Even before "the Internet" became common parlance, people with personal computers and modems were dialing up bulletin board services and proprietary online services like CompuServe to share messages with one another, play online games and download files.īecause of AOL's Mac-friendly underpinnings, the service quickly developed a large base of Mac users. In the early 1990s America Online (AOL) became the way many Americans were introduced to online services. Migrating the service's content to other places including its own web site, Apple unceremoniously took AppleLink offline in 1997. It'd take years, but eventually AppleLink ran its course. They rolled out a dial-up service called America Online instead. Quantum retained rights to the code it had developed for Apple, and decided to do something else with it. That made its debut in 1988, but marketing blunders from Apple and an expensive use model (an annual subscription fee plus a steep per-hour usage fee) kept customers away in droves. So the company contracted AppleLink's developer, Quantum Computer Services, to develop AppleLink Personal Edition. These companies provided a vastly expanded array of services to subscribers.ĪppleLink remained the rarified domain of a select group of technical sophisticates, but Apple recognized a need for a service for users, as well. At the same time, online services like CompuServe and The Source began to attract users. They'd exchange messages with one another, download files or play online games that were often variations of games developed for mainframe and minicomputers used in universities and labs. Many hobbyist computer users limited themselves to communicating with small bulletin board systems run by other hobbyists, sometimes connected with a bank of modems to support more than one user at a time. At that point, it was largely the domain of scientists, researchers and academics - an internetwork of mainframe computers designed using money from the Department of Defense as research into building a communications infrastructure that could survive a nuclear holocaust.Īs the first wave of personal computer hobbyists bought systems, companies began to sell modems that enabled these computers to talk to one another over regular telephone lines. ![]() It's easy to overlook, but in the mid 1980s, "the Internet" didn't exist in the same way it does today.
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