BIX (BYTE Information Exchange)

» see bix.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

bix launched in june 1985. byte magazine, then the dominant american personal computing publication, wanted a place where readers could talk to writers and to each other in long-form. the answer was a dial-up bbs running cosy conferencing software, sold for a $25 sign-up and $6 an hour of evening connect time.

by 1987 bix had roughly 17,000 subscribers, up from 6,000 the previous year. the number is small by modern standards. for a single-magazine reader community running on a handful of servers it was a serious audience. cosy organized everything into named conferences and topics, which let a 1986 engineer follow ten interest threads at once without losing context. the modern web has no good equivalent.

by the mid 1990s the price model had shifted to $40 a year flat-rate with internet dial-up access. byte magazine itself folded in may 1998. bix kept running for another three years under a series of acquirers and went dark in 2001.

by the time i would have been old enough to subscribe to bix, byte magazine was already gone and the service was on a slow wind-down across an ocean. there was no path from a 1999 ttnet account in ankara to a small american magazine bbs. the closest analogue in my own life was donanimhaber, which started in 2000 and was a web forum, not a dial-up.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what got buried with it ~

cosy was a 1983 university of guelph conferencing system. bix was its biggest commercial deployment. the format was conference-and-topic, not flat-and-chronological like usenet, and it survived longer than its parent magazine because the readers had built ten years of conversation inside it.

when bix closed in 2001 a group of former members built nlz, "noise level zero," an open-source cosy clone that preserved many of the original conferences. nlz ran until 2018. for a 1985 service that is a very long afterlife.

~ what came after ~

compuserve and aol targeted general consumers. bix targeted byte magazine readers, which meant engineers and hardware tinkerers. when the byte audience moved to the open web in the mid 1990s, bix had no second audience to fall back on. the niche that made it strong made it impossible to scale past 20,000 paying users.

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