CIX
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CIX (Originally Compulink Information eXchange) was one of the earliest British Internet Service Providers. Founded in 1983 by Frank and Sylvia Thornley, it began as a FidoNet bulletin board system, but in 1987 was relaunched commercially as CIX Conferencing. At the core of the service were many thousands of "conferences" - groups established by users to discuss particular topics, conceptually not unlike newsgroups but limited to CIX subscribers. These conferences still exist today although the CIX service has since expanded to include many other features.
In 1988 it provided the first commercial Internet email and Usenet access in the UK. CIX then grew rapidly, reaching a peak of more than 16,000 users in 1994, before losing customers to the newly-formed Internet Service Providers that provided access to the mass market but not, unlike CIX, conferencing.
In its heyday, CIX was one of the UK's premier online locations for both technical and social interaction. It hosted several official online support areas for companies such as Borland and Novell and counted among its subscribers many of the UK's technology journalists (some of them wooed with free accounts), which ensured regular mention in the computing press.
However, as the popularity of the Internet has increased at the expense of closed systems such as CIX, concern grows among the remaining users that subscriber numbers may fall or already have fallen below critical mass. Concern has also been expressed regarding CIX management's expulsion of members for apparently minor or unproven infractions of rules; examples include the 1990s termination of the user known as satnews (later reinstated after protests from other members), the dismissal in 1999 (and subsequent Employment Tribunal) of orac and the 2004 expulsion of chrisjj.
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[edit] Later Company History
Following the launch of the ISP Demon Internet, which itself was conceived in a conference on CIX, in 1995 the Thornleys decided to expand CIX's services to include full dialup Internet access as CIX Internet. However, take-up was limited: the service was later to market than its competitors, and considered by some inferior.
In 2000 CIX was sold to Telenor, a Norwegian telecommunications company. Telenor subsequently sold the business to PIPEX.
In 2003 CIX Conferencing was relaunched as CIX Online and given a Web interface as an alternative to the text interface. Customer acceptance of the Web interface has been limited, due partly to its cumbersome nature when compared to the offline readers (OLRs) previously employed by most users.
As of 2006 CIX Online is provided by Parkglobe, a company set up for the purpose by several long-term staffers/directors. Between 2004 and the present, several additional services including online calendars, contact lists and document libraries, plus phone-to-email and conference-call facilities, have been added in an attempt to position the service as a Virtual Office.
CIX Internet, some email, DNS, and connectivity continue to be provided by PIPEX. The two companies' billing and services are heavily intertwined, often causing customer confusion.
[edit] Technical Information
CIX Conferencing is based on CoSy ("Conferencing System"), though it has been heavily modified by succeeding generations of staff. The CoSy conferencing system used by CIX was initially run on a SysV UNIX server, and was gradually modified from the original CoSy to add new features. In 1996 the decision was taken to port the system to SunOS due to the obsolescence of the then-running hardware.
While initially users read the text-based CIX messages online, the UK's practice of charging per minute for telephone calls led to the development of off-line readers (OLRs). The official OLR for CIX, Ameol, handles email, CIX conferencing and Usenet, and is freely available to anyone to use. It was originally written by Steve Palmer in the early 1990s, first as a customer, then as a staff member. Many other OLRs, written by CIX users, are available for other operating systems.
[edit] See also
- WELL - US equivalent of CIX
