Ask HN: Pre-Internet online services architecture

5 points

7 years ago

I recently became aware of the world of pre-Internet online services [1] (AppleLink, Delphi, CompuServe, AOL etc) that provided a wide variety of online services like chat, file-sharing, forums and even other services like the WELL [2] which almost sounds like a pre-Internet Reddit.

I have not been able to find much detail about the network and software architecture of these systems. Does any one know or can point to resources about the architecture of these systems. What was the backend of these systems? Were they mostly “hosted” products with the software running on the provider’s servers or was it peer-to-peer? What network protocols did they use?

As a side note - I came across these things in the book “The Innovators” by Walter Isaacson [3], which is an excellent book if you are interested in the history of computing and the central characters right from its early beginnings in the 1800s to the current times.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Pre%E2%80%93World_Wide_Web_online_services [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_WELL [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovators_(book)

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