and voice actor. Case took him into a studio and had him record four phrases: “Welcome!,” “File’s done!,” “Goodbye!,” and, most famously, “You’ve got mail!” The last in particular would become one of the most iconic catchphrases of the 1990s, furnishing the title of a big Hollywood romantic comedy and even showing up in a Prince song. Even for those of us who were never on AOL, the sample today remains redolent of its era, when all of the United States seemed to be rushing to embrace its online future all at once. At AOL’s peak, the chirpy voice of Elwood Edwards was easily the most recognizable — and the most widely heard — voice in the country.

You’ve got mail!

But we get ahead of the story: recorded in 1990, the Edwards samples wouldn’t become iconic for several more years. In the meantime, the Great Commingling continued apace, with PC-Link and Promenade being shut down as separate services and merged into AOL in March of 1991. Only QuantumLink was left out in the cold; running as it was on the most limited hardware, with displays restricted to 40 columns of text, Quantum’s programmers judged that it just wasn’t possible to integrate what had once been their flagship service with the others. Instead QuantumLink would straggle on alone, albeit increasingly neglected, as a separate service for another four and a half years. The few tens of thousands of loyalists who stuck it out to the bitter end often retained their old Commodore hardware, now far enough out of date to be all but useless for any other purpose, just to retain access to QuantumLink. The plug was finally pulled on October 31, 1994, one day shy of the service’s ninth birthday. Even discounting the role it had played as the technical and philosophical inspiration for America Online, the software that Howard Goldberg and David Panzl and their team of student programmers had created had had one heck of a run. Indeed, QuantumLink is regarded to this day with immense nostalgia by those who used it, to such an extent that they still dream the occasional quixotic dream of reviving it.

The first version of America Online for MS-DOS. Steve Case convinced Isaac Asimov, Bill von Meister’s original celebrity spokesman for The Source all those years ago, to lend his name to a science-fiction area. It seemed that things had come full-circle…

For Steve Case, though, QuantumLink was the past already in 1991; AOL was the future. The latter was now available to anyone with an MS-DOS computer — already the overwhelmingly dominant platform in the country, whose dominance would grow to virtual monopoly status as the decade progressed. This was the path to the mainstream. To better reflect the hoped-for future, the name of Quantum Computer Services joined that of Control Video in Jim Kimsey’s shoe box of odds and ends in October of 1991. Henceforward, the company as well as the service would be known as America Online.

Much of the staff’s time continued to be devoted to curating community. Now, though, even more of the online events focused on subject areas that had little to do with computers, or for that matter with the other things that stereotypical computer owners tended to be interested in. Gardening, auto repair, and television were as prominently featured as programming languages. The approach seemed to be paying off, giving AOL, helped along by its easy-to-use software and a meticulously coached customer-support staff, a growing reputation as the online service for the rest of us. It had just under 150,000 subscribers by October of 1991. This was still small by the standards of CompuServe, GEnie, or Prodigy, but AOL was coming on strong. The number of subscribers would double within the next few months, and again over the next few months after that, and so on and so on.

CompuServe offered to buy AOL for $50 million. At two and a half times the latter’s current annual revenue, it was a fairly generous offer. Just a few years before, Kimsey would have leaped at a sum a fraction of this size to wash his hands of his problem child of a company. Even now, he was inclined to take the deal, but Steve Case was emphatically opposed, insisting that they were all on the verge of something extraordinary. The first real rift between the pair of unlikely friends was threatening. But when his attempts to convince CompuServe to pay a little more failed to bear fruit, Kimsey finally agreed to reject the offer. He would later say that, had CompuServe been willing to pay $60 million, he would have corralled his investors and sold out, upset Case or no. Had he done so, the history of online life in the 1990s would have played out in considerably different fashion.

With the CompuServe deal rejected, the die was cast; AOL would make it alone or not at all. At the end of 1991, Kimsey formally passed the baton to Case, bestowing on him the title of CEO of this company in which he had always been far more emotionally invested than his older friend. But then, just a few months later, Kimsey grabbed the title back at the behest of the board of directors. They were on the verge of an initial public offering, and the board had decided that the grizzled and gregarious Kimsey would make a better face of the company on Wall Street than Case, still an awkward public speaker prone to lapse gauche or just clam up entirely at the worst possible moments. It was only temporary, Kimsey assured his friend, who was bravely trying but failing to hide how badly this latest slap in the face from AOL’s investors stung him.

America Online went public on March 19, 1992, with an initial offering of 2 million shares. Suddenly nearly everyone at the company, now 116 employees strong, was wealthy. Jim Kimsey made $3.2 million that day, Steve Case $2 million. A real buzz was building around AOL, which was indeed increasingly being seen, just as Case had always intended, as the American mainstream’s online service. The Wall Street Journal‘s influential technology reporter Walt Mossberg called AOL “the sophisticated wave of the future,” and no less a tech mogul than Paul Allen of Microsoft fame began buying up shares at a voracious pace. Ten years on from its founding, and already on its third name, AOL was finally getting hot. Which was good, because it would never be cool, would always be spurned by the tech intelligentsia who wrote for Wired and talked about the Singularity. No matter; Steve Case would take being profitable over being cool any day, would happily play Michael Bolton to the other services’ Nirvana.

For all the change and turmoil that Control Video/Quantum Computer/America Online had gone through over the past decade, Bill von Meister’s original vision for the company remained intact to a surprising degree. He had recognized that an online service must offer the things that mainstream America cared about in order to foster mainstream appeal. He had recognized that an online service must be made as easy to use as humanly possible. And he had seen the commercial and technical advantages — not least in fostering that aforementioned ease of use — that could flow from taking complete control of the subscriber’s experience via custom, proprietary software. He had even seen that the mainstream online life of the future would be based around graphics at least as much as text. But, as usual for him, he had come to all these realizations a little too early. Now, the technology was catching up to the vision, and AOL stood poised to reap rewards which even Steve Case could hardly imagine.

(Sources: the books On the Way to the Web: The Secret History of the Internet and its Founders by Michael A. Banks, Stealing Time: Steve Case, Jerry Levin, and the Collapse of AOL Time Warner by Alec Klein, Fools Rush In: Steve Case, Jerry Levin, and the Unmaking of AOL Time Warner by Nina Munk, and There Must be a Pony in Here Somewhere: The AOL Time Warner Debacle by Kara Swisher; Softline of May 1982; New York Times of December 3 1984; Ahoy! of February 1985; Commodore Power/Play of December 1984/January 1985; Info issues 6 and 9; Run of August 1985 and November 1985; Midnite Software Gazette of January/February 1985 and November/December 1985; Washington Post of May 30 1985 and June 29 1990; Compute! of November 1985; Compute!’s Gazette of March 1986 and January 1989; Commodore Magazine of October 1989; Commodore World of August/September 1995; The Monitor of March 1996; the episode of the Computer Chronicles television series entitled “Online Databases, Part 1”; old Usenet posts by C.D. Kaiser and Randell Jesup.)

 
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Posted by on November 24, 2017 in Digital Antiquaria, Interactive Fiction

 

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A Net Before the Web, Part 3: Content and Competition

We saw in the last article how CompuServe’s user-driven philosophy led to this online service becoming an online community, steered to a large extent by its subscribers. Yet the choice between a content-driven model and a user-driven model has never really constituted a zero-sum proposition, whether on the Internet of today or the CompuServe of the 1980s. In fact, virtually from the moment that Jeff Wilkins decided the nascent MicroNET had potential that was worth seriously investing in — a moment we can date to the very end of 1979 — he started casting about for information and applications which CompuServe’s users couldn’t possibly create for themselves.

The list of top-down initiatives CompuServe would launch over the next several years reads amazingly similar to the list of aspirations, sketchily fulfilled if at all, with which The Source had made its much more high-profile debut. But whether Wilkins really was checking off the items on Bill von Meister’s original list or coming up with this stuff on his own doesn’t matter much in the end. What is important is how much of the daily online life of today was first tried out on CompuServe in the 1980s. Sometimes, as we’ve already seen in the case of the attempt to launch a digital-download service for commercial software, the world would prove not quite ready for what CompuServe strove to offer it. Still, the simple fact of the striving has historical significance of its own.

Very early on, Wilkins determined to bring the news to CompuServe. With The Source having cornered United Press International, he chose to ask the other national news wire, the Associated Press, to make their feed of important stories available to his subscribers. The almost accidental result of his inquiries was something even more prescient, a full-blown collision between the titans of Old Media and what would soon be known as the New Media. Jeff Wilkins:

I had been thinking about news for a long time — the potential to have it be searchable and immediate. And of course it lent itself to text pretty well; we were still at that point in time limited to all text.

I called the local newspaper, the Columbus Dispatch, and said that we’re building this service, and we’d like to have the AP wire; that’s where all the news came from in those days. They said the AP didn’t do that, but you could work on a test to convince them to participate. So, they gave us a test feed, and our technical team took that and parsed it and figured out how to set up menus and all that sort of thing. So, we had a crude working model of a news feed.

Then I called the Associated Press in New York and said I’d like to come talk to them about an idea. Of course, they gave me to a lower-level staffer. But I met him in New York and told him what we were trying to do. He said, “The AP is all the newspapers. They have a board of directors who make all the decisions. I doubt they’d be interested in this, but we’re having our conference in Hawaii next week. If you’ll let me take this demo you’ve just shown me out there, I’ll show it to them and see what they think. Then I’ll get back to you.” His name was Henry Heilman. He was a great guy.

About a week later, I’m in Columbus in my office and the phone rings. “This is Henry Heilman. I’m in Hawaii. Our board would like to come to Columbus to talk about your proposal.”

I said, “That’d be great! When would they like to come?”

He said, “They’d like to come next week.”

I said, “Who’s coming?”

He started to name names. And I recognized a couple of them. One was Katharine Graham from the Washington Post. Another was [Arthur Ochs] Sulzberger from the New York Times.

So, we set it up. It was really funny. Katherine Graham’s secretary called me and said, “Can you have a car for Mrs. Graham?”

I said, “What do you mean by a car?”

He said, “A limousine.”

We didn’t have a limousine service in Columbus, at least not that I ever used.  But anyway, I made arrangements to have her and everybody else picked up.

So, ten of these people came to our little conference room, and we made a presentation.

They said, “What’s your proposal?”

I said, “Well, I would like to have ten newspapers participate in a test of an electronic-newspaper service, and in exchange I’d like advertising in your newspapers worth $250,000 apiece, talking about this project.”

They said, “Can we have a few minutes to talk?” They were in there 45 minutes. I remember sweating profusely, thinking they were never going to go on with this. But they came back and said, “Yes, we’ll accept the proposal — with one condition: we offer it to all our newspapers, and let any participate that want to, provided that the ten of us can [also] be in the test.”

So, that was how we kicked it all off. I said, “I have one final request: the Columbus Dispatch will be the first newspaper that comes online.”

They agreed, and that was how the electronic-newspaper [service] launched.

CompuServe is demonstrated to members of the Associated Press in 1980. Standing in the back row from left are Jeff Wilkins, Katherine Graham of the Washington Post, and John F. Wolfe of the Columbus Dispatch, which was soon to become the first newspaper in history to go online.

Wilkins’s tale serves to illustrate that the entrenched forces of establishment media aren’t always quite as hidebound as they may first appear. In fact, the vaguely defined idea of “electronic publishing” was very much en vogue at the time in certain circles, albeit greeted with equal measures of excitement and trepidation. It was the former impulse that led Readers Digest, by reputation at least about the most hidebound media institution of all, to buy a controlling interest in the The Source in 1980, the same year CompuServe struck their newspaper deal.

But the fear that would always remain at the root of traditional publishing’s long, fraught negotiation with the online world was never hard to find just below the surface. Jim Batton of Knight-Ridder Newspapers was one of the more prominent skeptics, voicing fears that were in their way as prescient as the more optimistic rhetoric that came to surround this brave new world of online news: “Our concern was that if people might get their information in this way, they might no longer need newspapers.” Katherine Graham was playing both sides of the fence, lobbying in Congress for legislation that would prevent telephone companies from becoming “information providers” even as she was signing on with CompuServe.

Indeed, it appeared the newspaper industry in general didn’t entirely know its own mind. Keith Fuller, president of the Associated Press, summed up the two views that were at war within the psyches of people like Graham in these terms: “One [view is] that electronic delivery is the future knocking at the door, and the other [is] that electronic delivery is a disaster hunting a victim.” The decision to get in bed with CompuServe was not without controversy inside the AP’s member newspapers. One union, The Twin Cities Newspaper Guild No. 2, held a 26-day strike against the Minneapolis Star and Tribune after they elected to participate in the experiment. The union’s delivery carriers demanded guarantees that they would not lose their positions with a switch to electronic delivery, while editors and writers demanded that they receive the same residuals on electronically published articles as those they were accustomed to receiving for articles published on paper. It seems an absurdly early point for such conflicts to have begun, given the vanishingly small number of people who actually had the equipment and the willingness to reach their local newspaper online in 1980, but there you have it.

For CompuServe, on the other hand, the deal represented just another way to reach out to Middle America, to reach customers early and make their online service the only credible example of same in the eyes of most of them. They saw the importation of actual newspapers rather than just a news wire to CompuServe was a very significant step toward those goals. The news wires provided the skeleton of what people looked for in their hometown newspapers, but the meat, the bones, and the personality were found in the local human-interest stories, the opinion columns, the entertainment guides. These were the things that made spending a long, lazy weekend morning over the local newspaper and a pot of coffee such a mainstay of American life. In this light, the fact that it was the little Columbus Dispatch that first established an online presence rather than one of the big papers of record feels appropriate.

Each of the newspapers that participated in the program offered free time on CompuServe to any of their subscribers who wished to get a glimpse of the cyberspace future of journalism. The enormous attention the experiment garnered throughout the mainstream media made CompuServe a household name for the first time, at least among those interested in technology in the abstract. Rich Baker, a CompuServe executive:

All of a sudden, we had the biggest newspapers in the country running stories about CompuServe Information Service. The news stories spun off into wire stories, and our getting on the Today show. The Today crew came here so Garrick Utley could deliver the story. We got an incredible amount of exposure from the newspaper experiment. No amount of paid advertising could have accomplished such a feat.

While the experiment was a roaring success from the standpoint of CompuServe, the results from the newspapers’ standpoint were considerably more mixed — doubtless much to the relief of organizations like The Twin Cities Newspaper Guild No. 2. In the initial flurry of excitement, a few of the newspapers had devoted entire editorial staffs to their online editions, a practice that quickly proved untenable given the small number of online readers. Meanwhile even many of the early adopters among the reading public who had greeted the idea of an online newspaper with excitement had to admit in the end that it was a heck of a lot more pleasant to read a 25¢ physical newspaper than it was to watch stories scroll slowly onto a computer screen, bereft of illustrations or proper typesetting, at a price of $6 per hour — not to mention that it was a heck of a lot easier to read a paper-based newspaper at the breakfast table than it was to set up a computer there.

The trial program officially ended in June of 1982, and most of the fifteen or so newspapers who had participated ended their presence on CompuServe along with it. CompuServe’s grander plans for online news were eventually replaced by something called the Executive News Service, a much more limited digest of relevant wire reports for, as the name would indicate, the busy businessperson on the go. Tellingly, CompuServe shifted from telling potential customers about all the prestigious newspapers on offer to offering them the opportunity to “create your own newspaper” — a formulation much more in keeping with the user-driven ethos that had come to define so much of the service.

Another area where CompuServe reached toward a future that would prove to be just out of their grasp was online banking. On October 9, 1980, they announced a partnership with Radio Shack and the United American Bank of Knoxville, Tennessee, to offer the bank’s customers online access to their accounts. According to the press release, customers would be able to “receive current information on their checking accounts, use a bookkeeping service, and apply for loans,” with many more functions, including online bill paying and tax services, planned for the future. The service would represent, according to the bank’s president, “convenience banking without leaving home.” It certainly sounded promising, but it was a struggle to find any takers for the offer, limited as it was to United American Bank’s existing customers in eastern Tennessee. With computer security in its relative infancy, the safety of this, the most important of all their personal information, was a concern repeatedly and justifiably expressed by those who were surveyed on the topic. In the end, instead of becoming the first of many banks to go online, United American Bank elected to terminate the experiment within six months. It seemed that online banking, even more so than online newspapers, was an idea that was still just a little too far ahead of its time.

But other far-seeing ventures proved more successful. In 1982, just as the big newspaper experiment was ending, another electronic-publishing initiative was getting started. The World Book Encyclopedia went online with CompuServe that year, thus inadvertently hammering the first nail into the coffin of the paper-based encyclopedia. Countless wired schoolchildren were soon using this early ancestor of our own ubiquitous Wikipedia to write their reports without ever having to darken the door of a library.

Another, even more important initiative arrived in early 1984 in the form of the Electronic Mall. Once again, it had been The Source who had originated the idea of an online shopping emporium, making it part of their service from Day One. But, once again, online shopping had always been more of an aspiration than a reality there: few retailers initially set up storefronts, which led to few of the The Source’s already scant subscribers taking an interest, which gave few other retailers much encouragement to join the fray. And so it was left to the more methodical CompuServe to become the real pioneers of e-commerce.


In contrast to The Source’s shopping mall, CompuServe’s Electronic Mall debuted with a very impressive list of online storefronts, a tribute to how powerful and well-connected Jeff Wilkins’s erstwhile corporate data processor was becoming in the consumer marketplace. Many of the early names in the Electronic Mall could indeed be found in the typical American brick-and-mortar shopping mall: Sears, Waldenbooks, American Express, Kodak, E.F. Hutton, in addition to the expected list of computer-oriented shops, which boasted names like Commodore and Microsoft. But just as notable as all the big names were all the little ones. In another early testament to the leveling effect of so much of online life, small online-only vendors clustered side by side with some of the biggest corporate trademarks in the country. The Electronic Mall would remain a fixture for the next decade and change, doing very well for CompuServe and many of the entities who opened storefronts there. In the process, it became the first really successful example of e-commerce, yet another blueprint for what the future would eventually bring to everyone.

This page from CompuServe’s print magazine Online Today shows some of the wide variety of products that could be purchased from the Electronic Mall by 1989.

Speaking of which: the same year that the Electronic Mall went online, Trans World Airlines opened a gateway to their internal reservations system on CompuServe, allowing subscribers to book their own travel. “This will be the first time that comprehensive worldwide airline information and fares will be available to consumers,” said a proud Jeff Wilkins.  Other airlines followed, as did rental-car providers and hotels, precipitating a slow-rolling transformation in the way that people travel — and making life much more difficult for lots of professional travel agents.

So, already by the dawn of 1985 CompuServe encompassed an astonishing swathe of what we’ve come to think of as modern online life, some of it driven by users, some by content providers: email, forums, chat, news, encyclopedias, shopping, travel reservations. And even some of the things missing from that list, like digital distribution of commercial software and online banking, had been tried but had proved impractical. The range is so broad and so far-reaching that some of the technical pioneers who worked for CompuServe have in recent years made a lucrative sideline out of testifying to their prior art in patent cases, ruining the days of heaps of people who had believed themselves to be the innovators. “Almost everything people [have] tried to patent on the Internet,” notes Jeff Wilkins, “CompuServe had done in the early eighties.”

Having thus done his part for online posterity, Wilkins left the company in 1985 in order to get in on the ground floor of CD-ROM by opening a CD-pressing plant. His successor, Charlie McCall, made no dramatic changes to the solid framework Wilkins had left in place. For the remainder of the 1980s and well into the 1990s, CompuServe would just keep on trucking in business-as-usual mode, adding hundreds of thousands of new subscribers each year.

Prior to 1983, CompuServe had had the market for services like theirs virtually to themselves. Potential customers had only two other places to turn: The Source, which, perpetually mismanaged as it was, never posed all that much of a threat after 1980; and the network of private bulletin-board systems, which were regional, difficult to connect with, and, being usually able to host only one user at a time, were unable to offer anything like the same sense of real-time community. Indeed, CompuServe had deliberately tried to give the impression that theirs was the only online service that was or ever could be, deploying the word “utility” to foster a mental connection with the telephone system or the power grid (or, for modern sensibilities, with what the World Wide Web has become today).

But it was inevitable that others, seeing the growth CompuServe was enjoying, would want to enter the field. The first of these was DELPHI in March of 1983. Originally conceived as an online encyclopedia, it would always maintain a certain intellectual or literary focus. Shortly after its founding, for example, the service hosted what may have been the first online collaborative novel. In 1984, the science-fiction writer Orson Scott Card posted on DELPHI the entirety of Ender’s Game, destined to become his most famous novel, a year before it would see publication in print. Such coups aside, though, DELPHI lacked the corporate clout and the financial resources to challenge CompuServe for mainstream mindshare, and was never regarded by the latter as all that serious of a threat.

In October of 1985, however, a more serious threat did arrive in the form of GEnie. Formed by General Electric out of largely the same motivation that had led Jeff Wilkins to start MicroNET back in the day — the frustration of watching an expensive computing and telecommunications infrastructure sit all but dormant more than half of the time — GEnie arrived with an impressive array of offerings, many of them all too plainly modeled on those of its biggest competitor: chat, a forum system, shopping, news services, etc. Most of all, though, its owners planned to compete on the basis of price. In contrast to CompuServe’s $6.50 per hour, GEnie launched at a price of $5 per hour, an initial salvo in a slow-moving pricing cold war that would gradually bring down the average connection charge across the entire online-services industry over the years to come. While it would never even come close to catching CompuServe, GEnie would remain a force to be reckoned with in its own right for a long time.

And so it went, in accord with the implacable logic of capitalism. By the late 1980s there were several other viable online services as well, all orbiting the star that was CompuServe, defining themselves sometimes in their convergence, sometimes in their divergence. “We’re the more intellectual CompuServe!” said DELPHI; “We’re a cheaper version of CompuServe!” said GEnie; etc., etc. The fact that none of the services had any way of communicating with one another meant that each developed its own unique personality, partly defined by the priorities of its administrators but also partly, one senses, by random chance — or, rather, by the priorities of the people who happened to sign up in its earliest days.

For its part, CompuServe maintained always its reputation as the safe, steady online service, the one that might cost a little more than some of the others but that you knew you could rely on. A certain tradition of technical excellence which John Goltz had instilled from the company’s earliest days as a provider of corporate time-sharing services served them well in the consumer market. Their systems never — but never — went down, and even the odd glitches which often dogged their rivals’ offerings were all but unheard of. Some of their solutions to contemporary problems of the moment were so thorough that they have remained with us to this day. In 1987, for example, CompuServe developed the Graphics Interchange Format, or GIF, as a way to allow their subscribers using many different models of computer running many different kinds of software to share pictures with one another. It would go on to become the first truly ubiquitous cross-platform graphical standard; GIF images have been created in the literal billions in the decades since the format’s inception.

Even as it expanded, the burgeoning online-services industry managed to survive at least one existential threat. In mid-1987, the Federal Communications Commission made plans to implement a fee on the local access numbers which customers used to connect to the services without incurring long-distance charges. Discount long-distance services for voice calls that made use of a similar system had always been required to send part of their revenue back to the local telephone exchanges whose equipment they used, something CompuServe and the other online services had heretofore managed to avoid. In effect, the FCC argued, users of everyday telephone services were subsidizing users of these newfangled online services. They now planned to charge the latter $4.50 to $5.40 per hour for the privilege, a move with the potential to wipe out the whole industry at a stroke. “My opinion is that online information is horrendously overpriced right now,” said one analyst. “If you raise the price, you’re cutting out more and more people.” When word of the plan got to CompuServe, they enlisted their subscribers and everyone else they could find in a furious campaign to get it rescinded before it went into effect on January 1, 1988 — and they succeeded, another testimony to their growing clout. “Aunt Minnie,” as one of the FCC’s stymied attorneys put it, would have to go on subsidizing “Joe Computer User” in the name of keeping a developing industry alive. Not that the users of CompuServe and the other online services thought of it in those terms: for them, it meant simply that they got to keep on chatting and reading and writing and shopping and playing and all the rest without seeing the prices they paid for the privilege more than double.

As they were fending off this threat at home, CompuServe was already casting an eye outside their country’s borders. They expanded into Japan in 1987, then into Switzerland and Britain the following year; other European countries then followed. Soon the stories of friendship and romance that constantly swirled around CB Simulator took on an international character: an Indiana woman moved to Dublin to marry an Irish man; a Japanese woman and her daughter moved to California to join an American man. “I would feel the same about Suzuko if she were from South Africa or lived in Moscow,” said the last. Like so many Internet chatters who would come after them, the users of CB Simulator were learning the valuable lesson that people shouldn’t be judged by the passport they happen to hold.

Another landmark moment in Charlie McCall’s tenure — if one of more symbolic than practical importance by the time it arrived — came in 1989, when CompuServe, now 500,000 members strong, gobbled up their old arch-rival The Source, which was still straggling along with 50,000 members. Thus did a pioneer which had never quite lived up to its founders’ ambitions finally meet its end.

By the early 1990s, this net before the Web which Jeff Wilkins and Bill von Meister had first conceived almost simultaneously back in 1979 was reaching its peak, with CompuServe snowballing toward an eventual 3 million subscribers, with GEnie well into the hundreds of thousands, and with all the other services beavering along as well, filling their various niches.

And now, having reached this high-water mark, loading you down with so many data points describing so many firsts along the way, I feel keenly my failure to convey a more impressionistic sense of what it was really like to log onto one of these services. Unfortunately, I run into a problem that’s doomed to dog any digital antiquarian who tries to write about what the kids today like to call computing in the cloud: the lack of permanent artifacts to study in such an ephemeral form of media. There is, in other words, no preserved version of CompuServe that I can play in for research purposes or point you to to do the same, as I can the offline games I write about. I have only my imperfect memories from decades ago to go on — I was actually a GEnie man, having been lured by the cheaper price — along with what was written about the experience at the time. So, I’m going to take an unusual step, sort of an inversion of what we usually do around here. Instead of using the historical environment as a pathway to understanding why a certain game is the way it is, I’m going to do the opposite: suggest a game that you might play as a way of understanding the environment that spawned it.

Judith Pintar was a CompuServe regular in 1991 when she decided to write a game to simulate and gently satirize online life as she then knew it. Working with the text-adventure language AGT, she made Cosmoserve. If you’re at all interested in learning more about pre-Web online culture, I strongly encourage you to play it. Try to solve it if you like — it’s a very good game in its own right — but feel free to use a walkthrough if you prefer.

In Cosmoserve you’ll find much of what I’ve been writing about in this and the previous article: email, the Forums, chat, the Electronic Mall. From the struggle you sometimes had just to get online at all to the suggestive gossip on CB Simulator, from the ubiquity of Turbo Pascal to a killer computer virus — yes, we already had them this early on — it’s a perfect time capsule of online life circa 1991. I’ll have more to write about Cosmoserve in a future article, but for now suffice to say that it conveys all the experiential context that I can’t quite manage to give you in non-interactive, purely historical articles like these have been. You can almost hear the hair-raising howl of the modem connecting and the heavy clunk of a vintage IBM keyboard. Whether it happens to be a voyage of discovery or a nostalgia trip for you personally, I think you’ll find it has a lot to offer. Bless Judith Pintar for writing it.

As it happened, though, the online milieu Pintar so ably captured in 1991 was already being threatened at the time she wrote Cosmoserve. What we’ve been tracing to this point has been a certain approach to the commercial online service, one based entirely or almost entirely on text, allowing subscribers to connect using almost any terminal program. Yet by 1991 there was another approach out there as well, which in time would lead to the biggest single online service of all — yes, bigger even than CompuServe. And when we trace its origins back to the beginning, we find the familiar name of Bill von Meister. Jeff Wilkins may have wound up stealing his thunder last time around, but the magnificent rogue wasn’t yet done shaping history.

(Sources: the book On the Way to the Web: The Secret History of the Internet and its Founders by Michael A. Banks; Online Today of February 1988 and July 1989; 80 Microcomputing of January 1981; InfoWorld of November 24 1980, April 9 1984, May 21 1984, November 5 1984, and October 21 1985; Personal Computing of January 1981 and October 1981; Family Computing of March 1984; MacWorld of September 1987; New York Times of June 16 1987; Alexander Trevor’s brief technical history of CompuServe, which was first posted to Usenet in 1988; interviews with Jeff Wilkins from the Internet History Podcast and Conquering Columbus.)

 
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Posted by on November 10, 2017 in Digital Antiquaria, Interactive Fiction

 

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A Net Before the Web, Part 2: Service to Community

Then she generated the light, and the sight of her room, flooded with radiance and studded with electric buttons, revived her. There were buttons and switches everywhere — buttons to call for food, for music, for clothing. There was the hot-bath button, by pressure of which a basin of (imitation) marble rose out of the floor, filled to the brim with a warm deodorized liquid. There was the cold-bath button. There was the button that produced literature. And there were of course the buttons by which she communicated with her friends. The room, though it contained nothing, was in touch with all that she cared for in the world.

— from “The Machine Stops” by E.M. Forster

If we wished to compare The Source with CompuServe’s MicroNET in their earliest days, we might say that the former emphasized the content it would provide to its subscribers while the latter planned to set its subscribers free to make their own content for themselves. In a later era, the World Wide Web would offer both of these things in a hundred-car pileup between the forces of traditional media and millions of empowered creative individuals; we as societies are still struggling in many ways to come to terms with the sea change this represents. It’s of course the second part of the equation — all those empowered creative individuals — that marks the real diversion from the top-down media models of old. One might thus be tempted to say that MicroNET’s approach was the more visionary, hewing as it seemingly does to the philosophy sometimes known as “Web 2.0,” that guiding light of “mature” Internet culture. To do so, however, might be to give Jeff Wilkins and his colleagues a bit too much credit. The real driving force behind Wilkins’s MicroNET had little in common with the ideas that would come to be labelled Web 2.0, or for that matter the academic research that led to Web 1.0.

Wilkins had seen that computers were entering homes for the first time, but, raised on the big iron of institutional computing as he was, he couldn’t help but observe how absurdly primitive these new microcomputers really were. He thought of MicroNET as a way for people saddled with such toy computers to use them as the gateway to a real computer. Thus MicroNET’s early emphasis on programming languages. Why should hobbyists content themselves with the primitive BASIC dialects, 16 K (or less) memories, and slow and unreliable cassette-based storage of the first generation of microcomputers when MicroNET could offer them the chance to write and run larger programs in more sophisticated languages like Fortran and Pascal?

It didn’t take long, however, to see that most subscribers didn’t in fact come to MicroNET looking for a replacement for their little home computers. They rather saw it as a place to talk about the things they were doing on their micros: a place to trade tips, rumors, and ideas with one another. They were, in other words, less interested in writing programs on CompuServe’s big computers than they were in using them as a communications tool — as a way of learning how to write better programs on the TRS-80s and Apple IIs sitting right in front of them. Users groups were springing up all over the country for much the same purpose, but, valuable as they were, they were bound by all the constraints geography imposed on what was still a very small hobby in a very big country. What did you do between the monthly meetings of your users group? Some hobbyists logged onto MicroNET to get their fix of shop talk. And so, while the online programming environments sat largely unused, the email system and the public message boards were soon full of activity.

For all that this wasn’t quite what Wilkins had envisioned when he set up MicroNET, he adjusted to the reality on the ground with admirable alacrity. The first sign of the changing times came as early as December of 1979, when a new area called the “MicroNET Software Exchange” made its debut. Representing CompuServe’s first substantial investment of programming effort just for MicroNET subscribers, it was modeled after initiatives like the TRS-80 Software Exchange that was run by Softline magazine. With the commercial-software industry still in its infancy, these so-called “exchanges” gave programmers a conduit for selling their home-grown creations to the public. From the entrepreneurs whose wares could be found on them would be born many of the first generation of full-service software publishers — among them names like VisiCorp, Brøderbund, and Adventure International.

The MicroNET Software Exchange went online with 17 TRS-80 programs on offer, ranging in price from $1 to $49, with an average of $16.40. Subscribers who indulged could download the programs they purchased right away, seeing the price conveniently tacked onto their next MicroNET bill. But by the time MicroNET Software Exchange launched it was already clear to astute observers that this means of loosey-goosey commercial-software distribution — it wasn’t unusual for a single developer to “publish” the same program through half a dozen exchanges — probably wasn’t long for this world, doomed by the very same professional software publishers they had done so much to spawn. Despite the appeal to immediate gratification that downloading offered over waiting for physical cassettes to come in the mail, the MicroNET Software Exchange never took off. The era of digital download as a means of commercial-software distribution would require many years yet to come to fruition; this was one aspect of the digital life of the future that would indeed have to wait for a future that came equipped with the fast and reliable connections needed to download complex software painlessly.

CompuServe began to advertise MicroNET in early 1980 via simple spots like this one.

Still, the MicroNET Software Exchange did point to Wilkins’s evolving view of the service, just as the effort that went into creating it pointed to how MicroNET as a whole was moving out of the experimental phase, ready to take its place as an actively developed part of CompuServe’s business model. CompuServe began to take out some modest advertisements for the service in magazines like InfoWorld, and in the summer of 1980 dropped the separate MicroNET moniker altogether. The consumer online service was now known simply as CompuServe, all the former reticence about mixing corporate and consumer business in the same organization shoved aside. Many people within the company remained unhappy about the push into the consumer marketplace, but Wilkins dealt with the developing culture clash by isolating his small team of consumer-service developers in an office of their own, far from the jeering of their colleagues. Helping his cause immensely was the fact that Sandy Trevor, who had replaced John Goltz as the company’s chief technical architect, was himself an enthusiastic supporter of the consumer service, sending the skunk-works group many of his keenest technical minds. With him leading the way, almost all of the technical staff came around in fairly short order, and in time the rest of the staff would follow — especially as the consumer service started making the company real money. By 1987, it would constitute half of CompuServe’s revenue, nicely offsetting the continuing slow decline in the corporate time-sharing market.

It is true that early on the consumer side of the company grew fairly slowly; it would take until well into 1981 for it to reach 10,000 subscribers. Yet its perceived importance, both inside and outside of CompuServe, developed much more quickly. On May 12, 1980, the accounting giant H&R Block bought CompuServe in a deal which left Jeff Wilkins in charge and promised to let him continue on the path he was already steering. Wilkins himself believed that the potential of the consumer service was a major motivating factor — if not the major factor — prompting H&R Block to make the deal. He told one interviewer at the time that he believed H&R Block wanted “to put themselves in a marketplace that is growing faster than the tax markets.” Needless to say, such a description no longer applied to corporate time-sharing services, now a stagnant rather than an exploding market.

Radically different though the two companies’ histories, industries, and cultures were, the acquisition led to surprisingly little internal friction. Wilkins used the sense of security the name of H&R Block lent in corporate America to make deals for the consumer service that may very well have been impossible otherwise, while H&R’s deep pockets and willingness to take the long view made it possible for him to expand on his already excellent telecommunications network, thereby making sure that when the users were ready to come to CompuServe en masse, CompuServe would have the pipes to accept their business. “You have to have the ability to anticipate, to be two or three years ahead of the market,” said Wilkins. By mid-decade, it would be possible to establish a rock-steady connection with CompuServe’s PDP-10s in Columbus via a local call from virtually anywhere in the country.

The telecommunications infrastructure wasn’t the only aspect of the consumer service that required the constant attention of Wilkins’s best engineers. The steadily growing user roll brought plenty of challenges to the programming staff as well. In the old days, when CompuServe had been strictly a provider of time-sharing to corporate clients, each client was earmarked to a certain PDP-10 machine in the pool of same inside the data centers; said machine stored all their data and ran all their software and was thus the only one they needed to access. The demands of the consumer service, however, soon extended beyond the capacity of any one machine. Dividing subscribers into pools and assigning them to individual machines was no good solution, for all of the subscribers needed to be able to interact with one another in ways which CompuServe’s corporate clients didn’t. Sandy Trevor was the key designer of what came to be called the “yo-yo switch,” a methodology for balancing the load of the consumer service across the company’s range of twenty or more PDP-10s. Trevor:

When a user logs onto CompuServe and selects an option from the menu, he or she is automatically connected with the host on which the needed data is stored. If during an online session he later selects another item that’s on a different computer, he is quickly switched over to that host. Because it’s done so quickly, [the] user is unaware of the change.

This very divorcement of the details of computing hardware from computing in the abstract — to such an extent that the user never needs to think about the hardware at all — is the source of the adjective “cloud” in the modern notion of cloud computing. In the early 1980s, it was at the cutting edge of computer science, and points to how groundbreaking the CompuServe of that time was in a strictly technical as well as social and business sense.

While the engineers were thus occupied on the technical end, CompuServe’s evolving marketing department developed ways to get the service in front of potential customers with what one might call an engineer’s single-minded precision. In the summer of 1980, CompuServe struck a deal with Radio Shack, who were selling far more home computers than anyone else at the time, to stock what came to be known as the “Snapaks”: packets containing everything a new subscriber needed to log into the system for the first time and set up an account. A customer could go from opening the packet to using the service within minutes. The Snapaks thus represented a potent force in the consumer marketplace: instant gratification.

From store shelves, the Snapaks found their way into modem boxes, as well as those housing most of the popular home computers. Just as software publishers had long since realized that a stunning percentage of software was purchased at the same time as the computer used to run it, CompuServe understood that the best way to capture a potential customer was to nab her early, in the first blush of excitement that accompanied taking her new toy home. Thanks to their connections and financial resources, no one else could rival them in this kind of outreach. It became a key part of their success, especially after the inevitable competition in the market for online consumer services — some of it far more dangerous than the moribund The Source — began to arrive by mid-decade.

But we perhaps get ahead of ourselves; that’s a story for my next article. At this point, I’d like to flip the script on this business history with which we’ve occupied ourselves until now. It’s time to put on a social historian’s hat and ask what the people who used this most popular and sophisticated of all the 1980s online services were actually doing when they logged on.

It turns out that much of it wasn’t all that far removed from what people still do online today. That fact, far from minimizing the importance of this pioneering service, only serves to underscore how prescient it really was. Humans are, as the cliché goes, social animals. “Social media” may not yet have been a term, but as early as 1980 CompuServe was evolving into a prime example of exactly that. Advertised as a service, it very quickly became a community.

From the beginning, of course, there was email, allowing CompuServe members to send private messages back and forth for any reason they liked. Already in November of 1981, 80 Computing magazine could write of this subtly disruptive technology that “it may replace the postal system and take part of the load now carried by the telephone.”

While the concept of email — still generally referred to during the 1980s by more long-winded sobriquets like “electronic mail” — is a fairly obvious one, the fundamental issue which held back its acceptance as a replacement for paper mail for many years was the lack of inter-operability between the various email systems. For a CompuServe subscriber, this meant that she could only send and receive email to and from other CompuServe subscribers. In one of those quotations that become retroactively hilarious, Marvin Weinberger, a computer researcher, mused thus in 1984:

What we need is a sort of “Long Lines” carrier for electronic mail. It would be analogous to AT&T’s Long Lines, which transmits a message among the local telephone operating companies. So far, a few vendors have taken steps to exchange messages, but there are hundreds of mail systems. If electronic mail is really to become as useful as the telephone — meaning one could send a message to anybody, anywhere — then an entity of this type is a prerequisite.

Weinberger was overlooking the Internet, an entity of exactly the needed type which already existed and was in fact being used to exchange email all over the world as he said those words. Indeed, his words sound like the beginning of a joke: “Gee, if only there was an open computer network already in place for the purpose of sending all these data packets back and forth…”

But the Internet’s evolution into the publicly accessible World Wide Web was still years away; in 1984, it was available only to those with the right university, government, or corporate connections. In the meantime, the closed email systems of services like CompuServe did much to trap subscribers on the service with which they had originally signed up. Each online service was such a closed universe in all respects that moving from one to another meant literally abandoning one’s friends.

While email was a great tool for communicating with friends you’d already made on CompuServe, how did you make new ones? How, in other words, could you find people on CompuServe in the first place who shared your interests? The solution to this problem, arrived at already in its most basic form in 1980, were things that were first known as “Special Interest Groups,” then re-branded with the pithier moniker of simply “Forums.” Rather than dividing CompuServe’s offerings by function — email, bulletin boards, etc. — the Forum system divided them by topic. In a Forum, one could find and communicate with other subscribers who, one knew, were also there out of interest in the Forum’s topic.

Predictably enough, the earliest Forums tended to be dedicated to the computing hobby itself. Each brand of computer and, soon, each viable model of computer got its own Forum. These gatherings of like-minded subscribers came to wield considerable influence in the computer industry at large. Apple’s John Sculley and Steve Wozniak, for instance, both made themselves personally available from time to time on the Forum known as the “Micronetworked Apple Users Group.” It wasn’t unusual for journalists from the magazines to source their word-on-the-street reports from the CompuServe Forums, which came to serve them well as early harbingers of the way the public at large would react to any given plan, product, or announcement. Radio Shack developed the TRS-80 Model 100, the world’s first reasonably usable laptop computer, practically in partnership with the TRS-80 Forum. First they took the time to ask the people there what they wanted in a portable computer. Then they delivered prototype models to the Forum’s leading lights and collected their feedback — rinse and repeat through several more cycles. Throughout the process, the executives behind the project remained consistently available to the Forum’s members. The early subscribers to CompuServe were by definition trailblazers, and the people marketing home-computer hardware and software took their influence very, very seriously.

With time, though, CompuServe’s user base began to branch out beyond the hardcore hacker demographic, and the Forums reflected this in their growing diversity of subject matter. Jeff Wilkins has named aviation as the first non-computer topic to really take hold. Pilots, who were often early technology adopters, had congregated in enough numbers on CompuServe within a year or two that their pooled information on airplanes, airports, weather, and traffic became one of the best resources any aviator could have. Still more pilots started signing up for CompuServe just to have access to this goldmine, creating a snowball effect.

And as aviation went, so in time went heaps of other hobbies and topics of interest: law, medicine, gardening, religion, sports, travel, individual authors and musicians. Just as journalists in our own time have developed a sometimes disconcerting Twitter dependency, journalists by 1986 were finding a fair number of their alleged scoops on CompuServe. When the space shuttle Challenger blew up during launch in January of that year, the huge and active NASA Forum, with plenty of members perched at a privileged vantage point inside NASA itself, became the place to find the latest news about what had happened and why. By 1989, more than 170 Forums were in operation.

The real genius of the Forum system was CompuServe’s willingness to allow them to be driven by ordinary subscribers — a willingness that hearkens back in its way to the founding philosophy of the service. Recognizing that they couldn’t possibly administer such a diverse body of discussions, CompuServe’s employees didn’t even try. Instead they created a process whereby new Forums could be formed whenever enough subscribers had expressed interest in their proposed topics, and then turned over the administration to the experts, the people who knew best the topics they dealt with: the very same subscribers who had lobbied for them in the first place. Forum administrators — known as “sysops” in CompuServe parlance — were given free access, along with a cash stipend that was dependent on how active their domain was. For the biggest Forums, this could amount to a considerable amount of money. Jeff Wilkins has claimed that some sysops wound up earning up to $250,000 in the course of their CompuServe life.

Sysops enjoyed broad powers to go with their compensation. It was almost entirely they who wielded the censor’s pen, who said what was and wasn’t allowed. As their Forums grew, they were permitted to hire deputies to help them police their territory, rewarding them with gifts of free online time. By all accounts, the system worked remarkably well as an early example of the sort of community policing on which websites like Wikipedia would later come to depend. It was a self-regulating system; those few sysops who neglected their duties or abused their powers could expect their Forum’s traffic to dwindle away, until CompuServe shut the doors. Those Forums with particularly enthusiastic and active sysops, on the other hand, thrived, sometimes out of all seeming proportion to their esoteric areas of interest. The Source, still hewing largely to its content- rather than user-driven model, failed to implement anything like the Forum concept until 1985, and was rewarded with a far more fragmented, far less active social space, even taking into account the growing disparity between the numbers of subscribers on the two services.

While the Forums were instrumental in making CompuServe what it was, it was a single technical rather than administrative development which did the most of all to bind CompuServe’s subscribers together into a real community — a development which stands out today as the most obviously, undeniably groundbreaking aspect of the entire service.

The consumer service’s formative period had been marked by a brief-lived but fairly intense craze for CB radio, fueled by corn-pone entertainments like Smokey and the Bandit, B.J. and the Bear, and The Dukes of Hazzard. For a while, cars sporting huge antenna rigs were a common sight on American highways, and truckers were left grumbling about all these amateurs muddying up their bandwidth. Radio Shack made a killing off the fad, selling CB kits in their stores alongside the TRS-80s that were fueling the contemporaneous early home-computer boom. The people who found CB radio interesting were very often the same ones who were buying computers and using them to log onto CompuServe.

Sandy Trevor

In late 1979, in the midst of the CB craze, CompuServe rolled out an addition to the operating system used on their time-sharing PDP-10s: a method of sharing segments of memory across multiple user sessions. It may not sound like the most exciting innovation, but it opened up worlds of new possibilities for direct, user-to-user interaction in real time. The synergy between CB enthusiasts and the computer enthusiasts on CompuServe inspired Sandy Trevor to use his programmers’ latest advance in the service of a real-time online chat system. “It struck me that CB was something everyone had heard of,” he would later say. “Unlike many computer concepts, it wasn’t difficult for novices, and I thought it would provide a unique environment for meeting other people.” Jeff Wilkins recalls his first glimpse of what become known as “CB Simulator”:

We had an executive-committee meeting every Monday morning at 9:00; this was for the whole company. Sandy Trevor came to me before the meeting and said, “I want to show you what I did over the weekend. I call it CB. You pick a channel and you pick a username and you type, and everybody that’s on your channel sees what you’re typing.” He demonstrated it for me. I said, “Wow, that’s really interesting. I don’t know if people will use it or not, but we’ll give it a try and see. Let’s tell the executive committee about it, see what they think.”

So, we went to the executive-committee meeting and he gave a demonstration. I’ll never forget the expressions on their faces. They said, “You guys are insane! Nobody will ever use that! Why are we wasting our time on all this goofy stuff?”

Despite the committee’s objections, CB Simulator went live on February 21, 1980, with no fanfare whatsoever. CompuServe didn’t advertise it at all during its first four years of existence, and it wasn’t even on the menu system for the first year; would-be chatters had to learn the command to activate it from their more clued-in online friends. Sandy Trevor claims that this manifest ambivalence was shared by even Wilkins himself to a degree that’s perhaps obscured by the quotation above; “Jeff Wilkins,” he says, “thought it would be a fad.”

And yet CB Simulator went on to become CompuServe’s killer app, the place where the majority of subscribers spent the majority of their online time. A modern-day Wilkins, long since disabused of any doubts he might once have harbored, calls it out as the perfect combination of “high-tech” and “high-touch”; CB Simulator, more so than even the Forum system or anything else on CompuServe, provided that personal element that turned a conduit for information into a conduit for relationships. CompuServe’s advertising copy — after, that is, they bothered to start advertising CB Simulator — stated the case with only slight hyperbole: “There are students, lawyers, pilots, doctors, engineers, housewives, programmers, writers, all ready to welcome you from the moment you first access CB and type, ‘Hello, I’m new.'” For the people who used it, CB Simulator wasn’t a program or a service or even a technology; it was a social space where, once you’d learned the handful of needed commands, the technology quickly faded into the background.

Steven K. Roberts received a great deal of press attention for his two-and-a-half year trip across the highways and byways of the United States on his high-tech bicycle. On the cover of his book, he’s shown using a Tandy/Radio Shack portable computer — part of a model line designed, appropriately enough, in partnership with CompuServe subscribers — to connect to CompuServe via a satellite uplink. He was a CB Simulator regular throughout his adventure.

For most people of the 1980s, the idea of having online friends was still a deeply odd one, but for the people who were part of the CB Simulator scene the relationships forged there were as real and as pure as any they formed in the “real” world — or perhaps in many cases even more so. One regular chatter noted that on the CB Simulator “you meet someone from the inside out. You judge them on their heart and values, not what kind of jeans they wear.” Pat Phelps, CompuServe’s longtime CB Simulator administrator, beloved to the point of being called “Mother Superior” by her charges, spoke of the doors that were opened in similarly utopian terms:

There is no king or queen or worker class to it. Everyone is totally equal; it’s a fantastic equalizer as far as social order goes. It doesn’t matter what sex or race you are or what you look like, or handicaps, or whatever. People judge you on your ideas, on how you communicate.

Many handicapped people, for example, can’t leave their homes, and they’re withdrawn and concerned about the way they look. Here’s a way they can meet new people, make friends from all over the country. It doesn’t matter if they’re handicapped because everyone is accepted for the thoughts they share over the computer. If you meet a person who doesn’t fit the image of what you thought they should look like, it doesn’t matter because you already care for them and accept them.

“It’s like having a house guest in the corner who will talk to you anytime you want,” said another chatter. “It’s a form of communication, like hanging out on a street corner.” But of course many of the people hanging out on this virtual street corner were the very sort who would have been extremely uncomfortable doing so in the real world. “I’ve always been a loner, and this is a convenient way to meet people,” said one. “For the first time in my life, I have a group of people I can communicate with anytime.”

One of the first of many CB Simulator parties was organized by Pat Phelps in Columbus on June 16, 1984. These happy dancers have for the most part never met before in the physical world — but they seem to be getting along well enough.

Some of the friendships that were forged on CB Simulator evolved into something more — and this even before the “lonely hearts” channels became a thing. Pat Phelps claimed that even during the earliest period of CB Simulator’s existence several couples who met there wound up getting married. Although they were almost certainly not the absolute first of their kind, the first well-documented instance of a couple who met online getting married dates to February 14, 1983.

George Stickles and Debbie Fuhrman were better known online as “Mike” and “Silver.” He was a 29-year-old who worked at a copy shop near Dallas, Texas, she a 23-year-old secretary from Phoenix, Arizona. They got to know each other by chatting for “five or six hours” every night; “He would type in these jokes on the computer, and I felt really comfortable,” said Fuhrman. She eventually moved to Dallas to be with him. As a tribute to their unusual courtship, they decided to hold a wedding online, where their other friends on CB Simulator could participate. At first they thought of only a mock marriage. “Then after we got into it,” said Fuhrman, “we decided, why not do it for real. Pat [Phelps] said, ‘Yeah, yeah, by all means, do it for real.’ So we decided to go ahead and do everything at the same time.” The online spectators included Fuhrman’s parents, who had been unable to travel from Phoenix to join their daughter and future son-in-law. The bridesmaid was named Cupcake, the caterer “<< >>,” the usher Gandalf, the photographer Challenger, while the best man was the perfectly named Bestman. Three computers were placed in the same room in Dallas: one for each half of the happy couple, one for a 24-hour on-call minister who had been plucked out of the local phone book. As they went through the ceremony, each typed his or her words in addition to speaking them aloud. “I was quite surprised at the number of people who attended, as well as how well everything went,” said Stickles. The couple left the ceremony in a hail of virtual rice: “***************************.”

Stickles and Fuhrman were interviewed a number of times by journalists interested in documenting this strange new phenomenon of online dating. Some of the other adventures and misadventures their articles describe still ring true to anyone who has dipped a toe in these waters:

A couple who had been communicating over the lines for two months decided to meet each other at a local bar. They had been talking on the phone earlier. “The phone conversation was marvelous,” says the woman, who goes by the handle BigGal. “We chatted, laughed, and conversed for the better part of three hours. I couldn’t believe such a human being existed.”

And then they met. Damion, who had claimed to be 6 feet tall, had “mysteriously shrunk to about 5 feet 6 inches,” says BigGal. “The well-built body I had imagined assumed an avocado shape, and what was left of his brown hair was more of a dull, dusty gray color. Damion, supposedly 24 to 27 years old, also fibbed about his age. He looked old enough to be my father.”

Anecdotes like these reveal that judging the opposite sex exclusively on “their hearts and values” only got some chatters so far.

Still, we can presume that some of the supposed dishonesty that could lead to misunderstandings arose not so much from malignant intent as an earnest desire to try on different identities that weren’t going to fly in many real-world regions of an intensely hetero-normative country. One chatter told a journalist of some intense online time spent with what he assumed to be a “lovely, very philosophical” woman — only to learn that she was “really” a guy named Dave. Was Dave engaging in dishonest behavior, or revealing a truer self — or was Dave in some sense doing both at once?

Inevitably, some people were less interested in the relationship-building aspect of the whole romantic enterprise than they were in getting right down to the sex. Channels dedicated to sex chat could be found on CB Simulator almost from the beginning, and were quietly tolerated by CompuServe’s administrators — if not, for obvious reasons, publicized. Below is a precious historical document: real footage from 1984 of one of CB Simulator’s “adult” channels, as preserved by YouTube user Mathew Melnick. From the common area shown on the video, chatters could pair up in private rooms in order to… well, you know what they were doing, don’t you?


So, this sort of thing certainly had its place on CB Simulator. But, particularly after the media latched onto the topic of online sexy talk with predictable enthusiasm, it didn’t take long for the very sort of uncomfortable exchanges so many women had seen CB Simulator as an escape from to begin to spill over into their online life as well. Indeed, this became one of the few topics on which the usually sanguine Pat Phelps expressed real worry:

CompuSex is a very small part of what the medium is about. I’m not against it. If people want to do that, it’s perfectly alright. But now, because of the publicity, the majority of women have gotten extremely shy. Most of them aren’t even going to “talk” mode anymore. I don’t do it anymore, unless it’s with someone I know, because most of the one-on-ones are sex calls now. It’s kind of shut the door to friendships and meeting new people. Many of the women I talked to felt the same way. It’s sad. It’s shutting the door against the real reason that CB was originated in the first place, for fun and friendship and camaraderie and romance.

Thus, already by the time Phelps said those words in 1984, the Garden of Eden that had been CB Simulator in the eyes of its first adopters was starting to collect its share of snakes.

Other chatters were less predatory, but just as depressing in the way they brought some of the less savory aspects of the real world with them online. The head of the Republican Forum, speaking from the vast wisdom she had accrued in her 24 years, seemed determined to live up to every stereotype about her political party when she sniffed that “usually CB people are more educated, make a little more money. They’re a better group of people.” It all served to point out, for anyone who was in doubt, that the online life of the future wouldn’t be all unicorns and rainbows. If everyone was equal on CB Simulator, it seemed that some still believed they were more equal than others.

Another discordant note was lent by a new phrase which had begun to enter journalistic parlance for the first time by 1984: “online addiction.” The phrase is still heard all too often today, but one big difference between then and now is that those using CompuServe and similar services during the 1980s were paying by the minute for the privilege. Lurid stories emerged, usually based on hearsay rather than direct reporting, describing chatters who had supposedly lost house and home to the compulsion. While the scope was perhaps often exaggerated, the problem for some people was real. Monthly bills of $500 or more weren’t unusual among the CB Simulator hardcore, who occasionally confessed to forgoing niceties like a new car to replace that beat-up old clunker in order to have the money to keep chatting.

But there are downsides to any social revolution. The fact remains that the people hanging out on CB Simulator and other online spaces like it were at the vanguard of something extraordinary, something destined to be far more a force for good than its opposite. For countless people, home-bound or otherwise isolated by circumstance from those in the physical spaces around them, CompuServe became a vital part of their existence. I have no statistics to hand on how many people didn’t take their own lives or make some other tragic decision because of CompuServe, but I strongly suspect they number more than a few. Born as a prosaic exercise in corporate time-sharing, CompuServe’s evolution into the largest and most vibrant online community of the 1980s — it could boast 500,000 active members by 1989 — is one of the more unlikely and inspiring tales of a pivotal era in computer history. As yet, though, we’ve only seen half the picture. Next time, we’ll see how Big Media went digital for the first time thanks to CompuServe.

(Sources: the book On the Way to the Web: The Secret History of the Internet and its Founders by Michael A. Banks and Computing Across America: The Bicycle Odyssey of a High-Tech Nomad by Steven K. Roberts; Creative Computing of March 1980; InfoWorld of May 26 1980, March 14 1983, July 2 1984, July 9 1984, July 23 1984, and July 30 1984; 80 Microcomputing of November 1980 and November 1981; Online Today of June 1985 and July 1989; Alexander Trevor’s brief technical history of CompuServe, which was first posted to Usenet in 1988; interviews with Jeff Wilkins from the Internet History Podcast and Conquering Columbus.)

 
 

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A Net Before the Web, Part 1: The Establishment Man and the Magnificent Rogue

On July 9, 1979, journalists filtered into one of the lavish reception halls in Manhattan’s Plaza Hotel to witness the flashy roll-out of The Source, an online service for home-computer owners that claimed to be the first of its kind. The master of ceremonies was none other than the famous science-fiction and science-fact writer Isaac Asimov. With his nutty-professor persona in full flower, his trademark mutton-chop sideburns bristling in the strobe of the flashbulbs, Asimov said that “this is the beginning of the Information Age! By the 21st century, The Source will be as vital as electricity, the telephone, and running water.”

Actually, though, The Source wasn’t quite the first of its kind. Just eight days before, another new online service had made a more quiet official debut. It was called MicroNET, and came from an established provider of corporate time-shared computing services called CompuServe. MicroNET got no splashy unveiling, no celebrity spokesman, just a typewritten announcement letter sent to members of selected computer users groups.

The contrast between the two roll-outs says much about the men behind them, who between them would come to shape much of the online world of the 1980s and beyond. They were almost exactly the same age as one another, but cut from very different cloths. Jeff Wilkins, the executive in charge of CompuServe, could be bold when he felt it was warranted, but his personality lent itself to a measured, incremental approach that made him a natural favorite with the conservative business establishment. “The changes that will come to microcomputing because of computer networks will be evolutionary in nature,” he said just after launching MicroNET. Even after Wilkins left CompuServe in 1985, it would continue to bear the stamp of his careful approach to doing business for many years.

But William Von Meister, the man behind The Source and its afore-described splashier unveiling, preferred revolutions to evolutions. He was high-strung, mercurial, careless, sometimes a little unhinged. Described as a “magnificent rogue” by one acquaintance, as a “pathological entrepreneur” by another, he made businesses faster than he made children — of whom, being devoted to excess in all its incarnations, he had eight. His businesses seldom lasted very long, and when they did survive did so without him at their helm, usually after he had been chased out of them in a cloud of acrimony and legal proceedings. A terrible businessman by most standards, he could nevertheless “raise money from the dead,” as one investor put it, thereby moving on to the next scheme while the previous was still going down in flames. Still, whatever else you could say about him, Bill von Meister had vision. Building the online societies of the future would require cockeyed dreamers like him just as much as it would sober tacticians like Jeff Wilkins.


Had an anonymous salesman who worked for Digital Equipment Corporation in 1968 been slightly less good at his job, CompuServe would most likely never have come to be.

The salesman in question had been assigned to a customer named John Goltz, fresh out of the University of Arizona and working now in Columbus, Ohio, for a startup. But lest the word “startup” convey a mistaken impression of young men with big dreams out to change the world, Silicon Valley-style, know that this particular startup lived within about the most unsexy industry imaginable: life insurance. No matter; from Goltz’s perspective anyway the work was interesting enough.

He found himself doing the work because Harry Gard, the founder of the freshly minted Golden United Life Insurance, wanted to modernize his hidebound industry, at least modestly, by putting insurance records online via a central computer which agents in branch offices could all access. He had first thought of giving the job to his son-in-law Jeff Wilkins, an industrious University of Arizona alumnus who had graduated with a degree in electrical engineering and now ran a successful burglar-alarm business of his own in Tucson. “The difference between electrical engineering and computing didn’t occur to him,” remembers Wilkins. “I told him that I didn’t know anything about computing, but I had a friend who did.” That friend was John Goltz, whose degree in computer science made him the more logical candidate in Wilkins’s eyes.

Once hired, Goltz contacted DEC to talk about buying a PDP-9, a sturdy and well-understood machine that should be perfectly adequate for his new company’s initial needs. But our aforementioned fast-talking salesman gave him the hard up-sell, telling him about the cutting-edge PDP-10 he could lease for only “a little more.” Like the poor rube who walks into his local Ford dealership to buy a Focus and drives out in a Mustang, Goltz’s hacker heart couldn’t resist the lure of DEC’s 36-bit hot rod. He repeated the saleman’s pitch almost verbatim to his boss, and Gard, not knowing a PDP-10 from a PDP-9 from a HAL 9000, said fine, go for it. Once his dream machine was delivered and installed in a former grocery store, Goltz duly started building the online database for which he’d been hired.

The notoriously insular life-insurance market was, however, a difficult nut to crack. Orders came in at a trickle, and Goltz’s $1 million PDP-10 sat mostly idle most of the time. It was at this point, looking for a way both to make his computer earn its keep and to keep his employer afloat, that Goltz proposed that Golden United Life Insurance enter into the non-insurance business of selling time-shared computer cycles. Once again, Gard told him to go for it; any port in a storm and all that.

At the dawn of the 1970s, time-sharing was the hottest buzzword in the computer field. Over the course of the 1950s and 1960s, the biggest institutions in the United States — government bureaucracies, banks, automobile manufacturers and other heavy industries — had all gradually been computerized via hulking mainframes that, attended by bureaucratic priesthoods of their own and filling entire building floors, chewed through and spat out millions of records every day. But that left out the countless smaller organizations who could make good use of computers but had neither the funds to pay for a mainframe’s care and upkeep nor a need for more than a small fraction of its vast computing power. DEC, working closely with university computer-science departments like that of MIT, had been largely responsible for the solution to this dilemma. Time-sharing, enabled by a new generation of multi-user, multitasking operating systems like DEC’s TOPS-10 and an evolving telecommunications infrastructure that made it possible to link up with computers from remote locations via dumb terminals, allowed computer cycles and data storage to be treated as a commodity. A business or other organization, in other words, could literally share time on a remote computer system with others, paying for only the cycles and storage they actually used. (If you think that all this sounds suspiciously like the supposedly modern innovation of “cloud computing,” you’re exactly right. In technology as in life, a surprising number of things are cyclical, with only the vocabulary changing.)

Jeff Wilkins

John Goltz possessed a keen technical mind, but he had neither the aptitude nor the desire to run the business side of Golden United’s venture into time-sharing. So, Harry Gard turned once again to his son-in-law. “I liked what I was doing in Arizona,” Jeff Wilkins says. “I enjoyed having my own company, so I really didn’t want to come out.” Finally, Gard offered him $1.5 million in equity, enough of an eye-opener to get him to consider the opportunity more seriously. “I set down the ground rules,” he says. “I had to have complete control.” In January of 1970, with Gard having agreed to that stipulation, the 27-year-old Jeff Wilkins abandoned his burglar-alarm business in Tuscon to come to Columbus and run a new Golden Life subsidiary which was to be called Compu-Serv.

With time-sharing all the rage in computer circles, it was a tough market they were entering. Wilkins remembers cutting his first bill to a client for all of $150, thinking all the while that it was going to take a lot of bills just like it to pay for this $1 million computer. But Compu-Serv was blessed with a steady hand in Wilkins himself and a patient backer with reasonably deep pockets in his father-in-law. Wilkins hired most of his staff out of big companies like IBM and Xerox. They mirrored their young but very buttoned-down boss, going everywhere in white shirt and tie, lending an aura of conservative professionalism that belied the operation’s small size and made it attractive to the business establishment. In 1972, Compu-Serv turned the corner into a profitability that would last for many, many years to come.

In the beginning, they sold nothing more than raw computer access; the programs that ran on the computers all had to come from the clients themselves. As the business expanded, though, Compu-Serv began to offer off-the-shelf software as well to suit the various industries they found themselves serving. They began, naturally enough, with the “Life Insurance Data Information System,” a re-purposing of the application Goltz had already built for Golden United. Expanding the reach of their applications from there, they cultivated a reputation as a full-service business partner rather than a mere provider of a commodity. Most importantly of all, they invested heavily into their own telecommunications infrastructure that existed in parallel with the nascent Internet and other early networks, using lines leased from AT&T and a system of routers — actually, DEC minicomputers running software of their own devising — for packet-switching. From their first handful of clients in and around Columbus, Compu-Serv thus spread their tendrils all over the country. They weren’t the cheapest game in town, but for the risk-averse businessperson looking for a full-service time-sharing provider with a fast and efficient network, they made for a very appealing package.

In 1975, Compu-Serv was spun off from the moribund Golden United Life Insurance, going public with a NASDAQ listing. Thus freed at last, the child quickly eclipsed the parent; the first stock split happened within a year. In 1977, Compu-Serv changed their name to CompuServe. By this point, they had more than two dozen offices spread through all the major metropolitan areas, and that one PDP-10 in a grocery store had turned into more than a dozen machines filling two data centers near Columbus. Their customer roll included more than 600 businesses. By now, even big business had long since come to see the economic advantages time-sharing offered in many scenarios. CompuServe’s customers included Fortune 100 giants like AMAX (the largest miner of aluminum, coal, and steel in the country), Goldman Sachs, and Owens Corning, along with government agencies like the Department of Transportation. “CompuServe is one of the best — if not the best — time-sharing companies in the country,” said AMAX’s director of research.

Inside one of CompuServe’s data centers.

The process that would turn this corporate data processor of the 1970s into the most popular consumer online service of the 1980s was born out of much the same reasoning that had spawned it in the first place. Once again, it all came down to precious computer cycles that were sitting there unused. To keep their clients happy, CompuServe was forced to make sure they had enough computing capacity to meet peak-hour demand. This meant that the majority of the time said capacity was woefully underutilized; the demand for CompuServe’s computer cycles was an order of magnitude higher during weekday working hours than it was during nights, evenings, and weekends, when the offices of their corporate clients were deserted. This state of affairs had always rankled Jeff Wilkins, nothing if not a lover of efficiency. Yet it had always seemed an intractable problem; it wasn’t as if they could ask half their customers to start working a graveyard shift.

Come 1979, though, a new development was causing Wilkins to wonder if there might in fact be a use for at least some of those off-hour cycles. The age of personal computing was in the offing. Turnkey microcomputers were now available from Apple, Commodore, and Radio Shack. The last company alone was on track to sell more than 50,000 TRS-80s before the end of the year, and many more models from many more companies were in the offing. The number of home-computer hobbyists was still minuscule by any conventional standard, but it could, it seemed to Wilkins, only grow. Might some of those hobbyists be willing and able to dial in and make use of CompuServe’s dearly bought PDP-10 systems while the business world slept? If so, who knew what it might turn into?

It wasn’t as if a little diversity would be a bad thing. While CompuServe was still doing very well on the strength of their fine reputation — they would bill their clients for $19 million in 1979 — the time-sharing market in general was showing signs of softening. The primary impetus behind it — the sheer expense of owning one’s own computing infrastructure — was slowly bleeding away as minicomputers like the DEC PDP-11, small enough to shove away in a closet somewhere rather than requiring a room or a floor of its own, became a more and more cost-effective solution. Rather than a $1 million proposition, as it had been ten years ago, a new DEC system could now be had for as little as $150,000. Meanwhile a new piece of software called VisiCalc — the first spreadsheet program ever, at least as the modern world understands that term — would soon show that even an early, primitive microcomputer could already replace a time-shared terminal hookup in a business’s accounting department. And once entrenched in that vital area, microcomputers could only continue to spread throughout the corporation.

Still, the consumer market for online services, if it existed, wasn’t worth betting CompuServe’s existing business model on. Wilkins entered this new realm, as he did most things, with cautious probity. The new service would be called MicroNET so as to keep it from damaging the CompuServe brand in the eyes of their traditional customers, whether because it became a failure or just because of the foray into the untidy consumer market that it represented. And it would be “market-driven” rather than “competition-driven.” In Wilkins’s terminology, this meant that they would provide some basic time-sharing infrastructure — including email and a bulletin board for exchanging messages, a selection of languages for writing and running programs, and a suite of popular PDP-10 games like Adventure and Star Trek — but would otherwise adapt a wait-and-see attitude on adding customized consumer services, letting the market — i.e., all those hobbyists dialing in from home — do what they would with the system in the meantime.

Even with all these caveats, he had a hard time selling the idea to his board, who were perfectly happy with the current business model, thank you very much, and who had the contempt for the new microcomputers and the people who used them that was shared by many who had been raised on the big iron of DEC and IBM. They took to calling his idea “schlock time-sharing.”

Mustering all his powers of persuasion, Wilkins was able to overrule the naysayers sufficient to launch a closed trial. On May 1, 1979, CompuServe quietly offered free logins to any members of the Midwest Affiliation of Computer Clubs, headquartered right there in Columbus, who asked for them. With modems still a rare and pricey commodity, it took time to get MicroNET off the ground; Wilkins remembers anxiously watching the connectivity lights inside the data center during the evenings, and seeing them remain almost entirely dimmed. But then, gradually, they started blinking.

After exactly two months, with several hundred active members having proved to Wilkins’s satisfaction that a potential market existed, he made MicroNET an official CompuServe service, open to all. To the dissatisfaction of his early adopters, that meant they had to start paying: a $30 signup charge, followed by $5 per hour for evening and weekend access, $12 per hour if they were foolish enough to log on during the day, when CompuServe’s corporate clients needed the machines. To the satisfaction of Wilkins, most of his early adopters grumbled but duly signed up, and they were followed by a slow but steady trickle of new arrivals. The service went entirely unadvertised, news of its existence spreading among computer hobbyists strictly by word of mouth. MicroNET was almost literally nothing in the context of CompuServe’s business as a whole — it would account for roughly 1 percent of their 1979 revenue, less than heaps of their larger individual corporate accounts — yet it marked the beginning of something big, something even Wilkins couldn’t possibly anticipate.

But MicroNET didn’t stand alone. Even as one online service was getting started in about the most low-key fashion imaginable, another was making a much more high-profile entrance. It was fortunate that Wilkins chose to see MicroNET as “market-driven” rather than “competition-driven.” Otherwise, he wouldn’t have been happy to see his thunder being stolen by The Source.

Bill von Meister

Like Jeff Wilkins, Bill von Meister was 36 years old. Unlike Wilkins, he already had on his resume a long string of entrepreneurial failures to go along with a couple of major successes. An unapologetic epicurean with a love for food, wine, cars, and women, he had been a child not just of privilege but of aristocracy, his father a godson of the last German kaiser, his mother an Austrian countess. His parents had immigrated to New York in the chaos that followed World War I, when Germany and Austria could be uncomfortable places for wealthy royalty, and there his father had made the transition from landed aristocrat to successful businessman with rather shocking ease. Among other ventures, he became a pivotal architect of the storied Zeppelin airship service between Germany and the United States — although the burning of the Hindenburg did rather put the kibosh on that part of his portfolio, as it did passenger-carrying airships in general.

The son inherited at least some of the father’s acumen. Leveraging his familial wealth alongside an unrivaled ability to talk people into giving him money — one friend called him the best he’d ever seen at “taking money from venture capitalists, burning it all up, and then getting more money from the same venture capitalists” — the younger von Meister pursued idea after idea, some visionary, some terrible. By 1977, he had hit pay dirt twice already in his career, once when he created what was eventually branded as Western Union’s “Mailgram” service for sending a form of electronic mail well before computer email existed, once when he created a corporate telephone service called Telemax. Unfortunately, the money he earned from these successes disappeared as quickly as it poured in, spent to finance his high lifestyle and his many other, failed entrepreneurial projects.

Late in 1977, he founded Digital Broadcasting Corporation in Fairfax County, Virginia, to implement a scheme for narrow-casting digital data using the FM radio band. “Typical uses,” ran the proposal, “would include price information for store managers in a retail chain, bad-check information to banks, and policy information to agents of an insurance company.” Von Meister needed financing to bring off this latest scheme, and he needed a factory to build the equipment that would be needed. Luckily, a man who believed he could facilitate both called him one day in the spring of 1978 after reading a description of his plans in Business Week.

Jack Taub had made his first fortune as the founder of Scott Publishing, known for their catalogs serving the stamp-collecting hobby. Now, he was so excited by von Meister’s scheme that he immediately bought into Digital Broadcasting Corporation to the tune of $500,000 of much-needed capital, good for a 42.5 percent stake. But every bit as important as Taub’s personal fortune were the connections he had within the federal government. By promising to build a factory in the economically disadvantaged inner city of Charlotte, North Carolina, he convinced the Commerce Department’s Economic Development Administration to guarantee 90 percent of a $6 million bank loan from North Carolina National Bank, under a program meant to channel financing into job-creating enterprises.

Unfortunately, the project soon ran into serious difficulties with another government agency: the Federal Communications Commission, who noted pointedly that the law which had set aside the FM radio band had stipulated it should be reserved for applications “of interest to the public.” Using it to send private data, many officials at the FCC believed, wasn’t quite what the law’s framers had had in mind. And while the FCC hemmed and hawed, von Meister was fomenting chaos within the telecommunications and broadcasting industries at large by claiming his new corporation’s name gave him exclusive rights to the term “digital broadcasting,” a modest buzzword of its own at the time. His legal threats left a bad taste in the mouth of many a potential partner, and the scheme withered away under the enormous logistical challenges getting such a service off the ground must entail. The factory which the Commerce Department had so naively thought they were financing never opened, but Digital Broadcasting kept what remained of the money they had received for the purpose.

They now planned to use the money for something else entirely. Von Meister and Taub had always seen business-to-business broadcasting as only the first stage of their company’s growth. In the longer term, they had envisioned a consumer service which would transmit and even receive information — news and weather reports, television listings, shopping offers, opinion polls, etc. — to and from terminals located in ordinary homes. When doing all this over the FM radio band began to look untenable, they had cast about for alternative approaches; they were, after all, still flush with a fair amount of cash. It didn’t take them long to take note of all those TRS-80s and other home computers that were making their way into the homes of early adopters. Both Taub and von Meister would later claim to have been the first to suggest a pivot from digital broadcasting to a microcomputer-oriented online information utility. In the beginning, they called it CompuCom.

The most obvious problem CompuCom faced — its most obvious disadvantage in comparison to CompuServe’s MicroNET — was the lack of a telecommunications network of its own. Once again, both Taub and von Meister would later claim to have been the first to see the solution. One or the other or both took note of another usage inequality directly related to the one that had spawned MicroNET. Just as the computers of time-sharing services like CompuServe sat largely idle during nights and weekends, traffic on the telecommunications lines corporate clients used to connect to them was also all but nonexistent more than half of the time. Digital Broadcasting came to GTE Telenet with an offer to lease this idle bandwidth at a rate of 75¢ per connection per hour, a dramatically reduced price from that of typical business customers. GTE, on the presumption that something was better than nothing, agreed. And while they were making the deal to use the telecommunications network, von Meister and Taub also made a deal with GTE Telenet to run the new service on the computers in the latter’s data centers, using all that excess computing power that lay idle along with the telecommunications bandwidth on nights and weekends. Because they needed to build no physical infrastructure, von Meister and Taub believed that CompuCom could afford to be relatively cheap during off-hours; the initial pricing plan stipulated just $2.75 per hour during evenings and weekends, with a $100 signup fee and a minimum monthly charge of $10.

For all the similarities in their way of taking advantage of the time-sharing industry’s logistical quirks, not to mention their shared status as the pioneers of much of modern online life, there were important differences between the nascent MicroNET and CompuCom. From the first, von Meister envisioned his service not just as a provider of computer access but as a provider of content. The public-domain games that were the sum total of MicroNET’s initial content were only the beginning for him. Mirroring its creator, CompuCom was envisioned as a service for the well-heeled Playboy– and Sharper Image-reading technophile lounge lizard, with wine lists, horoscopes, entertainment guides for the major metropolitan areas, and an online shopping mall. In a landmark deal, von Meister convinced United Press International, one of the two providers of raw news wires to the nation’s journalistic infrastructure, to offer their feed through CompuCom as well — unfiltered, up-to-the-minute information of a sort that had never been available to the average consumer before. The New York Times provided a product-information database, Prentice Hall provided tax information, and Dow Jones provided a stock ticker. Von Meister contracted with the French manufacturer Alcatel for terminals custom-made just for logging onto CompuCom, perfect for those wanting to get in on the action who weren’t interested in becoming computer nerds in the process. For the same prospective customers, he insisted that the system, while necessarily all text given the state of the technology of the time, be navigable via multiple-choice menus rather than an arcane command line.

In the spring of 1979, just before the first trials began, CompuCom was renamed The Source; the former name sounded dangerously close to “CompuCon,” a disadvantage that was only exacerbated by the founder’s checkered business reputation. The service officially opened for business, eight days after MicroNET had done the same, with that July 9 press conference featuring Isaac Asimov and the considerable fanfare it generated. Indeed, the press notices were almost as ebullient as The Source’s own advertising, with the Wall Street Journal calling it “an overnight sensation among the cognoscenti of the computing world.” Graeme Keeping, a business executive who would later be in charge of the service but was at this time just another outsider looking in, had this to say about those earliest days:

The announcement was made with the traditional style of the then-masters of The Source. A lot of fanfare, a lot of pizazz, a lot of sizzle. There was absolutely no substance whatsoever to the announcement. They had nothing to back it up with.

Electronic publishing was in its infancy in those days. It was such a romantic dream that there never had to be a product in order to generate excitement. Nobody had to see anything real. People wanted it so badly, like a cure for cancer. We all want it, but is it really there? I equate it to Laetrile.

While that is perhaps a little unfair — there were, as we’ve just seen, several significant deals with content providers in place before July of 1979 — it was certainly true that the hype rather overwhelmed the comparatively paltry reality one found upon actually logging into The Source.

Nevertheless, any comparison of The Source and MicroNET at this stage would have to place the former well ahead in terms of ambition, vision, and public profile. That distinction becomes less surprising when we consider that what was a side experiment for Jeff Wilkins was the whole enchilada for von Meister and Taub. For the very same reason, any neutral observer forced to guess which of these two nascent services would rise to dominance would almost certainly have gone with The Source. Such a reckoning wouldn’t have accounted, however, for the vortex of chaos that was Bill von Meister.

It was the typical von Meister problem: he had built all this buzz by spending money he didn’t have — in fact, by spending so much money that to this day it’s hard to figure out where it could all possibly have gone. As of October of 1979, the company had $1000 left in the bank and $8 million in debt. Meanwhile The Source itself, despite all the buzz, had managed to attract at most a couple of thousand actual subscribers. It was, after all, still very early days for home computers in general, modems were an even more exotic species, and the Alcatel terminals had yet to arrive from France, being buried in some transatlantic bureaucratic muddle.

Jack Taub

By his own later account, Jack Taub had had little awareness over the course of the last year or so of what von Meister was doing with the company’s money, being content to contribute ideas and strategic guidance and let his partner handle day-to-day operations. But that October he finally sat down to take a hard look at the books. He would later pronounce the experience of doing so “an assault on my system. Von Meister is a terrific entrepreneur, but he doesn’t know when to stop entrepreneuring. The company was in terrible shape. It was not going to survive. Money was being spent like water.” With what he considered to be a triage situation on his hands, Taub delivered an ultimatum to von Meister. He would pay him $3140 right now — 1¢ for each of his shares — and would promise to pay him another dollar per share in three years if The Source was still around then. In return, von Meister would walk away from the mess he had created, escaping any legal action that might otherwise become a consequence of his gross mismanagement. According to Taub’s account, von Meister agreed to these terms with uncharacteristic meekness, leaving his vision of The Source as just one more paving stone on his boulevard of broken entrepreneurial dreams, and leaving Taub to get down to the practical business of saving the company. “I think if I had waited another week,” the latter would later say, “it would have been too late.”

As it was, Digital Broadcasting teetered on the edge of bankruptcy for months, with Taub scrambling to secure new lines of credit to keep the existing creditors satisfied and, when all else failed, injecting more of his own money into the company. Through it all, he still had to deal with von Meister, who, as any student of his career to date could have predicted, soon had second thoughts about going away quietly — if, that is, he’d ever planned to do so in the first place. Taub learned that von Meister had taken much of Digital Broadcasting’s proprietary technology out the door with him, and was now shopping it around the telecommunications industry; that sparked a lawsuit on Taub’s behalf. Von Meister claimed his ejection had been illegal; that sparked another, going in the opposite direction. Apparently concluding that his promise not to sue von Meister for his mismanagement of the company was thus nullified, Taub counter-sued with exactly that charge. With a vengeful von Meister on his trail, he said that he couldn’t afford to “sleep with both eyes closed.”

By March of 1980, The Source had managed to attract about 3000 subscribers, but the online citizens were growing restless. Many features weren’t quite as advertised. The heavily hyped nightlife guides, for instance, mostly existed only for the Washington Beltway, the home of The Source. The email system was down about half the time, and even when it was allegedly working it was anyone’s guess whether a message that was sent would actually be delivered. Failings like these could be attributed easily enough to the usual technical growing pains, but other complaints carried with them an implication of nefarious intent. The Source’s customers could read the business pages of the newspaper as well as anyone, and knew that Jack Taub was fighting for his company’s life on multiple fronts. In that situation, some customers reasoned, there would be a strong incentive to find ways to bill them just that little bit more. Thus there were dark accusations that the supposedly user-friendly menu system had been engineered to be as verbose and convoluted as possible in order to maximize the time users spent online just trying to get to where they wanted to go. On a 110- or 300-baud connection — for comparison purposes, consider that a good touch typist could far exceed the former rate — receiving all these textual menus could take considerable time, especially given the laggy response time of the system as a whole whenever more than a handful of people were logged on. And for some reason, a request to log off the system in an orderly way simply didn’t work most of the time, forcing users to break the connection themselves. After they did so, it would conveniently — conveniently for The Source’s accountants, that is — take the system five minutes or so to recognize their absence and stop charging them.

A sampling of the many error messages with which early users of The Source became all too familiar.

The accusations of nefarious intent were, for what it’s worth, very unlikely to have had any basis in reality. Jack Taub was a hustler, but he wasn’t a con man. On the contrary, he was earnestly trying to save a company whose future he deeply believed in. His biggest problem was the government-secured loan, on which Digital Broadcasting Corporation had by now defaulted, forcing the Commerce Department to pay $3.2 million to the National Bank of North Carolina. The government bureaucrats, understandably displeased, were threatening to seize his company and dismantle it in the hope of getting at least some of that money back. They were made extra motivated by the fact that the whole affair had leaked into the papers, with the Washington Post in particular treating it as a minor public scandal, an example of Your Tax Dollars at Waste.

Improvising like mad, Taub convinced the government to allow him to make a $300,000 down payment, and thereafter to repay the money he owed over a period of up to 22 years at an interest rate of just 2 percent. Beginning in 1982, the company, now trading as The Source Telecomputing Corporation rather than Digital Broadcasting Corporation, would have to repay either $50,000 or 10 percent of their net profit each year, whichever was greater; beginning in 1993, the former figure would rise to $100,000 if the loan still hadn’t been repaid. “The government got a good deal,” claimed Taub. “They get 100 cents on the dollar, and get their money back faster if I’m able to do something with the company.” While some might have begged to differ with his characterization of the arrangement as a “good deal,” it was, the government must have judged, the best it was likely to get under the circumstances. “The question is to work out some kind of reasonable solution where you recover something rather than nothing,” said one official familiar with the matter. “While it sounds like they’re giving it away, they already did that. They already made their mistake with the original loan.”

With the deal with the Commerce Department in place, Taub convinced The Readers Digest Association, publisher of the most popular magazine in the world, who were eager to get in on the ground floor of what was being billed in some circles as the next big thing in media, to buy 51 percent of The Source for $3 million in September of 1980, thus securing desperately needed operating capital. But when a judge ruled in favor of von Meister on the charge that he had been unlawfully forced out of the company shortly thereafter, Taub was left scrambling once again. He was forced to go back to Readers Digest, convincing them this time to increase their stake to 80 percent, leaving only the remaining 20 percent in his own hands. And with that second capital injection to hand, he convinced von Meister to lay the court battle to rest with a settlement check for $1 million.

The Source had finally attained a measure of stability, and Jack Taub’s extended triage could thus come to an end at last. Along the way, however, he had maneuvered himself out of his controlling interest and, soon, out of a job. Majority ownership having its privileges, Readers Digest elected to replace him with one of their own: Graeme Keeping, the executive who had lobbied hardest to buy The Source in the first place. “Any publisher today, if he doesn’t get into electronic publishing,” Keeping was fond of saying, “is either going to be forced into it by economic circumstances or will have great difficulty staying in the paper-and-ink business.”

The Source’s Prime computer systems, a millstone around their neck for years (although the monkey does seem to be enjoying them).

The Source may have found a safe harbor with one of the moneyed giants of American media, but it would never regain its early mojo. Keeping proved to be less than the strategic mastermind he believed himself to be, with a habit of over-promising and under-delivering — and, worse, of making terrible choices based on his own overoptimistic projections. The worst example of the tendency came early in his tenure, in the spring of 1981, when he was promising the New York Times he would have 60,000 subscribers by 1982. Determined to make sure he had the computing capacity to meet the demand, he cancelled the contract to use GTE Telenet’s computing facilities, opening his own data center instead and filling it with his own machines. At a stroke, this destroyed a key part of the logistical economies which had done so much to spawn The Source (and, for that matter, CompuServe’s MicroNET) in the first place. The Source’s shiny new computers now sat idle during the day with no customers to service. Come 1982, The Source had only 20,000 subscribers, and all those expensive computers were barely ticking over even at peak usage. This move alone cost The Source millions. Meanwhile, the deal with Alcatel for custom-made terminals having fallen through during the chaos of Taub’s tenure, Keeping made a new one with Zenith to make “a semi-intelligent terminal with a hole in the back through which you can turn it into a computer.” That impractical flight of fancy also came to naught, but not before costing The Source more money. Such failures led to Keeping’s ouster in June of 1982, to be replaced by another anodyne chief from the Readers Digest executive pool named George Grune.

Soon after, Control Data Corporation, a maker of supercomputers, bought a 30 percent share of The Source for a reported $5 million. But even this latest injection of capital, technical expertise, and content — Control Data would eventually move much of their pioneering Plato educational network onto the service — changed little. The Source went through three more chief executives in the next two years. The user roll continued to grow, finally reaching 60,000 in September of 1984 — some two and a half years after Graeme Keeping’s prediction, for those keeping score — but the company perpetually lost money, was perpetually about to turn the corner into mainstream acceptance and profitability but never actually did. Thanks not least to Keeping’s data-center boondoggle, the hourly rate for non-prime usage had risen to $7.75 per hour by 1984, making this onetime pioneer that now felt more and more like an also-ran a hard sell in terms of dollars and cents as well. Neither the leading name in the online-services industry nor the one with the deepest pockets — there were limits to Readers Digest’s largess — The Source struggled to attract third-party content. A disturbing number of those 60,000 subscribers rarely or never logged on, paying only the minimum monthly charge of $10. One analyst noted that well-heeled computer owners “apparently are willing to pay to have these electronic services available, even if they don’t use them regularly. From a business point of view, that’s a formula for survival, but not for success.”

The Source was fated to remain a survivor but never a real success for the rest of its existence. Back in Columbus, however, CompuServe’s consumer offering was on a very different trajectory. Begun in such a low-key way that Jeff Wilkins had refused even to describe it as being in competition with The Source, CompuServe’s erstwhile MicroNET — now re-branded as simply CompuServe, full stop — was going places of which its rival could only dream. Indeed, one might say it was going to the very places of which Bill von Meister had been dreaming in 1979.

(Sources: the book On the Way to the Web: The Secret History of the Internet and its Founders by Michael A. Banks and Stealing Time: Steve Case, Jerry Levin, and the Collapse of AOL Time Warner by Alec Klein; Creative Computing of March 1980; InfoWorld of April 14 1980, May 26 1980, January 11 1982, May 24 1982, and November 5 1984; Wall Street Journal of November 6 1979; Online Today of July 1989; 80 Microcomputing of November 1980; The Intelligent Machines Journal of March 14 1979 and June 25 1979; Washington Post of May 11 1937, July 10 1978, February 10 1980, and November 4 1980; Alexander Trevor’s brief technical history of CompuServe, which was first posted to Usenet in 1988; interviews with Jeff Wilkins from the Internet History Podcast and Conquering Columbus.)

 
 

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