GEnie

GEnie was an online service created by General Electric. It was launched as an ASCII-based service by GE's Information Services division in October 1985, and received attention as the first serious comercial competition to CompuServe. The initial price for connection, at both 300 bps and then-high-speed 1200 bps, was $6 per hour during "non-prime-time" hours (that is, evenings and weekends.) Daytime, "prime time" hours were rather prohibitive and cost between $18 and $24/hour.

Later, GEnie developed the Star*Services package, which offered a set of "unlimited use" features for $4.95/month. Other services cost extra, mirroring the tiered service model that was popular at the time.

GEnie's forums were called RoundTables (RTs), and each had a page number associated with it - akin to a web address today. For some time, GEnie published a bimonthly paper magazine called LiveWire. The service included the aforementioned RTs, games, mail, and shopping.

Although GEnie developed a loyal following, particularly for its hosted forums, it never had enough backing from GE and failed to keep up when Prodigy and America Online produced graphics-based online services that drew the masses. Programs such as Aladdin were developed in response, and were the equivalent of modern-day email programs and newsreaders.

In addition, as the Internet gained popularity, GEnie took its time developing GEnie Mail-to-Internet Mail gateways (which did see the light of day, but were cost-prohibitive) and support for Usenet Newsgroups.

GE sold GEnie in 1996 to IDT. IDT attempted to transition Genie (now all-lowercase) to an ISP, but ultimately failed. IDT also attempted to place a GUI on the still text-based service.