Launched at Tysons Corner, Virginia
William von Meister (born February 21, 1942 - died May 18, 1995) was an American entrepreneur who founded and participated in a number of startup ventures in the Washington DC area.
In 1978, Meister founded The Source, an online services company. It was eventually sold to Reader's Digest and later acquired by its rival, CompuServe.
In 1983, Control Video Corporation was founded by Meister. The company originally ran the GameLine dial-up service using a toll-free number for the Atari 2600, which Meister claimed to be able to handle up to 100,000 users. The GameLine was a modem that plugged into the cartridge slot. It allowed users to "download" games over a phone line connection. It became one of many smaller companies that went bust in the video game crash of 1983.
Click here for further details. Control Video Corporation retained its name until 1985, when it became Quantum Computer Services.
One of its co-founders was Marc Seriff, born in 1948. From 1985 - 1996 Marc Seriff served as Quantum's Senior Vice President. He was responsible for building the technical infrastructure that allowed Quantum / AOL to grow from a small online service into a massive network, having millions of users. He oversaw development of the company's software, servers, and network architecture, playing a key role in designing the user interface and user experience that made AOL so popular.
As AOL grew, the company went public in 1992. Seriff remained for several more years, helping to guide it through a period of rapid growth and change. His contributions to AOL were instrumental in fact in shaping the early internet, and his work continues to influence the way we interact with online services today.
Further background to Quantum — Playnet New York Playnet Quantum Link (or Q-Link) became the American and Canadian online service for Commodore 64 and 128 personal computers, the Apple II in 1987, and the PC in 1988. It officially started November 5, 1985, in Vienna, Virginia. The original Q-Link, as mentioned, was a modified version of the PlayNET system. It featured electronic mail, online chat (in its People Connection department), public domain file sharing libraries, online news, and instant messaging using On Line Messages (OLMs). Other noteworthy features included multiplayer games like checkers, chess, backgammon, hangman, a clone of the television game show "Wheel Of Fortune" called 'Puzzler', and an interactive graphic resort island (called Habitat during beta-testing, then renamed Club Caribe).
In October 1986, Quantum Link expanded their services to Bingo, Slot machines, Blackjack and Poker in RabbitJack's Casino, also RockLink, a section about rock music. The software archives were organized into hierarchical folders and expanded. In November 1986, the service offered to digitize users' photos (to be included in their profiles) and started an online auction service.
Connections to Q-Link were typically made by dial-up modems with speeds from 300 to 2400 baud, with 1200 being the most common. The service was normally open weekday evenings and all day on weekends. Pricing was $9.95 per month, with additional fees of six cents per minute (later raised to eight) for so-called "plus" areas, including most of the aforementioned services. Users were given one free hour of "plus" usage per month. Hosts of forums and trivia games could also earn additional free "plus" time.
Its competitors were CompuServe and The Source, and bulletin board systems (single and multiuser), with gaming systems such as Scepter of Goth and Swords of Chaos. Its graphic display was better than many competing systems however because they used specialized Commodore software with Commodore's nonstandard protocol. However, this also limited their market, only the Commodore 64 and 128 could run the software necessary to access it.
Early Employees Meanwhile, Apple Computer had created its own online network that went live in July 1985. Called AppleLink, its target audience was not the general public, but was exclusively for Apple employees and certified dealers, and later for software developers. It made use of a graphic user interface, that looked different from that of the Macintosh, but utilized the same concept of files and folders with the addition of bulletin boards and email within the system.
To operate this on the server end, Apple contracted with GEIS (General Electric Information Services), that ran a text-only GEnie service, on their Mark III timesharing computers. The software that ran on the local computer to connect to the system was written in Pascal, on contract by Pete Burnight of Central Coast Software. GEIS charged a high price for use of their system, costing about $30 million per year, which translated to $15 per hour during business hours for users of AppleLink, and as well provided no income to Apple.
Click here for that early link — 1987-1989 with Apple. In August 1988, PC Link, a service for IBM-compatible PCs developed in a joint venture with the Tandy Corporation. In 1989 it launched its first instant messaging service.
In October 1989 a new version for Mac and Windows was launched as America Online.
Advertisements invited modem owners to "Try America Online FREE", promising free software and trial membership. AOL had charged its users an hourly fee until December 1996, but now the company changed to a flat monthly rate of $19.95. During this time, AOL connections were flooded with users trying to connect, and many cancelled their accounts due to constant busy signals. A commercial was made featuring Steve Case telling people AOL was working day and night to fix the problem.
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They recruited Larry Roberts (former head of the ARPANet) to be President of the company, and Barry Wessler. After it moved to McLean Virginia, in 1979 it was acquired by GTE Telephone (GTE is now Verizon) then moved to offices in Reston. In 1986 GTE Telenet was acquired by Sprint (Southern Pacific Railroad Internal Networking Telephony) and renamed SprintNet, with customers migrated to its SprintLink IP network.
PlayNet (or PlayNET) was an American online service for Commodore 64 personal computers that operated from 1984 to 1987 in Troy, New York. PlayNet was founded in 1983 by two former GE Global Research employees, Dave Panzl and Howard Goldberg, as the first person-to-person, online communication and game network to feature home computer based graphics. The founders launched the business initially with their own money. They then raised over $2.5 million from a variety of investors, including the venture capital funds of the Town of North Greenbush NY, Key Bank, Alan Patricof & Associates, and the New York State Science and Technology Foundation, and a group of individual investors through a limited R&D partnership led by McGinn Smith. The service had two membership options: an $8/month service charge plus $2.75/hour connect time charge, or no service charge and $3.75 per hour connection charge. File downloads were charged a flat rate of $0.50 each. In 1985 PlayNet licensed their system to Control Video Corporation (CVC) just before it became Quantum Computing Services. A modified version of this PlayNet software (Quantum Link/Q-Link) was ported to the PC in 1989, creating the first version of the AOL software. Even in 2005, some aspects of the original PlayNet communication protocols appeared to be used by AOL.
Bankruptcy Initially the PlayNet offices had been located in the J Building on Peoples Avenue in Troy, part of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute incubator program. It subsequently moved to RPI's Technology Park in North Greenbush. PlayNet declared bankruptcy in March 1986, ceasing operations in 1988 after Quantum stopped paying royalties.
Control Video Corporation had first hired Steve Case as a marketing executive in January 1983. The crash in the video game market put considerable stress on finances, and by May the company was near bankruptcy. CEO William von Meister and other remaining employees worked on ideas to try to keep the company going, but in early 1985 William von Meister quietly left. In May the company was reorganized as Quantum Computer Services. Jim Kimsey, a manufacturing consultant at Control Video, was CEO, Marc Seriff mentioned earlier was CTO and Steve Case handled marketing. They made use of Control Video's dial-up service to create and launch Quantum Link, focusing on the Commodore 64 and 128 computer platform. The software used its own take on point and click, using the cursor keys to select options from a colorful screen. It was a popular way for Commodore users to get online with a world larger than a dial-up BBS. It passed tokens back and forth and provided a fixed price service tailored for home users.
Steve Case at Quantum wanted to expand his Quantum Link service beyond the Commodore market, and Apple wanted something like AppleLink to connect with its customers. It took months of meetings with Apple before Case could get the company to agree to let Quantum handle the project, but by 1987, they were ready to start what was known internally as "Project Samuel". Quantum would create and operate the online system, and Apple would help with development of the client software. This software had to meet Apple's requirements that it look like an Apple product, have screens designed the way Apple wanted them, and Quantum was required to make available adequate customer service. Apple promised to help promote the product, and would get a royalty of ten percent on all subscribers. In May 1988, Quantum and Apple launched AppleLink Personal Edition for Apple II and Macintosh computers. It was designed initially to be used with the Apple II, but its ultimate target was the Mac.
AOL Timeline 1991-2015
In February 1991, AOL for DOS was launched using a GeoWorks interface; it was followed a year later by AOL for Windows. This coincided with growth in pay-based online services, like Prodigy, CompuServe, and GEnie. 1991 also saw the introduction of an original Dungeons & Dragons title called Neverwinter Nights from Stormfront Studios; which was one of the first Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games to depict the adventure with graphics instead of text.
In March AOL proprietary e-mail services connect to the Internet. In September AOL add Usenet Newsgroups access, jokingly called the "Eternal September", a reference to how new college and university freshmen would earlier gain first awkward access in September, but now new users arrived continually.
The Arpanet (now called the NSFNet / Internet) reaches 5 million host computers having 100,000 domain names with an equal number of www sites. The NSFnet is dissolved on April 30, 1995. The high quality commercial networks (Tier 1 networks) including AT&T, Sprint, ANSnet (sold to AOL in 1995), UUNet and others have formed a mesh network (rather than a single backbone network), interconnecting with each other on a settlement free basis i.e. no fees charged by the receiving network, known as peering.
In 1996, AOL replaced Booklink with a browser based on Internet Explorer, allegedly in exchange for inclusion of AOL in Windows.