June 7, 2010 • 27 mins
In this episode, Jonathan and Chris discuss online service providers, which were popular content providers before the World Wide Web took over.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera.
It's ready. Are you get in touch with technology? With
text style from how stuff works dot com. Hello again, everyone,
and welcome to tech stuff. My name is Chris Poulette
(00:21):
and I am an editor here at how stuff works
dot com. Sitting across from me, as he always does,
is senior writer Jonathan Strickland. How do hi there? Oh wait,
that's sort of your line, yeah, sort of for hey there, Uh. Today,
we thought we would continue our we we've been doing
a few podcasts recently about sort of the predecessors of
(00:41):
what we think of as the Internet, and we were
kind of gonna go along those same lines, something that
that that consumers had access to before we had access
to the Worldwide Web, and that would be online service providers.
That's kind of the collective term for these sort of companies.
(01:01):
Online service providers actually were sort of the middle ground,
at least the way I think of it, between the
older bulletin board services and the Internet when caught on
as a commercial entity where people would actually have content
that they wanted to sign on um, whereas a bulletin
board was sort of a centralized hub where people would
(01:21):
log in and log out of for information. UH an
online service provider was like that, only much much larger
and Um, although you may be going, wait a minute,
online service providers, I really don't know anything about what
you're talking about. I think you probably have a few
coasters sitting around your home that used to belong to,
(01:42):
UH at least one of them. Yeah, well, let's let's
kind of talk about you know, you can make a
good point about how online service providers kind of bridge
the gap between the bbs s and and say the
current Internet. Um. So, if you think of a BBS,
most bbs as were run on a single computer, yes,
that had a modem line going connected to it, and
(02:04):
often you could only have a single devoted phone line
going to that BBS. BBS, by the way, stands for
bulletin board system, So if you wanted to access a
bulletin board system, you would have to dial into that
bulletin board and then you would have, assuming that no
one else was already connected to it, you could then
go in there, read the message board, maybe play a
(02:25):
short game. UM. You might even be limited to a
specific amount of time before it automatically kicks you off.
So that you don't just just a hog all the
time of the system. Right. These were These were small
and and usually operated by just one or two dedicated
folks who are interested in hosting a service like this.
So you wouldn't want to monopolize their the service because
(02:47):
then you wouldn't have anything else from anyone else to
uh enjoy. You would just be taking up all the time.
So these bulletin board services uh systems rather were uh
we're fairly primitive now, and online service provider was more
like a network. Um. You you actually had a couple
of steps here. You would again, you're using a modem,
(03:07):
and we're talking about the old dial up modems. So
these are modems that are connected to phone lines, and
you would use the modem to connect to uh, well,
it's a local area connection, you know. You would you
would dial into a local connection that would then connect
you to the overall network. UM. A lot of the
online service providers charged by the minute, or by the
(03:30):
hour or or the some of them later on would
charge by the month, right right, And UM yeah, basically
in this case, if you wanted to sign up for
service with an online service provider, UM, you would have
hope that they had a node local to you, So
they would have a pool what they would call a
pool of modems uh, sitting there and say the downtown
(03:52):
area of your of the local large city, and you
would dial a local number and that would connect you
to via their own network to you know, the main servers,
and from there you could access the information, right because
otherwise you would have to pay twice. You would have
to pay once for the phone call, so you're paying
the phone operator one one price, and then you're paying
(04:15):
the the the operator, the online service provider um and
a subscription fee essentially to access their services. Now, these networks,
in many ways, especially later on as as they began
to evolve, started to resemble what we think of as
the Internet, except for one really really important distinction, which
(04:36):
is that they all remained independent of each other. Yes,
so if you belonged to one online service provider, so
let's say compy Serve that was a famous one, right,
and then let's say say Chris belongs to copy Serve,
but I belong to Prodigy. Now, both of those services
did have things like electronic mail for their members, but
(04:56):
the members could only email other members of that same service,
so I could not email Chris because we would be
on two different online service providers. There would not be
a crossover there because this is predating the era where
the Internet became available to the general public. At this point,
the Internet is still really the domain of uh, the
(05:19):
universities and the government. Right, I don't want Hopefully nobody
paused the podcast to write us an email and tell
us no, I had comput Serve and I was allowed
to email on the people. Yes, well there are still
comput Serve subscribers. That is, the service still exists, but
it's no longer an online service provider. Yes, later on,
as they became connected to the Internet, you could do this.
(05:40):
But what we're talking about is when these services started
because uh, compu Serve, for example, was founded in nine nine,
which was before way before the Internet actually became a
popular service among the you know, uh everyday user. You know, well, yes,
in sixty nine, they were still developing the protocols that
(06:00):
formed the backbone of the Internet, and the backbone as
far as the software site is concerned, at least, yeah,
that would allow it to be a major network. Right,
there were a few, very few systems connected to our
pinet at the time, there wasn't There really was no Internet. Internet. Um,
so yeah, we're talking about let's say, okay, so before
(06:23):
the Internet has really become a public utility in a way,
if you you know, using utility is still kind of misleading,
but just to to say that it's open to service
service service. So before that you had these private networks.
They're all self contained. Now, each private network gave its
(06:45):
members access to certain services that again mirror what we
find on the Internet, but what you would find on
one service would not necessarily be the same as what
you would find on another. So for example, if you
were a compu Serve customer and you logged in and
you wanted to check the news that was available through
various articles on copy Serve, it may not be the
(07:05):
same selection that you would find if you were a
Prodigy Serve customer. That's right. Yeah, a lot of these
online service providers had struck deals with different entities for
for providing content. Going going back to compu Serve um,
they were the hosts for the first online newspaper in
the United States, the Columbus Dispatch from Ohio. U signed
(07:29):
on in July of n Back when compu Serve had
about thirty six hundred total subscribers um, and so you know,
they were the they were the ones if you wanted
to to read the Columbus Dispatch, that's where you would go.
You would go to compu Serve and sign on and
uh a lot of other places, a lot of other sorry,
a lot of other newspapers signed on with compu Serve
(07:50):
after that. But uh, providers like Prodigy and America Online. Yeah,
that's the one we're talking about. With the coasters. Yes,
when they would send out lots and lots and lots
of disks and people began using them as coasters. People
began referring to the discs which they would get, uh
numerous discs in the mail and in cereal boxes and
(08:11):
in polly bags that came around windows of passing cars.
And it was it was crazy, yeah, that people used
to refer to them, uh and derisively as coasters. But no,
I mean they're basically if you wanted a service, say
you wanted subscription to The New York Times, you might
not be able to get it with one osp You
would have to sign on to another because that's the
(08:32):
one that had the content deal in place, which means
that you would have to pay another subscription fee to
another online service provider and something like we said. Sometimes
these early ones were charging by the hour, so you
would log on and it would depend not only on
how long you stayed on there, but the speed of
your modem connection. And these modum connection speeds the dial
(08:54):
up ones were incredibly slow compared to broadband connection since
almost unimaginably slow for someone who has just started using
the Internet recently, because most people, even if you're using
a dial up are traveling at blistering speeds compared to
the early ones and um and most of the early
(09:14):
online service providers were strictly text based because of this.
I mean, it wasn't just that you know, graphics would
were challenging to to transmit over lines. It's just that
the speed of data transmission was so low that it
would take forever for you to download a picture. So most,
uh most of these were text based at least early on.
(09:36):
Only a few would start to develop graphic user interfaces
over time, and those graphic user interfaces UH in the
late are really in the early nineties were very primitive
compared to what you would see today. I mean, the
Worldwide Web really has redefined, um, the way that we
view interfaces like this, and I think, uh, you know,
(09:57):
for someone who is who is probably new to the
Internet in the last ten years or so, if you
went back to look at some of the interfaces that
these OSPs used back in the day, so to speak, um,
you would go, are you kidding me? Yeah? No. But
for for those of us who grew up during this
(10:18):
this time or who were using computers during this time,
it was really an exciting time because before then, everything
you wanted to do on your computer was was restricted
just to your computer, and you would have to go
and you would get software and you'd run the software
on your computer, but that's it. It was a self
contained system and there was no connection to the outside world.
The modem broke that door open. And first it broke
(10:41):
it open with just having computer to computer communication, which
was already revolutionary for those of us who had personal computers,
and that's where the Bolton board system kind of grew
out of, out of that culture. But getting to the
online service provider where suddenly you had access to to
content and you didn't have to go out and buy
a disk and at the disc into your computer to
(11:01):
to look at that content. Yes, you did have to
have the software on your computer so that you could
access these online service providers. Right. It was essentially a
client that you would use that you would dial into
something and then everything would be delivered through and you'd
be looking at it through the client. But you wouldn't
have to say, get go out and get a new,
(11:22):
UH encyclopedia type of program in order to see the
latest information on stuff. You could log into this online
service provider and see it. And at the time this
was revolutionary, you know. Before again you would just have
to wait till someone published something. You would have to
go out and buy it, and then you would look
at it locally on your computer. UM. And were you
(11:42):
UH or your family UH customers of an online service provider? Um, my,
my wife's family. Several of them had actual accounts with
OSPs personally. Since I started using the internet in actually
I was using bitnet, I should say, UM, I moved
directly to the Internet via a shell account. I was
(12:03):
using a shell account for a long time, which for
for the uninitiated is basically a terminal account where you're
typing commands in and UH, I had a Shell account,
which is Unix based. I believe on most services anyway,
or at the time it was UM until the late nineties,
(12:23):
UH so I really hadn't and I went from a
Shell account directly to the World Wide Web without going
the OSP route right uh Now, as my family actually
we were customers of Genie. I s. The General Electric
had a web service called Genie and UH Capital g
Capital e Yes and Genie UH. It offered things like
(12:48):
message boards and offered email. Among Genie users, there were
games that you could play. Some of them were like
they even had like flight simulators, but they also had
the MUDs or multi user dungeons, yes, in which several
players could all be playing this this text based adventure
game all at the same time. Some of the MUDs
would even allow you to interact directly with players in
(13:11):
in more meaningful ways than just being able to talk
to each other. You could trade items or or even
some of them had the primitive player versus player kind
of interactions where you could engage in combat with each other.
But the reason why we went with Genie specifically was
because of their forums were called round tables. Now, Genie
(13:33):
happened to be a very popular service among a very
niche audience, and that would be science fiction authors. Now,
my parents are both science fiction authors. So my father
in particular, at the time he was he was the
published author. Mom had not written anything with Dad at
(13:53):
yet at that point. Um, but Dad was a published
science fiction author and used Genie to correspond with other
science fiction authors. Um. He was a member of SIFUA,
which is Science Fiction Writers of America, and through Genie
they could stay in touch with each other in a
much more effective way than that, you know, sending letters
or or a corresponding and you know traditional methods. So UM,
(14:17):
so I actually got familiar with online service providers fairly early. UM.
I also learned very early that uh all most of
these meant that I could only be on for a
very short amount of time because otherwise I would get
in trouble for running up the bill. Yeah. Although eventually
most of these online service providers UH in order to
stay competitive, moved to monthly fees as opposed to hourly
(14:40):
fees because um there were a lot of people were
getting more and more accustomed to the idea of having
unlimited access for a flat rate as opposed to having
to pay on an hourly basis. Yes, and back then,
of course, unlimited access really didn't mean that much bandwidth still,
because we're talking more slee text, some primitive graphics, and
(15:03):
really your connection speeds were only so fast anyway, so
it wasn't like you were jamming up the networks by
you know, accessing the the services right right there weren't
a lot of there weren't a lot of people uploading
and downloading things like, um, movies, music or books, because
that would have taken a few years, a long long time.
(15:26):
It would have been faster to go out there and
recreate the movie from scratch. I think you're probably let's
get a cast together. I'm almost certain that's what what
those kids who did h Raiders Lust Arc. We're thinking
we could download it, but just be faster if we
just performed the darn thing. Yep. Um yeah, and and
and I basically got my start in the internet world, um,
(15:51):
actually working in the Internet world as a sales representative
for a national Internet service provider. And one of the
very first things this was in ninety six, and one
of the very first things that I had to answer
for a lot of people was, you know, why should
I sign up with you, and they would come from
a o L or Prodigy or compute serve, and they
didn't understand the difference between an Internet connection, uh, you know,
(16:15):
to the Internet itself versus being on one of those services.
And to some degree there wasn't a connection. In a
lot of cases, the content they wanted it was probably
limited to another osp that they didn't have access to,
but it wasn't It really wasn't long the mid to
late I mean, um, the OSPs put up a good
(16:36):
fight for a while because they didn't necessarily their protocols
were not t c P I P they they all
had a proprietary protocols. Yeah, most of them were packet
switching protocols, but it wasn't the same sort of packet
switching that she's fine and t c P I P R.
So the thing is they weren't really compatible with information
on the Internet. And the thing is, I think it
(16:57):
wasn't necessarily uh the sps out selling them. I mean
a lot of the I s p s offered unlimited
access around that time. Um, that was unusual for people
like a o L. But at the same time, there
was content available from the other services, and I think, uh,
the OSPs gradually felt pressure to open their networks up
(17:20):
to the Internet so that you could get things like
US net news and uh, you know, some of the
web content, because the Worldwide Web and an OSP are
not the same thing, right, right, So some OSPs started
to become gateways to the Internet. Yes, so you could
access both their proprietary content or the content that they
(17:40):
had partnered with other providers to give to their members,
as well as access the wider array of content you
could find on the Internet, which was almost like open
just for public consumption, um and so uh, companies like
a o L and Prodigy in particular, really and even
compu serve really tried to leverage the sort of uh,
(18:01):
this sort of content to to attract people and say, look,
you know, yeah, you could go to an I s P,
but we're providing that service already, and you get access
to this content that you're not going to find on
the Internet. Yeah. That was their big compelling argument right now. Granted,
and that worked for a little while, but it was
definitely a short term thing. So for OSPs to survive,
(18:23):
they really only had one choice, and that was to
to evolve into becoming an I s P. And Internet
service provider, because if they didn't do that, eventually the
content that had been uh exclusive to that particular provider
was going to make it onto the Internet one way
or another. Because the companies that they were making partnerships
(18:45):
with could they they saw that the where the future was,
and that the future was that they needed to have
an online presence of their own on the Internet, and
instead of just partnering with an OSP where their content
is locked up behind this this uh this this wall,
they wanted to have their more control of their own presentation.
And so you started to see these companies create websites
(19:08):
and uh that was that was sort of the beginning
of the end of the USP business. Yeah, it was.
It was one of those things where people could say, well,
you know, I've got access to this company's nineteen million subscribers,
but look how fast the Internet is growing. And you
know if I if I make my content available on
the Internet as well, that I could probably get even
(19:30):
more subscribers. Um. And that's that's gradually the way it's gone. Um.
Most of the biggest online service providers still exist in
some form or at least confuser event a O L
of course, UH do exist still UM, but a lot
of the smaller ones that my genie are no longer
with us, at least not in their original form UM.
(19:55):
And you know, I, as we've been talking about it,
I've been thinking about how OSP sort of are similar
to the net neutrality argument we're having now, where if
you are UM, you know, if you belong to I
s P A UH, you're a subscriber of the Internet
service provider A, you have access to everything on the Internet,
(20:15):
but you might have special access to certain types of
content that you know, people from other Internet service providers
may not have access to you, or may have limited
access to or even slower access to UM. And that's
sort of it's sort of in the same same vein
when you think about it, because you know, if there's
a UH perception of exclusivity that belongs to an OSP,
(20:38):
if you think back to the time, Hey, if you
sign up with us, you get all these great things
that you can't get anywhere else. Well, you know, if
if net neutrality UH goes by the wayside, and we
uh you know, the Internet service providers are allowed to
regulate the flow of traffic on their own networks UM,
then they will be able to claim exclusivity again. Sure, yeah,
(21:00):
and and you know that has its own benefits and
its own drawbacks. The biggest drawback for me, at least
is that with online service providers you they weren't as regional.
You could pretty much find a way of being a
customer of one of these different or multiple online service
providers if you really wanted to, uh, in any major market. Now, granted,
(21:24):
the folks who live in rural parts of the United
States and uh, you know, to expand that across the globe, UM,
they often might be more limited because when we're talking
back in the good old days, you're talking about you know,
again a local phone call. You would have to hope
that whatever service provider you wanted had a UM had
(21:47):
had modems that were within that local area code UM,
and not all of them did. But in most major
markets you would find representations of any of these osp
s there you would be able to be a customer
of any of those, Whereas today, with I s p s,
at least the major I s p s, you may
not have that choice. So it may be that let's
let's just do this is just an example. Uh, Let's
(22:09):
say that time Warner has access to this amazing array
of content, but but not not everything like you know
it's got, but they have their own And then Comcast
has a different selection of equally amazing stuff, but it's
different stuff. You might not live in an area that
has access to both Comcast and Time Warner. You may
(22:30):
have access to only one or the other, which means
that you don't really have choice. You're forced upon a
selection of Internet sites or in Internet services, uh the
and you have to be happy with that. You you're
not going to have the choice of of company B.
Which is why net neutrality is a big deal because
(22:51):
while well it's impossible to say that that being an
I s P, you know that you're not really a
monopoly regionally. You can be a mano compoly nationally, they're
not monopolies. And there are markets where there are multiple
I s p s that you can choose are major ones,
but it's not that way across the entire nation, right right,
(23:13):
and and uh, you know, it will be interesting to
see how the content providers, the the independent content providers
view these situations, because UM they're going to have to
decide whether they're going to want to sell their content
exclusively to UM a COX Communications or a QUEST or
(23:34):
an A T and T. You know, if it means
that people in other areas don't have access to that material,
and they could open themselves up to selling their content
to millions more subscribers by making it open across multiple platforms.
It also might be an opportunity for the satellite Internet
providers to differentiate themselves because satellite Internet can be accessed
(23:56):
by far more people in far more areas, but they
have their own set of problems with latency and bandwidth
simply because of the nature of the communication from the
Earth to the satellite and back. Sure, so you know,
online gaming is much more difficult for satellite Internet subscribers
than it would be for people using cable or DSL
(24:16):
or y Max for that matter. Um So, you know,
it's going to be interesting to see how that argument
plays out. But you can see the similarity there between
the net neutrality arguments that we're making today and the USPS.
I think, yeah, no, I I completely agree. Uh, well,
that was a good discussion about online service providers. I
was actually a little worried about it before we went
(24:37):
into it, because, um, well, for one thing, I wasn't
when when Chris sent me the email. He said OSPs,
and I was like, well, uh, Ohio State Police, That's
exactly what I meant, John. I don't know how you
might have gotten that compute. So I have another Uh,
I have half of another podcast that I can record
about the Ohio State Police. UM, it's it's it's high
(25:02):
in the middle and round on both ends. You know.
I had seen something on on OSPs not too long ago,
and I thought, you know, we should revisit that that
whole thing. And I remember, you know, the the some
of the really unique proprietary organizations like the World for
the Apple users and um actually have any World CD
at home somewhere, which I'm not using as a coaster
(25:22):
because they were far less common than the al that's
a collector's item mint in box. Well, I think that
was an interesting, uh discussion to have about, you know,
again a precursor to the Internet. And uh, now we're
going to have just a little bit of listener mail.
(25:44):
This listener mail comes from Ryan in the UK and
the subject was Jonathan's British accent freaks me out. And
then the email reads, it's the same whenever I hear
you Americans try to speak in our accent. It really
creaks me out big I E face Well, Ryan, Uh,
I was purposefully doing a terrible British accent for that.
(26:07):
Thus the the whole Dick van Dyke joke, because Dick
Vandyke's accent and Mary Poppins was about as horrible as
you could ask for. Uh. My own actual professional acting
British accents are slightly better, but I'm not gonna do
it because I don't want to creep you out. If
anything we do creeps you out, you can let us
(26:27):
know by writing us. Our email address is tech stuff
at how stuff works dot com. We also welcome all questions, criticisms,
podcast ideas, anything like that. Go ahead and send it
on in and Chris and I will talk to you
again really soon for moral thiss and thousands of other topics.
(26:48):
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re invented two thousand twelve camera. It's ready, are you
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera.
It's ready. Are you get in touch with technology? With
text style from how stuff works dot com. Hello again, everyone,
and welcome to tech stuff. My name is Chris Poulette
(00:21):
and I am an editor here at how stuff works
dot com. Sitting across from me, as he always does,
is senior writer Jonathan Strickland. How do hi there? Oh wait,
that's sort of your line, yeah, sort of for hey there, Uh. Today,
we thought we would continue our we we've been doing
a few podcasts recently about sort of the predecessors of
(00:41):
what we think of as the Internet, and we were
kind of gonna go along those same lines, something that
that that consumers had access to before we had access
to the Worldwide Web, and that would be online service providers.
That's kind of the collective term for these sort of companies.
(01:01):
Online service providers actually were sort of the middle ground,
at least the way I think of it, between the
older bulletin board services and the Internet when caught on
as a commercial entity where people would actually have content
that they wanted to sign on um, whereas a bulletin
board was sort of a centralized hub where people would
(01:21):
log in and log out of for information. UH an
online service provider was like that, only much much larger
and Um, although you may be going, wait a minute,
online service providers, I really don't know anything about what
you're talking about. I think you probably have a few
coasters sitting around your home that used to belong to,
(01:42):
UH at least one of them. Yeah, well, let's let's
kind of talk about you know, you can make a
good point about how online service providers kind of bridge
the gap between the bbs s and and say the
current Internet. Um. So, if you think of a BBS,
most bbs as were run on a single computer, yes,
that had a modem line going connected to it, and
(02:04):
often you could only have a single devoted phone line
going to that BBS. BBS, by the way, stands for
bulletin board system, So if you wanted to access a
bulletin board system, you would have to dial into that
bulletin board and then you would have, assuming that no
one else was already connected to it, you could then
go in there, read the message board, maybe play a
(02:25):
short game. UM. You might even be limited to a
specific amount of time before it automatically kicks you off.
So that you don't just just a hog all the
time of the system. Right. These were These were small
and and usually operated by just one or two dedicated
folks who are interested in hosting a service like this.
So you wouldn't want to monopolize their the service because
(02:47):
then you wouldn't have anything else from anyone else to
uh enjoy. You would just be taking up all the time.
So these bulletin board services uh systems rather were uh
we're fairly primitive now, and online service provider was more
like a network. Um. You you actually had a couple
of steps here. You would again, you're using a modem,
(03:07):
and we're talking about the old dial up modems. So
these are modems that are connected to phone lines, and
you would use the modem to connect to uh, well,
it's a local area connection, you know. You would you
would dial into a local connection that would then connect
you to the overall network. UM. A lot of the
online service providers charged by the minute, or by the
(03:30):
hour or or the some of them later on would
charge by the month, right right, And UM yeah, basically
in this case, if you wanted to sign up for
service with an online service provider, UM, you would have
hope that they had a node local to you, So
they would have a pool what they would call a
pool of modems uh, sitting there and say the downtown
(03:52):
area of your of the local large city, and you
would dial a local number and that would connect you
to via their own network to you know, the main servers,
and from there you could access the information, right because
otherwise you would have to pay twice. You would have
to pay once for the phone call, so you're paying
the phone operator one one price, and then you're paying
(04:15):
the the the operator, the online service provider um and
a subscription fee essentially to access their services. Now, these networks,
in many ways, especially later on as as they began
to evolve, started to resemble what we think of as
the Internet, except for one really really important distinction, which
(04:36):
is that they all remained independent of each other. Yes,
so if you belonged to one online service provider, so
let's say compy Serve that was a famous one, right,
and then let's say say Chris belongs to copy Serve,
but I belong to Prodigy. Now, both of those services
did have things like electronic mail for their members, but
(04:56):
the members could only email other members of that same service,
so I could not email Chris because we would be
on two different online service providers. There would not be
a crossover there because this is predating the era where
the Internet became available to the general public. At this point,
the Internet is still really the domain of uh, the
(05:19):
universities and the government. Right, I don't want Hopefully nobody
paused the podcast to write us an email and tell
us no, I had comput Serve and I was allowed
to email on the people. Yes, well there are still
comput Serve subscribers. That is, the service still exists, but
it's no longer an online service provider. Yes, later on,
as they became connected to the Internet, you could do this.
(05:40):
But what we're talking about is when these services started
because uh, compu Serve, for example, was founded in nine nine,
which was before way before the Internet actually became a
popular service among the you know, uh everyday user. You know, well, yes,
in sixty nine, they were still developing the protocols that
(06:00):
formed the backbone of the Internet, and the backbone as
far as the software site is concerned, at least, yeah,
that would allow it to be a major network. Right,
there were a few, very few systems connected to our
pinet at the time, there wasn't There really was no Internet. Internet. Um,
so yeah, we're talking about let's say, okay, so before
(06:23):
the Internet has really become a public utility in a way,
if you you know, using utility is still kind of misleading,
but just to to say that it's open to service
service service. So before that you had these private networks.
They're all self contained. Now, each private network gave its
(06:45):
members access to certain services that again mirror what we
find on the Internet, but what you would find on
one service would not necessarily be the same as what
you would find on another. So for example, if you
were a compu Serve customer and you logged in and
you wanted to check the news that was available through
various articles on copy Serve, it may not be the
(07:05):
same selection that you would find if you were a
Prodigy Serve customer. That's right. Yeah, a lot of these
online service providers had struck deals with different entities for
for providing content. Going going back to compu Serve um,
they were the hosts for the first online newspaper in
the United States, the Columbus Dispatch from Ohio. U signed
(07:29):
on in July of n Back when compu Serve had
about thirty six hundred total subscribers um, and so you know,
they were the they were the ones if you wanted
to to read the Columbus Dispatch, that's where you would go.
You would go to compu Serve and sign on and
uh a lot of other places, a lot of other sorry,
a lot of other newspapers signed on with compu Serve
(07:50):
after that. But uh, providers like Prodigy and America Online. Yeah,
that's the one we're talking about. With the coasters. Yes,
when they would send out lots and lots and lots
of disks and people began using them as coasters. People
began referring to the discs which they would get, uh
numerous discs in the mail and in cereal boxes and
(08:11):
in polly bags that came around windows of passing cars.
And it was it was crazy, yeah, that people used
to refer to them, uh and derisively as coasters. But no,
I mean they're basically if you wanted a service, say
you wanted subscription to The New York Times, you might
not be able to get it with one osp You
would have to sign on to another because that's the
(08:32):
one that had the content deal in place, which means
that you would have to pay another subscription fee to
another online service provider and something like we said. Sometimes
these early ones were charging by the hour, so you
would log on and it would depend not only on
how long you stayed on there, but the speed of
your modem connection. And these modum connection speeds the dial
(08:54):
up ones were incredibly slow compared to broadband connection since
almost unimaginably slow for someone who has just started using
the Internet recently, because most people, even if you're using
a dial up are traveling at blistering speeds compared to
the early ones and um and most of the early
(09:14):
online service providers were strictly text based because of this.
I mean, it wasn't just that you know, graphics would
were challenging to to transmit over lines. It's just that
the speed of data transmission was so low that it
would take forever for you to download a picture. So most,
uh most of these were text based at least early on.
(09:36):
Only a few would start to develop graphic user interfaces
over time, and those graphic user interfaces UH in the
late are really in the early nineties were very primitive
compared to what you would see today. I mean, the
Worldwide Web really has redefined, um, the way that we
view interfaces like this, and I think, uh, you know,
(09:57):
for someone who is who is probably new to the
Internet in the last ten years or so, if you
went back to look at some of the interfaces that
these OSPs used back in the day, so to speak, um,
you would go, are you kidding me? Yeah? No. But
for for those of us who grew up during this
(10:18):
this time or who were using computers during this time,
it was really an exciting time because before then, everything
you wanted to do on your computer was was restricted
just to your computer, and you would have to go
and you would get software and you'd run the software
on your computer, but that's it. It was a self
contained system and there was no connection to the outside world.
The modem broke that door open. And first it broke
(10:41):
it open with just having computer to computer communication, which
was already revolutionary for those of us who had personal computers,
and that's where the Bolton board system kind of grew
out of, out of that culture. But getting to the
online service provider where suddenly you had access to to
content and you didn't have to go out and buy
a disk and at the disc into your computer to
(11:01):
to look at that content. Yes, you did have to
have the software on your computer so that you could
access these online service providers. Right. It was essentially a
client that you would use that you would dial into
something and then everything would be delivered through and you'd
be looking at it through the client. But you wouldn't
have to say, get go out and get a new,
(11:22):
UH encyclopedia type of program in order to see the
latest information on stuff. You could log into this online
service provider and see it. And at the time this
was revolutionary, you know. Before again you would just have
to wait till someone published something. You would have to
go out and buy it, and then you would look
at it locally on your computer. UM. And were you
(11:42):
UH or your family UH customers of an online service provider? Um, my,
my wife's family. Several of them had actual accounts with
OSPs personally. Since I started using the internet in actually
I was using bitnet, I should say, UM, I moved
directly to the Internet via a shell account. I was
(12:03):
using a shell account for a long time, which for
for the uninitiated is basically a terminal account where you're
typing commands in and UH, I had a Shell account,
which is Unix based. I believe on most services anyway,
or at the time it was UM until the late nineties,
(12:23):
UH so I really hadn't and I went from a
Shell account directly to the World Wide Web without going
the OSP route right uh Now, as my family actually
we were customers of Genie. I s. The General Electric
had a web service called Genie and UH Capital g
Capital e Yes and Genie UH. It offered things like
(12:48):
message boards and offered email. Among Genie users, there were
games that you could play. Some of them were like
they even had like flight simulators, but they also had
the MUDs or multi user dungeons, yes, in which several
players could all be playing this this text based adventure
game all at the same time. Some of the MUDs
would even allow you to interact directly with players in
(13:11):
in more meaningful ways than just being able to talk
to each other. You could trade items or or even
some of them had the primitive player versus player kind
of interactions where you could engage in combat with each other.
But the reason why we went with Genie specifically was
because of their forums were called round tables. Now, Genie
(13:33):
happened to be a very popular service among a very
niche audience, and that would be science fiction authors. Now,
my parents are both science fiction authors. So my father
in particular, at the time he was he was the
published author. Mom had not written anything with Dad at
(13:53):
yet at that point. Um, but Dad was a published
science fiction author and used Genie to correspond with other
science fiction authors. Um. He was a member of SIFUA,
which is Science Fiction Writers of America, and through Genie
they could stay in touch with each other in a
much more effective way than that, you know, sending letters
or or a corresponding and you know traditional methods. So UM,
(14:17):
so I actually got familiar with online service providers fairly early. UM.
I also learned very early that uh all most of
these meant that I could only be on for a
very short amount of time because otherwise I would get
in trouble for running up the bill. Yeah. Although eventually
most of these online service providers UH in order to
stay competitive, moved to monthly fees as opposed to hourly
(14:40):
fees because um there were a lot of people were
getting more and more accustomed to the idea of having
unlimited access for a flat rate as opposed to having
to pay on an hourly basis. Yes, and back then,
of course, unlimited access really didn't mean that much bandwidth still,
because we're talking more slee text, some primitive graphics, and
(15:03):
really your connection speeds were only so fast anyway, so
it wasn't like you were jamming up the networks by
you know, accessing the the services right right there weren't
a lot of there weren't a lot of people uploading
and downloading things like, um, movies, music or books, because
that would have taken a few years, a long long time.
(15:26):
It would have been faster to go out there and
recreate the movie from scratch. I think you're probably let's
get a cast together. I'm almost certain that's what what
those kids who did h Raiders Lust Arc. We're thinking
we could download it, but just be faster if we
just performed the darn thing. Yep. Um yeah, and and
and I basically got my start in the internet world, um,
(15:51):
actually working in the Internet world as a sales representative
for a national Internet service provider. And one of the
very first things this was in ninety six, and one
of the very first things that I had to answer
for a lot of people was, you know, why should
I sign up with you, and they would come from
a o L or Prodigy or compute serve, and they
didn't understand the difference between an Internet connection, uh, you know,
(16:15):
to the Internet itself versus being on one of those services.
And to some degree there wasn't a connection. In a
lot of cases, the content they wanted it was probably
limited to another osp that they didn't have access to,
but it wasn't It really wasn't long the mid to
late I mean, um, the OSPs put up a good
(16:36):
fight for a while because they didn't necessarily their protocols
were not t c P I P they they all
had a proprietary protocols. Yeah, most of them were packet
switching protocols, but it wasn't the same sort of packet
switching that she's fine and t c P I P R.
So the thing is they weren't really compatible with information
on the Internet. And the thing is, I think it
(16:57):
wasn't necessarily uh the sps out selling them. I mean
a lot of the I s p s offered unlimited
access around that time. Um, that was unusual for people
like a o L. But at the same time, there
was content available from the other services, and I think, uh,
the OSPs gradually felt pressure to open their networks up
(17:20):
to the Internet so that you could get things like
US net news and uh, you know, some of the
web content, because the Worldwide Web and an OSP are
not the same thing, right, right, So some OSPs started
to become gateways to the Internet. Yes, so you could
access both their proprietary content or the content that they
(17:40):
had partnered with other providers to give to their members,
as well as access the wider array of content you
could find on the Internet, which was almost like open
just for public consumption, um and so uh, companies like
a o L and Prodigy in particular, really and even
compu serve really tried to leverage the sort of uh,
(18:01):
this sort of content to to attract people and say, look,
you know, yeah, you could go to an I s P,
but we're providing that service already, and you get access
to this content that you're not going to find on
the Internet. Yeah. That was their big compelling argument right now. Granted,
and that worked for a little while, but it was
definitely a short term thing. So for OSPs to survive,
(18:23):
they really only had one choice, and that was to
to evolve into becoming an I s P. And Internet
service provider, because if they didn't do that, eventually the
content that had been uh exclusive to that particular provider
was going to make it onto the Internet one way
or another. Because the companies that they were making partnerships
(18:45):
with could they they saw that the where the future was,
and that the future was that they needed to have
an online presence of their own on the Internet, and
instead of just partnering with an OSP where their content
is locked up behind this this uh this this wall,
they wanted to have their more control of their own presentation.
And so you started to see these companies create websites
(19:08):
and uh that was that was sort of the beginning
of the end of the USP business. Yeah, it was.
It was one of those things where people could say, well,
you know, I've got access to this company's nineteen million subscribers,
but look how fast the Internet is growing. And you
know if I if I make my content available on
the Internet as well, that I could probably get even
(19:30):
more subscribers. Um. And that's that's gradually the way it's gone. Um.
Most of the biggest online service providers still exist in
some form or at least confuser event a O L
of course, UH do exist still UM, but a lot
of the smaller ones that my genie are no longer
with us, at least not in their original form UM.
(19:55):
And you know, I, as we've been talking about it,
I've been thinking about how OSP sort of are similar
to the net neutrality argument we're having now, where if
you are UM, you know, if you belong to I
s P A UH, you're a subscriber of the Internet
service provider A, you have access to everything on the Internet,
(20:15):
but you might have special access to certain types of
content that you know, people from other Internet service providers
may not have access to you, or may have limited
access to or even slower access to UM. And that's
sort of it's sort of in the same same vein
when you think about it, because you know, if there's
a UH perception of exclusivity that belongs to an OSP,
(20:38):
if you think back to the time, Hey, if you
sign up with us, you get all these great things
that you can't get anywhere else. Well, you know, if
if net neutrality UH goes by the wayside, and we
uh you know, the Internet service providers are allowed to
regulate the flow of traffic on their own networks UM,
then they will be able to claim exclusivity again. Sure, yeah,
(21:00):
and and you know that has its own benefits and
its own drawbacks. The biggest drawback for me, at least
is that with online service providers you they weren't as regional.
You could pretty much find a way of being a
customer of one of these different or multiple online service
providers if you really wanted to, uh, in any major market. Now, granted,
(21:24):
the folks who live in rural parts of the United
States and uh, you know, to expand that across the globe, UM,
they often might be more limited because when we're talking
back in the good old days, you're talking about you know,
again a local phone call. You would have to hope
that whatever service provider you wanted had a UM had
(21:47):
had modems that were within that local area code UM,
and not all of them did. But in most major
markets you would find representations of any of these osp
s there you would be able to be a customer
of any of those, Whereas today, with I s p s,
at least the major I s p s, you may
not have that choice. So it may be that let's
let's just do this is just an example. Uh, Let's
(22:09):
say that time Warner has access to this amazing array
of content, but but not not everything like you know
it's got, but they have their own And then Comcast
has a different selection of equally amazing stuff, but it's
different stuff. You might not live in an area that
has access to both Comcast and Time Warner. You may
(22:30):
have access to only one or the other, which means
that you don't really have choice. You're forced upon a
selection of Internet sites or in Internet services, uh the
and you have to be happy with that. You you're
not going to have the choice of of company B.
Which is why net neutrality is a big deal because
(22:51):
while well it's impossible to say that that being an
I s P, you know that you're not really a
monopoly regionally. You can be a mano compoly nationally, they're
not monopolies. And there are markets where there are multiple
I s p s that you can choose are major ones,
but it's not that way across the entire nation, right right,
(23:13):
and and uh, you know, it will be interesting to
see how the content providers, the the independent content providers
view these situations, because UM they're going to have to
decide whether they're going to want to sell their content
exclusively to UM a COX Communications or a QUEST or
(23:34):
an A T and T. You know, if it means
that people in other areas don't have access to that material,
and they could open themselves up to selling their content
to millions more subscribers by making it open across multiple platforms.
It also might be an opportunity for the satellite Internet
providers to differentiate themselves because satellite Internet can be accessed
(23:56):
by far more people in far more areas, but they
have their own set of problems with latency and bandwidth
simply because of the nature of the communication from the
Earth to the satellite and back. Sure, so you know,
online gaming is much more difficult for satellite Internet subscribers
than it would be for people using cable or DSL
(24:16):
or y Max for that matter. Um So, you know,
it's going to be interesting to see how that argument
plays out. But you can see the similarity there between
the net neutrality arguments that we're making today and the USPS.
I think, yeah, no, I I completely agree. Uh, well,
that was a good discussion about online service providers. I
was actually a little worried about it before we went
(24:37):
into it, because, um, well, for one thing, I wasn't
when when Chris sent me the email. He said OSPs,
and I was like, well, uh, Ohio State Police, That's
exactly what I meant, John. I don't know how you
might have gotten that compute. So I have another Uh,
I have half of another podcast that I can record
about the Ohio State Police. UM, it's it's it's high
(25:02):
in the middle and round on both ends. You know.
I had seen something on on OSPs not too long ago,
and I thought, you know, we should revisit that that
whole thing. And I remember, you know, the the some
of the really unique proprietary organizations like the World for
the Apple users and um actually have any World CD
at home somewhere, which I'm not using as a coaster
(25:22):
because they were far less common than the al that's
a collector's item mint in box. Well, I think that
was an interesting, uh discussion to have about, you know,
again a precursor to the Internet. And uh, now we're
going to have just a little bit of listener mail.
(25:44):
This listener mail comes from Ryan in the UK and
the subject was Jonathan's British accent freaks me out. And
then the email reads, it's the same whenever I hear
you Americans try to speak in our accent. It really
creaks me out big I E face Well, Ryan, Uh,
I was purposefully doing a terrible British accent for that.
(26:07):
Thus the the whole Dick van Dyke joke, because Dick
Vandyke's accent and Mary Poppins was about as horrible as
you could ask for. Uh. My own actual professional acting
British accents are slightly better, but I'm not gonna do
it because I don't want to creep you out. If
anything we do creeps you out, you can let us
(26:27):
know by writing us. Our email address is tech stuff
at how stuff works dot com. We also welcome all questions, criticisms,
podcast ideas, anything like that. Go ahead and send it
on in and Chris and I will talk to you
again really soon for moral thiss and thousands of other topics.
(26:48):
Does it how stuff works dot com and be sure
to check out the new tech stuff blog now on
the how Stuff Works homepage, brought to you by the
re invented two thousand twelve camera. It's ready, are you
TechStuff News
Hosts And Creators
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Karah Preiss
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