Saturday, March 30, 2013

PlayNET Giving Birth to AOL


**VIDEO FIXED**

What we have here is EXTREMELY rare footage of a Commodore 64 (well, an SX-64, you don't see those out in the wild too much) connecting to PlayNET, one of the first public online services right alongside CompuServ, and before AOL and Even QuantumLink (or QLink). This footage appears to have been recorded in 1985.

Actually, speaking of AOL and Qlink, PlayNET is directly related to BOTH! If you are familiar with Qlink, you'll notice the interface looks stunningly similar. Thats because QuantumLink is a direct descendant of PlayNET. I'll edit this later to put in more details, but I do know that PlayNET begat QuantumLink, which begat AOL (America Online).

A bit of a personal aside, my father told me that used to game avidly on this service, mostly playing Backgammon. In fact, ACCORDING TO HIM (ahem)... he either placed first or second place in a PlayNET Backgammon tournament. I can neither confirm nor deny that, other than brief glimpses of memory of him playing it. That is all :)

0 comments:

Post a Comment