The Old Online Services (CI$, GEnie, BIX, P/Link, etc.)

[DennyA]

How many of you guys were regulars on the old online services in the pre-Internet days?

I was a serious addict, mostly on the GEnie and People/Link Amiga forums, as well as GEnie's awesome SFRT science fiction forum. I also spent a fair amount of time hanging out on BIX. I had a CI$ account, but used it least because of the higher costs.

I even started an Amiga user group in Hattiesburg, MS back in 1986 or so just to support my habit. The user group fees went to pay my People/Link and long-distance bills (since there was no Tymnet/Telenet access in Hattiesburg), and in return I'd put together the best PD/Shareware programs on the monthly SMAUG (Southern Mississippi Amiga User Group) disks.

I think of all of the online services I listed here, the only one I never had an account on was QuantumLink, and maybe The Source. (Though I think I did at least try a trial there.)

...Denny Atkin
GEnie, BIX, AOL: DennyA
CompuServe: 75500,3602
People/Link: Denny

[DennyA]

I shouldn't have made the BBS option exclusionary, but I don't know anyone who used online services who didn't also dial into BBSes, so it's mostly there for people who were online in those days, but didn't use "timesharing."

[Acid]

I was on PlayNet with my Commodore 64 before the Internet went big.

[Talisker]

I miss GEnie.

[Eric P]

i miss prodigy's communities hack, where you'd get a username/pass word for an account that was created so that you could just leave yourself messages and reply to those messages for free creating "pop up" topic specific forums.

[Matt Bowyer]

I started with Compuserve 10,000 years ago.

[Athryn]

Prodigy, Compuserve, AOL, etc. I dunno why you have Fidonet separate from BBSes, as Fidonet was a BBS network. :P

I also ran several multiline BBSes when I was in college in Southern Oregon.

[Dean]

I was on CIS and was a tester for Epic Megagames through there.

I was on Prodigy, and very excited about paying one low price per month, but it felt more like a toy (big fonts, very pretty). I was big into the Wing Commander groups and the Playwriting group there.

I tried AOL as a tester with the option of becoming a Charter Member (I think they wanted $8.95/month and then they had "premium services" and they promised if you joined as a Charter Member that you would always get that price). I wrote them a long report about why chat rooms would never work and turned down their Charter Member offer.

I was on a couple of local BBSes and through them, Fidonet. I was on Channel 1 out of Lexington, MA, and many years later found out that some guy named Tom Chick used to post there when he was at Harvard, though he didn't go by Tom Chick at the time (and I didn't go by Dean or any variation thereof at the time). The first Usenet newsgroup I subscribed to was eff.talk, eventually moving on to alt.religion.scientology, and comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.strategy.

[Charles]

None of these services had Canadian numbers. I only had limited access to a single one line local BBS.

[Creole Ned]

My roommate ran a BBS using a C64 and something like four 1541 drives. It was like living in the future! (at 300 baud)

I subscribed to several FidoNet discussion groups (writing, music, etc.) and would download the current bunch of messages on my Amiga using a reader whose name I forget -- QWK Reader, maybe? Then I'd read through the messages, carefully compose my replies (since turnaround time was typically in days) and send them off. It's funny how much closer it was to the actual mail service back then. :)

I still vividly remember a regular in the FidoNet music group -- he went by the name Patrick Goodman -- being utterly devastated by Freddie Mercury's death as he was an extremely hardcore Queen fan. Very little if anything in the way of flames given the long delay between receiving and sending messages, too. Such a different time.

[Athryn]

Yeah, a QWK reader is what we used, man I forgot about those.

[Cubit]

AOL, unfortunately.

[ReptileHouse]

I spent waayyyyy too much time on RIME and FidoNet mail discussion groups back then. Not that I do anything similar these days. Not at all...

[Linoleum]

REA ALL CAT=1-50 TOP=1-50 NEW NOR

Or something like that.

[DennyA]

Prodigy, Compuserve, AOL, etc. I dunno why you have Fidonet separate from BBSes, as Fidonet was a BBS network. :P

Because all Fidonet nodes were BBSes, but not all BBSes were Fidonet nodes. :)

[RickH]

I still miss door games.

[Mr_PeaCH]

I will never forget getting my account with CompuServe established (circa 1996? 97?) and being giddy with the possibility of rubbing elbows with far flung people via the internet and the very first person that I struck up a conversation from was from down my street. Literally.

[Alan Dunkin]

Hmm, started off with local BBS's in the late 80s. Can't remember the initial system that I connected to--there was a local one that did a lot of RPGing called Runestone. Might have been AmigaBBS but was probably something else (not IBM-based). Moved on to a bunch of Fido and/or Opus BBS's after that for awhile... the only one I remember off-hand was The Diplomat, which ran weekly Diplomacy turns.

Quickly got into CIS (was active in Kesmai, British Legends) till I spent way too much (late '88 I think it was, I had an early era account number, even before Denny's), then GEnie (Cyberstorm? I can't remember the name right now), BIX (which I still miss a lot), and a host of others.

--- Alan

[mono]

In '88-'89, my Prodigy connection made my dorm room a popular spot on Sunday afternoons. It was the only way we could get all the late NFL scores without driving to a bar with cable, or waiting for the 11pm news.

[Anti-Bunny]

I still miss door games.

They're still around, in one form or another.

[Timemaster Tim]

I had accounts on Compuserve and AOL courtesy of my work at the time. But I must say that I hardly ever used them. As a Canadian, I was subscribed to Canada Remote Systems which operated very much like a supersized BBS. Aside from that, there was bunch of local one-line/two-line BBSes that I would frequent with my 2400 baud, later 9600 baud, and later 14.4K baud Courier HST modems. I'm not sure, but I think by the time I was beyond the 14.4K, I had switched to an ISP for the wonders of the Internet.

[ElGuapo]

We used Prodigy to trade stocks in high school back in the day.

[Robert Sharp]

I forgot to select BBS as well. I really miss some of these services. I mean they sucked for actual online use compared to what we have today, but they all had fun games included in them (sometimes for extra fees, sadly). So I played cool dungeon crawl games on my friend's Compuserve account. And there was Gemstone et al on AOL, and Crossroads and Trade Wars on the BBS. Fun times.

[DennyA]

What was great was the asshole-to-reasonable-person ratio in the early days. Oh, sure, there were occasional trolls and jerks, but the John Gabriel Greater Internet Dickwad Theory had not come into full play yet.

Then came AOL.

My first boss out of college got hooked on Gemstone 3. Full-on MMO addiction with a text-based RPG!

I remember when my GEnie account got comp'd when I got my first full-time journalism gig. Finally, I didn't have to spend $6 an hour to play Air Warrior!

[Raife]

I have a friend who still uses her Prodigy email account. It's sort of a badge of honor for her.

[Vesper]

I ran a FidoNet BBS on my Amiga for many years, on my Sysop-program purchased Courier HST. Oh those were the glory days... I started out BBSing in 1984 on a 300 baud modem. I was also the nerdiest kid in the city when I saved up my paper route money to buy a 1200 baud modem (Commodore 1670).

I dabbled in Quantum Link on my C64, but that was about it as far as pay services.

[Sarkus]

I switched around between a bunch of them, but the idea of paying per hour fees on top of the monthly just to play some games never sat well with me.

I really, really liked AOL for awhile and miss aspects of it. It was nice to be able to go to one place where there were game forums for just about every title and there were reps from the makers active in those forums answering questions. AOL messed that up themselves when they got so big they thought they could start charging the game developers for that presence, which is what pushed them out to create their own websites and which lead me (and others) to abandon AOL for the emerging public internet.

[graller]

I played the heck out of Neverwinter Nights on AOL and Gemstone 3 on GEnie

[Omniscia]

At first, our household used a local ISP that basically only offered USENET and Gopher access. Then, we were AOL members from versions 2.0 through 3.0, leaving shortly after they introduced the flat-rate billing plan for another local ISP.

[Athryn]

I played the heck out of Neverwinter Nights on AOL and Gemstone 3 on GEnie

I think you're thinking of Shadow of Yserbius.

Edit: no, you're not, but that reminds me, The Sierra Network is missing from the list. That was the best Online service ever!