Genie (online service)

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GEnie login window (ca.1989)

Genius ( G eneral E lectric N etwork for I nformation E xchange ) was an online service that existed 1985-1999. Its operator, the American electrical company General Electric , wanted to secure a market share with GEnie in the online services business, which was growing rapidly in the 1980s, and in 1990 also set up access in Germany. The biggest competitor was initially Compuserve , later AOL .

history

GEnie was founded in Rockville , Maryland on October 1, 1985 by former CompuServe employee Bill Louden. Although the service was purely text-based, it started with a computer game: MegaWars . It is considered to be one of the first networked games ( MMOGs ) in computer history. GEnie gave itself a consciously young look. The forerunners of e-mail addresses were personal codes, which at GEnie had the typical structure XVYxxxxxx, xxxx. You could append a # to this to identify yourself with a specific page in one of the forums, and an @ (for action / menu) was also possible, without any connection with today's usual e-mail syntax.

When General Electric started in the Federal Republic of Germany in the summer of 1990, it had signed a contract with the Deutsche Bundespost , which gave German customers free network access to the GEnie computers. The hub for Germany was in Hürth near Cologne. Use of the service was paid by the hour or with a subscription. Access was via modems connected to the home computer or PC and the Post Office telephone network. The data transmission rates were set from the receiving end to 300, later 1200 bits per second.

The discussion forums in GEnie were moderated by sysops , had individual page numbers and were called "RoundTables". This page concept was a forerunner of the web addresses of today's Internet.

Some of the round tables featured prominent figures. The computer journalist Jerry Pournelle (chief columnist of the computer magazine Byte ) used GEnie to exchange ideas with readers. The Science Fiction RoundTable (SFRT) was the official online meeting place for the Association of American SF Writers (SFWA).

Despite its high popularity at the time (350,000 members in 1994), GEnie always lagged behind CompuServe, which was founded in 1969. With the start of AOL in Germany in 1995, supported by Bertelsmann , the business opportunities for both services in Germany dwindled. Because of the World Wide Web , which started in 1993, there were further problems for the older online services. In 1996 General Electric sold the brand. GEnie then signed up to Genie and only had around 20,000 members. In 1999 there were only 10,000 paying members who used the discussion and chat forums and a transition to the Internet that had been in place since 1993 . On December 30, 1999, GEnie was no longer available.

Typical login process

In order to log into GEnie, you first had to set the data transfer rate to 300 or 1200 bps and the modem to the alternating operation duplex method. Then one let the computer dial the access number over the modem. It was free of charge; there were over 600 such dial-up nodes in the US at the end of the 1980s. After the connection was established, you had to wait for the prompt to appear:

U#=

Here you entered your user ID and password. You then saw a pure text page, which was called Page 1 and offered the following options:

1. About GEnie... 2. New on GENie 3. GE Mail [a forerunner of e-mail, e-mail correspondence initially only within the GEnie network] 4. Live Wire CB [what was later called chat] 5. Computing 6. Travel
7. Finance 8. Shopping 9. News 10. Games 11. Professional 12. Leisure 13. Reference 14. Logoff

Below this was the request to enter one of the numbers listed above:

Enter #:

Behind the main menu there were numerous submenus, some of which are subject to a charge, which can also be accessed directly by entering

INDEX

could search and navigate. One of these was the RoundTable Bulletin Board System , which was used to access the decentralized mailbox networks, and another was the current status of the Dow Jones Index .

To get to the entry menu one gave

TOP

to say goodbye to the system

BYE

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ see Bill Louden's profile on the Austin Community College website
  2. ↑ see chat log of the science fiction authors on the last day of GEnie ( memento of the original from June 17, 2006 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.dm.net
  3. ^ Genie Online Is Acquired , New York Times, August 21, 1996