Boston CitiNet

~ the obit ~

Free to use, paid for by advertisers, with the operators watching which pages you opened so they could sell that back. That is the shape of the internet I joined in 1998 and it is the shape of most of what I have used since. It was already running on a minicomputer in a Boston suburb in 1986, when I was two years old and Turkey had no consumer data service of any kind.

Applied Videotex Systems started the thing in 1982 under the name YellowData, with the slogan telling you to let your modem do the walking. It became Boston CitiNet in 1985. The founders were Thomas Considine and Richard Koch, later joined by Myron Kassaraba and John Pollock, and the software came out of Considine's own DEC integration business. Everyone else selling this in the early eighties billed by the hour. CitiNet did not bill at all unless you wanted to talk to people, at which point mail and chat cost $9.95 a month.

By 1985 it had over 5,000 paying subscribers and eventually reached something like 45,000 users. Advertisers ranged from local employment agencies up to Byte magazine and the Sack Theaters cinema chain. Vendors on it sold cheese and fax machines. The most popular single feature was a daily horoscope written by an astrologer named Lillian Bono, which tells you as much about the audience as any subscriber figure does.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the basement on trapelo road ~

The first version ran on a DEC MicroPDP-11 with more than a hundred dial-up lines coming into the basement of a former A&P grocery store on Trapelo Road in Belmont. In 1985 it moved up to a MicroVAX II. That is the entire physical footprint of a service that at its height carried tens of thousands of people, in a converted supermarket cellar full of modems.

The pitch was that it was free and needed nothing but ASCII. Viewtron, the other big videotex name of the moment, wanted $900 for a dedicated terminal before you could see a single page. CitiNet worked with whatever machine you already had, which is why it outlived Viewtron by four years on a fraction of the money.

~ what it worked out early ~

CitiNet was doing click-stream analysis to support its advertising business in the second half of the 1980s. Counting which pages a reader moved through, and selling the pattern, is the foundation of the entire modern advertising industry, and it was being done on a MicroVAX in Massachusetts before most of the people who would build that industry could type.

The company also put newspapers online for other people. Newsday and the Omaha World-Herald both got early electronic editions through it, and the Philadelphia Inquirer went up in 1988. It ran the information hosting for Pacific Bell's Project Victoria trial in Danville, California, and designed the gateway architecture for NYNEX. For a local service in a supermarket basement, an unusual amount of the 1990s was prototyped there first.

~ how it ended ~

It stopped in 1990 and nobody wrote down a reason. No bankruptcy filing anyone cites, no shutdown notice, no farewell page. A service that was free to the reader and dependent on local advertisers had a ceiling built into it, since the audience could never grow past the area code and the ad rates could never grow past what a Boston cinema chain would pay.

The rest of the founders' work carried on inside the phone companies, in projects that got folded into other projects. What did not carry on was the name. Being early buys you a footnote in somebody else's history, which is what CitiNet got, and it is more than most local services from that decade managed.

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