StarText

~ the goodbye ~

StarText went live on 3 May 1982, which makes it one of the first newspapers anywhere to sell its own content down a telephone line. The Fort Worth Star-Telegram supplied the words and Tandy supplied the machinery, both of them local to the same part of Texas, and the name is just those two halves stuck together. Five dollars a month bought news updated from five in the morning until midnight.

The first version was barely interactive. You called in on a 300 baud modem, entered four requests from a menu of fifty, and the system sent back what you asked for and stopped. Wanting more meant doing the whole thing again. It ran on a single Tandy Model II. Six months after launch it had fifty customers, mostly because most computers on sale at the time could not connect to it at all.

The version that mattered came later, written in DIBOL by Serge Stein and running on DEC VAX 11/750s behind banks of 1200 and 2400 baud modems. That one had the paper's news and classifieds with messages between subscribers on top. It also carried Grolier's encyclopedia, American Airlines flight schedules pulled off Sabre and home banking. You told the system your screen size and it sent you exactly that much text before waiting. At one point the billing was calculated on the number of words it had sent you, which is a way of pricing information that no one has tried since and probably should not have tried then.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the startexans ~

Subscribers were called StarTexans and a good number of them wrote the service. Volunteer columnists produced text-only columns with their own readerships, under their own editorial control, distributed by a newspaper that was not paying them. There was a printed newsletter, StarText Ink, that reprinted the logs of subscriber columns for people to read on paper.

That arrangement is the whole future of publishing compressed into a Texas metro area in 1987. Readers writing the product for free while the institution hosted it and kept the brand, and a community that met up in person because the thing they had in common was a phone number. What the newspaper never worked out is that this was the valuable part, and it kept treating the columns as a bonus attached to the wire copy.

~ the last three users ~

GEnie launched nationally in October 1985 and slowly pulled StarTexans away, since a national service beats a metro one on everything except local news. The paper's answer in 1996 was to launch StarText Net with internet access and an email address, and to rename the original service StarText Classic, which is what a company calls a product it has decided to stop.

StarText Classic closed on 3 March 1997 at 5:12 in the afternoon with three users still logged on. Somebody wrote that number down, and it is a better epitaph than any of the corporate paperwork that followed. In June 1998 StarText Net was renamed Star-Telegram Online Services, and once Knight-Ridder owned the paper the whole thing turned into an ordinary newspaper website with everything that had made it specific removed.

~ the part turkey never had ~

No Turkish paper ever ran anything like this. There was no decade here of your local newspaper being your online service, and nothing at all between the printed edition and a website. The papers I read growing up went from paper straight to the web in the second half of the nineties, and skipped the entire era in which a newspaper could plausibly think of itself as a network.

Which means the thing StarText proved locally had to be reproven globally, by people who had never heard of it, on a platform where the newspaper had no advantage at all. Fort Worth had readers writing for its paper in 1987. By the time I got online it was clear that readers would write for anybody, and the paper was no longer the one holding the phone number.

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