[ Retro Scan of the Week ] Welcome to eWorld
January 2nd, 2012 by Benj Edwards
The time Apple went AOL.
In the lost era between Jobs (1985-1996), Apple produced many strange and ill-fated products. Here we see an ad for eWorld, Apple’s subscription dial-up online service that launched in June 1994.
eWorld offered proprietary features like message forums, email, weather, news, and other information in a fashion similar to CompuServe, Prodigy, or AOL. It also provided an early consumer portal to the Internet.
Due to its high price ($8.95 per month plus $7.90 per hour from 6 AM to 6 PM on weekdays), poor marketing, and the fact that the World Wide Web was breathing down its neck, eWorld never really took off. Apple shut down the service in March 1996.
By the way, Happy New Year!
Discussion Topic of the Week: Did you ever use a subscription online service? Which one(s)?
January 2nd, 2012 at 1:22 pm
I never subscribed to eWorld, but I do have a t-shirt given out during its launch. The service was just too expensive, and my old 14.4 modem and the WWW did just fine during that time, thank you…
January 2nd, 2012 at 5:19 pm
Prodigy! That was my first introduction to online worlds, in late 1992. I started on BBSes early in 1993.
January 2nd, 2012 at 7:56 pm
I used Prodigy back in the day, as well as.. *shudder* AOL.
In other news, you KNOW that if that service were around today, it would be called iWorld
January 3rd, 2012 at 12:33 am
My older brother got me into local dial-up BBSes circa ’89, but I never tried one of the subscription services. I remember reading the ads for them and not quite understanding what they were.
January 3rd, 2012 at 9:28 am
I used AOL for quite a while. I kind of miss getting the AOL CD’s in the mail every single day. I remember seeing people who would make art sculptures out of old AOL CD’s.
January 4th, 2012 at 9:57 am
Charging hourly “airtime” for an online service sounds as ridiculous now, as it did 3 decades ago. CompuServe was known as Compu$erve due to this. The nice side effect is that BBSes flourished due to cost differences.
January 5th, 2012 at 1:51 pm
This ad annoys me. And also, it was proven false: now we have computers everywhere and all kids aren’t getting A’s in Current Events.
In fact, they never even offered a Current Events class in my high school…
January 5th, 2012 at 7:17 pm
I’m a retro lover, and I have some friends that might be interested in this page too.
Why don´t you put a “Share in Facebook” button? It may be useful.
A great page. I know about most of the games you talk here, but the computers are something new for me. Can you find something that surprise me?
January 28th, 2012 at 1:46 am
I think the first service I used was AppleLink: a highly expensive option, only made worse by the fact that local calls were all toll numbers in the UK. The experience and interface however were very well thought out, easy to understand and use.
Following that, I used CompuServe for a couple of years. The interface was a mess in comparison, but the costs were better.
eWorld was the last premium type service I used, and that was a very brief use. The interface there was OK, but a bit too over designed IMHO.
Interesting of course to backtrack here: eWorld was a custom front-end designed by Apple to use AOL’s dial up network, and AOL was formed from an Apple project to offer AppleLink to consumers (Personal AppleLink). What goes around…
May 28th, 2012 at 1:18 am
HA! I love that “on-line” is written as such, using a hyphen.
My family used Prodigy in 1992; that was the first online platform I ever used for reconnecting with anyone from my past, a task that now seems prosaic, but at the time felt quite magical.