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Ask HN: Pre-Internet online services architecture

5 points by ramk ↗ HN
I recently became aware of the world of pre-Internet online services [1] (AppleLink, Delphi, CompuServe, AOL etc) that provided a wide variety of online services like chat, file-sharing, forums and even other services like the WELL [2] which almost sounds like a pre-Internet Reddit.

I have not been able to find much detail about the network and software architecture of these systems. Does any one know or can point to resources about the architecture of these systems. What was the backend of these systems? Were they mostly “hosted” products with the software running on the provider’s servers or was it peer-to-peer? What network protocols did they use?

As a side note - I came across these things in the book “The Innovators” by Walter Isaacson [3], which is an excellent book if you are interested in the history of computing and the central characters right from its early beginnings in the 1800s to the current times.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Pre%E2%80%93World_Wide_Web_online_services [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_WELL [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovators_(book)

6 comments

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danjayh
I have fond memories of using Prodigy as a small child. When they added images to the news service, it was magical. I can't think of anything now that brings the same level of excitement as the progression of technology during my childhood in the late 80's and 90's (Maybe self-driving cars, but they're far less accessible).

On the architecture, I can't help you. We did run a small BBS when we were in 5th grade, but it fit on a single PC with a dialup line. There were several common software packages that provided file hosting, forums, games, extensibility, etc. that were used to run them. Towards the end, some (including ours) were even going graphical (google 'remote imaging protocol'). Much of the online world was confined to BBSs prior to the advent of the Internet.

ramk
Thank you for your personal perspective and the pointer to Remote Imaging Protocol. When you say you ran a BBS on your PC - how did others access the content on your BBS? Would others have access to the content when you were no longer connected to the dialup line?
danjayh
It wasn't through the Internet. We had a dedicated phone line for it (quite an expense for a 5th grader). Others dialed in directly, and when one user was connected, anyone else trying to connect got a busy signal. If the user wasn't remote, they paid long-distance charges by the minute to the telco. Larger BBSs had banks of phone lines to enable multiple users to connect simultaneously. Just the concept of multiplexing a single physical connection between multiple applications (or even users) via SLIP or PPP and TCP/IP was a pretty revolutionary change that came with the move from terminal-based communication to binary communication.

EDIT: I guess I should have said 'from circuit-switched networking to packet-switched networking', but ... you get the idea. The change largely occurred simultaneously.

DanBC
This is a great question and if I had some way of boosting it I would.

The costs of getting online with these services was pretty high.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3087928

Compuserve, charging $11 per hour, had "more than 250,000 subscribers".

Delphi, charging $6 per hour had a loyal but small (less than 10,000 users) following.

$11 in 1988 is about $23 today.

ramk
Yes, they sound very expensive! As I understand, even earlier than that there were Time-Sharing computing businesses in the 60s and early 70s that charged per-hour for computing time which were expensive. I guess we have come a full circle now with cloud computing though the modern ones are comparatively less expensive.
icedchai
Older online services ran on minicomputers with connectivity over private networks. Read up about modems, terminal servers, protocols like X.25, minicomputers like DEC VAXen, PDPs, networks like Tymnet and Telenet/SprintNet.