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)?

Just a little while ago on Twitter, I started spouting out some one liners, Jeff Foxworthy style, about how you know if a website is old. I love coming across old websites, so it’s fun to spit these out.

I can’t guarantee that they’re funny, but I think they’re at least amusing. People liked them enough that I decided to post my lines here and ask you guys to continue the list. I may add more to it over time.

• You know it’s an old website if…
  …every image on the site rotates.
• You know it’s an old website if…
  …they refer to AltaVista in the present tense.
• You know it’s an old website if…
  …you found it through a web ring.
• You know it’s an old website if…
  …it says “Best viewed in IBM WebExplorer.”
• You know it’s an old website if…
  …your browser complains that there’s no MIDI plug-in installed.
• You know it’s an old website if…
  …it forces you to enter the site through a splash page.
• You know it’s an old website if…
  …it asks you not to hotlink the GIF images.
• You know it’s an old website if…
  …every single link on the page ‘404s.
• You know it’s an old website if…
  …the owner claims it’s “under construction.”
• You know it’s an old website if…
  …it brags about having 1,000 hits.

Now it’s your turn. Add your one-liners in the comments below.

Up now on Technologizer.com is my recent interview with John Linnell of the tech-savvy rock band They Might Be Giants. Linnell and I discussed his personal computer and video game history, how he’s integrated computers into his music career, a fierce Tetris addiction, and gruesome encounters with X-Acto knives. I hope you enjoy it.

By they way — Happy Birthday to Mr. Linnell, who turned 52 yesterday.

Up now on PCMag is a slideshow I made showcasing freaky-weird 3D amateur computer art of the early 1990s. It’s composed mostly of GIF files from the BBS era that I’ve been collecting for some time now.

Here’s a snippet of the introduction:

Back in the early 1990s, when 3D computer-generated art was still a new thing, a brave new breed of amateur artists emerged. They took up early 3D CGI (computer generated imagery) tools and created graphical works that they then shared on dial-up BBSes and CompuServe.

Over the years, I’ve collected dozens of these now-vintage images, and I recently noticed that many of them are, well, more than a little bizarre.

When you’re done checking out the slideshow, feel free to post your fondest memories of vintage CGI graphics. And if you have any bizarre 3D CGI images of your own to share, please post a link.

CYBERSPACE (echo, echo, echo…):

The future of mankind or an ingenious scheme to sell virtual furniture for real money?

It’s been a while since I’ve done a slideshow where I attempted to quantify the unquantifiable and rank a series of things in order from least to greatest. I’m typically not a fan of the format because the results are always subjective, but I still think it works because it stimulates public thought and gives me a good excuse to both entertain and educate on a subject I love.

The subject, in this case, is online worlds, where people gather together in virtual space to buy/sell mouse-crafted Furry outfits, chat about LARPing, and construct entire worlds filled with simulated genitalia.

So without further ado, I present to you “The 11 Most Influential Virtual Worlds of All Time” over at PC World. I hope you enjoy it.

When you’re done reading/pounding your fists, feel free to tell us about your favorite online worlds in the comments below.

There are about 730 hours in a month.

You may remember getting one of these in the mail in the 1990s.

Ok, ok…you may remember getting dozens and dozens of these CDs in the mail. Some people used them as coasters, some as Frisbees. Some put them in the microwave to watch them sparkle. (To any kids reading: please don’t try this.) Me? I collected them.

I saved just about every CompuServe, Prodigy, and America Online floppy disk or CD I ever received back then, and I amassed quite a collection. Some day I plan to write about these promotional disks more, but for now you’ll have to be satisfied with this shiny blue AOL Titanium 5.0 CD from way back in ’99.

Discussion Topic of the Week: What did you do with all the promotional CDs and floppy disks you received in the mail?

Last night, PC World posted my latest history-flavored slideshow on their site. It’s a visual survey of dial-up modem history that they titled “Modems: 60 Years of Hooking Up.”

I wanted to go into more detail, but it was hard to find good quality pictures of old modems. That’s unsurprising because modems not devices that folks celebrate as often as, say, computers themselves. My personal book collection on modems came in handy, but the muddy black and white photos printed there are as clear as molasses.

(By the way, if anyone out there has photos of a Racal-Vadic VA3400 or a Bell 212A data set, please let me know. Those would come in handy for a more complete history of modems in the future.)

I didn’t go into more detail about non-dial-up modems (i.e. ISDN, DSL, Cable, wireless, or satellite) because you could fill a whole slideshow on the history of each of those separately, and I was already running a bit behind from trying to find photos of dial-up modems. But hey, the result should still be entertaining and informative.

I hope you enjoy it.

Explain the context of this image and I will grant you the power of flight. Hint: it has something to do with computers.

“System Requirements: 48k Atari, 1 disk drive, modem”

You’re looking at an ad for what may have been the world’s first multiplayer graphical online gaming service, Games Computers Play (1985). It may also have been the world’s first graphical multi-user environment, as it predated the Lucasfilm Habitat beta test for the C64 (1986) by six months or more.

I don’t know else much about this Atari 8-bit-only service beside what can be gleaned from the advertisement above, a 1985 article in Antic magazine, and this thread over at AtariAge.

One of the posters in the forum thread linked above mentioned that he/she found the creators of the service, whom I’d love to talk to myself. I’m trying to get in touch with that poster, but if anyone knows anything about this service (including info about who created it) or has stories to share, please email me here.

[Update – I did get in touch with one of the creators of this service. More info to follow. ]

Discussion Topic of the Week: What was the first game you played with another human (or humans) over a modem?

I’ve been working too hard and my brain feels like a block of sand (whatever that means), but I need to share this link with you before I collapse.

Just today, PCMag published my latest piece for them, a slideshow of 12 “forgotten” online games that you can still play. It’s mostly composed of intriguing telnet classics, although a few ancient, overlooked MMOs show up on the list as well.

I hope you enjoy it. If you do, please spread word of it far and wide. Leave no door unknocked; no word of slideshow evangelism unsaid. Tattoos — lots of tattoos. If you succeed, there will be more to come.