PlayNET

~ the goodbye ~

PlayNET sits in the part of online history i can read about but cannot remember. It ended when i was four years old, it ran on a Commodore 64 plugged into an American phone network, and the first modem in my house arrived ten years after the service was already gone.

Dave Panzl and Howard Goldberg founded PlayNet, Inc. in 1983, both of them out of GE's research operation in upstate New York, and put the service live in 1984. The claim they made for it holds up: the first person-to-person online communication and game network with graphics generated on the home computer itself. Everything else at the time was characters on a screen, because everything else was designed for a terminal, and the whole point of a C64 is that it is not a terminal.

The way they got there was to ship their own client software on a disk and speak a protocol nobody else spoke. The C64 drew the chessboard locally. The network only had to move the moves. Servers ran on Stratus fault tolerant machines in PL/1, reached over X.25 through Tymnet and Telenet at 300 baud, and that arrangement is the reason a graphical service could work at a speed that would take three minutes to move a single photograph today.

What you did there was play board games against strangers and talk to them while you did it. Chess, checkers, backgammon, bridge, Stratego, Chinese chess, Go. A multiplayer Dungeons and Dragons was started and never finished. Alongside the games ran mail, chat, bulletin boards, file downloads at fifty cents each, and a real time message feature called On Line Messages, abbreviated OLM, which is the direct ancestor of the thing that later popped up in the corner of every AOL screen in America.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what it cost ~

In 1985 there were three ways to pay. Thirty dollars once to join, then six dollars a month plus two dollars an hour. Or eight dollars a month plus $2.75 an hour. Or no monthly fee at all and $3.75 an hour. Every version of that pricing charges you for time, which means every version of it teaches the same lesson the metered era taught everybody: you are aware of the clock the entire time you are having fun.

It never got past about five thousand subscribers. That is a small number for something this early and this good, and the reason is boring. PlayNet had no distribution. It was two engineers and a service, competing for the attention of Commodore owners against companies with advertising budgets, in a country where the customer still had to find out the thing existed from a magazine.

~ the license ~

In 1985 PlayNet licensed its system to Control Video Corporation for fifty thousand dollars plus a recurring royalty. Control Video had just failed at selling downloadable Atari games over the phone and needed something that worked. It took the PlayNet code, modified it, and launched Quantum Link for the Commodore 64 on 5 november 1985.

So for about three years two services ran on the same software, one of them owned by the people who wrote it. PlayNet declared bankruptcy in march 1986. Quantum Computer Services, as Control Video had renamed itself, worked out that a company about to fold could not sue anybody, and stopped sending the royalty payments. PlayNet went under for good, and at the liquidation Quantum bought the technology outright for whatever it went for.

~ what it became ~

In october 1991 Quantum Computer Services renamed itself America Online. The software lineage runs unbroken from the disk PlayNet mailed to Commodore owners in 1984, through Q-Link, into the client that ended up on a hundred million free CDs and defined the American internet for a decade.

Nobody remembers the first company in that sentence. The founders built a graphical online service several years before the industry believed in one, priced it honestly, ran out of subscribers, and sold their only asset to the firm that would use it to become enormous. The instant message and the graphical online room were both already working in upstate New York in 1984, on a machine with 64 kilobytes of memory.

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