MSN began back in 1993-1994. It was put on hold because of the DoJ investigations. Developers had access to it for a while. MSN can be considered of the “old” CompuServe model.

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[…] the stark contrast in how each approached his discussion of technology. Zittrain’s article, “Battle of the Networks” , from The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It was very obviously socially deterministic, an […]

[…] as Jonathan Zittrain notes in “Battle of the Networks,” (Chapter two of The Future of the Internet, and How to Stop It), that used to be the case. […]

[…] Chapter two of The Future of the Internet and How to Stop it, Jonathan Zittrain “illustrates the relationships among the standard layers that can be said to […]

Another historical case study in this context would France Telecom’s Minitel (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel). It would be interesting to imagine an alternate history in which a socialist bureaucracy heavily influenced the early development of networked systems

The author paints an interesting dystopian picture speculation, but alternative histories (along the lines of ‘what if the allies had not won WWII’ & etc.) seem to assume that no other serendipitous factors would have turned the arc of social/technological development to an outcome not predicted by its antecedents. Heck – perhaps with this scenario we would all be zipping along on our personal Brother (TM) jetpacks now?

Prodigy, was something completely different. It was what the Web would become, only about 10 years before it’s time. At the time all of the other services were totally text based. Prodigy did amazing things, though at a cost! Yes it was mainframe based ( all services were), and centrally controlled ( all services were). But it was “Graphic” in nature. This was a first, it was called video text, and it predated windows, ( at least in beta). It was done with In-House written technology called TBOL (trintex basic object language). That ran on an hierarchy of Mini-Computers running in local “Bunkers)”, IBM’s TPF ( same as SABRE), and DB2 (IBMs relational database system).

For it’s day Prodigy was a major innovation. Windows didn’t exist, DOS ruled the realm. The Prodigy diskette, kicked DOS off the system and loaded a propriety OS that understood TBOL. There were data cache’s up and down the line to speed delivery of content. The TBOL content was not graphic in nature instead it was instructions on how to display Graphics on the target device. Thus optimizing a 2400 baud connection, while enabling graphic delivery.

I know, I was there in 1987. I had a compuserve account from 1988-2002, I got my first Internet account with “Chris.com” AKA XO communications in 1992, which was where I learned UNIX on their Shell Accounts.

The reason was, at the time there were no alternatives…. The internet was not available for commercial use. Even though PC’s were fairly ubiquitous by 1983, large scale processing power wasn’t, you still needed mainframes to do anything that scaled up. Mainframes, have great scalability but also have great inhibitors due to their cost. Around 1983, I was paying ~$1.65 per cpu second. We are talking about millions of dollars at stake. Everything had to be done very carefully or not at all. This was why PC’s started to boom around that time. In this time frame , we put PC’s on our programmers desks ( 3-5K dollars per, in 1980 dollars) just to cut down our Mainframe CPU costs.

Jim

AT&T had restrictions well into the 1980’s .. If you wanted to use a modem other then an AT&T DataPhone, you had to lease the Data Access Arrangement (DAA) from AT&T. The DAA is a fairly simple electronic interface between the modem and the network, that is designed to electrically isolate the modem from the network to prevent “damage to the network”. In the early 1980’s the only place you could get a certified DAA was from AT&T. 3rd party vendors were not allowed to incorporate them into their own designs. While if you leased a DataPhone, the circuit was built in.

Ah, I remember the shiiiiiiiiish-shuuuuuush of the modem so well. And garish BBS logins. Kind of miss it all, really.

Sounds like AT+T had ossified a bit.

That would have been a strange world indeed.

The key point here is needed more now then ever and that is “little concern for controlling the network or it’s users” I feel that this is akin to freedom of thought. More importantly open networks, open data, open user identity, no secrets. Users will behave do quality work because they are netliving in the open-this would lead to alot more then rough consensus but toward quality consensus.

Yes, Apple ][, it’s a ‘personal’ computer.