The Pipeline

» see pipeline.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

The Pipeline was finished before I got online. By the time a 14.4k modem was screaming in a house in Turkey in 1998, its subscribers had already been sold twice and its name was gone from the market.

It began in December 1993 in New York City. James Gleick, who by then had written Chaos and was one of the better known science writers in America, went into business with a programmer named Uday Ivatury. They had met at the Manhattan Bridge Club, over a shared interest in playing bridge online, which in 1993 meant something quite different from what it means now.

The problem they set out to fix is easy to forget. In 1993 getting on the internet meant a terminal session, and a terminal session meant knowing commands. You dialed into a machine and got a prompt, and from there you were expected to know what elm and rn were. Every service that existed assumed a user who had already been taught.

The Pipeline shipped software for Windows and Mac that did not assume that. Mail, chat, Usenet and the web all sat behind a graphical interface, and it is generally credited as the first internet service provider to offer one. AOL and CompuServe had graphical clients, but those were walled gardens with a gateway bolted on. This was a front end onto the actual internet.

~ the record ~

~ the book with a disc in it ~

The distribution method was very 1994: a book with a disc in the back, sold in bookshops. That format did enormous work in the mid nineties, because it solved the bootstrap problem. To get software for connecting to the internet you had to already be connected to the internet, unless somebody handed you a physical object.

The book was also documentation, which mattered more than it sounds. A new user in 1994 did not need a manual for the client so much as an explanation of what Usenet was and why anyone would want FTP. Selling the explanation next to the software was a reasonable read of who the customer actually was.

~ what it licensed out ~

The subscriber base stayed small. More than six thousand people in the early years is a real number for 1994 and an invisible one next to AOL. But Gleick and Ivatury did something smarter than trying to win New York: they licensed the software to other providers, fifteen or more of them, in the United States and abroad.

One of the licensees was Ireland On-Line, which is how a program written above a bridge club in Manhattan ended up being the front door to the internet for Irish customers. Caltech ran it too. For a period in the mid nineties, a meaningful slice of the graphical dial-up experience anywhere in the English-speaking world was this one codebase with somebody else's logo on it.

~ sold twice in eighteen months ~

PSINet bought The Pipeline in February 1995. PSINet was a backbone company with capacity to fill, and it took the service national and put flat rate unlimited pricing on it, which was the aggressive move of that moment and the one that eventually broke the hourly billing model everywhere.

Then PSINet changed its mind about consumers entirely. In July 1996 it sold the whole consumer operation to MindSpring and went back to selling wholesale bandwidth to businesses, which is what it had always been good at. MindSpring already had a brand and a client of its own, so the Pipeline name was retired on arrival. MindSpring merged into EarthLink in 1999, and old subscribers kept receiving mail at pipeline.com addresses for years afterward at a company two acquisitions removed from the one they signed up with. Gleick went back to writing books, which was the correct decision.

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