Microtex 666

~ the last words ~

Telecom Australia launched its national videotex service, Viatel, on 28 February 1985, built on the British Prestel standard like most of the world outside France. Viatel was the pipe. Microtex 666 was the thing worth dialing it for, and it was aimed at a much narrower group of people than a national information service normally is.

Sean Howard owned it. He also owned Australian Personal Computer, the country's biggest-selling computer magazine, which is how the service got promoted to exactly the audience it wanted. For most of its life the day-to-day running was handled externally by Scott Sanderson at Information Solutions, which additionally sold a bundle of a modem plus the software to drive it, because in 1986 owning a modem was still an unusual thing to have done.

What sat behind it was a hobbyist service rather than a national institution. The telesoftware library was large, meaning programs you pulled down the phone line rather than bought on a cassette, and the chat ran close enough to realtime that you could argue in it. Then there was the game.

~ the record ~

~ the funny part ~

The Great Galactic Conflict was a turn-based massively multiplayer game written by Ian Davies between 1983 and 1984, and it was engineered to hold a thousand players. It peaked at around six hundred, which is still a number that should not exist in 1985. You entered your moves during a one-week window. Once a week the engine processed everybody's moves at once and produced a result, and that result became the board for the following week.

A full game took ten weeks and GGC was played three times. Because a turn was a week long, the actual game was the negotiation between players in the gaps, which meant the interesting part happened off the board entirely. The backend ran on DOS PCs and took several hours to compute what everyone had collectively done, then used Viatel's bulk update protocol to push the new state out to the players. In 1988 the winner was eligible for a prize of $2,500.

~ what it became ~

Telecom eventually bought Microtex, and the service's own run is recorded as ending in 1989. The name outlived the thing: Howard sold his Computer Publications business, Microtex included, to Australian Consolidated Press in 1992, three years after the service had stopped mattering. He then started a public email service called Oz-E-Mail.

In 1994 Malcolm Turnbull and Trevor Kennedy invested and it was relaunched as OzEmail, which listed on Nasdaq in 1996 and was bought by WorldCom for $520 million in March 1999. Australia's largest ISP grew directly out of a hobbyist page on a videotex system, which is the kind of lineage the web mostly does not have. The part I cannot quite hold is the arithmetic underneath it. Six hundred people were playing one game together in Australia in 1985, thirteen years before I first dialed anything at all.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »