National Videotex Network

~ the eulogy ~

NVN was a national dial-up service launched in 1992 by a Houston company called U.S. Videotel, built to take business off CompuServe and GEnie. The product was the standard one for that category: a basic tier and a premium tier, news and research databases with forums over the top of them. The differentiator was price. NVN leaned on packet-switching networks to keep the per-hour access charge under what the incumbents wanted.

The games are the part worth naming, since they are the only pieces of NVN that anybody still talks about. It carried Island of Kesmai, the graphical multiplayer role-playing game CompuServe subscribers had been paying by the hour for since 1985, and MUD II, the direct descendant of the original Essex MUD. Both of those had followings that would move between services for a better rate.

It also offered internet access, which in 1992 meant something narrower than it does now and was already the thing that mattered. Two years later the service was gone. I was ten years old on the other side of the world with four more years to wait for a modem, so the entire era of the paid national online service is something I arrived after, and by the time I got a line the survivors of it were already selling themselves as ways to reach the web rather than as places to be.

~ the dossier ~

~ the last one in ~

Launching a general online service in 1992 was a bet that the category had years left. CompuServe was near its peak, Prodigy was spending IBM and Sears money, and AOL was two years from the disc campaign that made it enormous. From inside that market it looked like there was room for a cheaper fifth or sixth entrant.

What was actually happening was that Mosaic shipped in 1993, and after it the interesting content stopped arriving inside walled services and started arriving on a network with no gatekeeper. NVN never got the chance to fail at that transition properly. It had barely finished being new.

~ what really happened ~

The service was terminated on 17 June 1994, and the word used in the contemporary reporting is abrupt. The Houston Chronicle headline was a flat joke about an online service being offline. There was no long wind-down, no notice period that anyone recorded and no migration offer to another provider.

At the moment it stopped, NVN's programmers were working on a graphical front end, which is what every text service was building in 1994 in the hope of not looking obsolete next to Windows. It never shipped. Four months after NVN closed, Netscape put out the browser that made all of those front ends pointless anyway, which means the thing they were racing to finish would not have saved them if they had finished it.

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