The Source

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

~ the obit ~

the source sat in the part of internet history i can read about but cannot personally remember. it launched in 1979, when i was not yet born, and it died in august 1989, when i was five years old and still about a decade away from a modem of my own. the entire ten-year run of the source happened in a country i had not yet visited, on hardware almost no one outside of north america owned. the long-distance phone rates alone would have made even thinking about the service unthinkable from turkey.

but it was the first thing in america that you could legitimately call a consumer online service. compuserve was older as a company but had been business-focused. the source got there first as a consumer brand, in june 1979, and it set the basic shape of what a consumer online service would look like for the next fifteen years. text screens with a per-hour billing model. dial-in over a 300 baud modem at first, later 1200.

by the time it died it had been outpaced by compuserve in every measurable way. compuserve had ten times the subscribers and a better technical platform. when reader's digest, the source's owner of the late eighties, decided to get out of the business, compuserve bought the subscriber list for what was reportedly a small sum and quietly shut the service off.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ before the consumer internet ~

bill von meister founded the source as digital broadcasting corporation in 1978. he announced it at comdex in june 1979 with the tagline "america's information utility", and the press loved that line. von meister was the kind of founder who liked big words for small companies. jack taub, a publishing entrepreneur, came in as the main backer.

the headquarters sat at 1616 anderson road in mclean, virginia. the back end ran on prime minicomputers, expensive machines that drained most of the operating budget. the source charged users by the hour of connect time, with peak-hour rates that could run twenty dollars an hour or more in 1980 money. that was the only revenue model that worked at the time.

~ what it actually did ~

once you dialed in, the source gave you menus. news came from united press international with a weather feed alongside. email worked, plus a chat system that supported real-time text conversation between subscribers. a many-to-many conferencing feature called participate prefigured what usenet would do better a few years later. you could also browse a primitive online shopping catalog and read magazines online. most of the actual usage, by all later accounts, was email and chat. the high-minded "information utility" framing was for the press releases. what people did once they got on was talk to each other.

~ how it ended ~

by the late eighties the source had been bought and resold a few times. reader's digest ended up holding it during the final years and decided in 1989 it was not a fit for the rest of their portfolio. compuserve, by then comfortably the dominant consumer online service in the us, bought the subscriber base and folded it into their own. the source's actual servers and brand stopped operating in august 1989.

von meister himself had moved on years earlier. he went on to start a small online service called control video corporation, which got reorganized into quantum computer services and eventually became america online. the source died, but the founder's later company became aol. that is a strange piece of lineage to remember when you are reading the obit of a service that almost no one alive today actually used.

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