Talk:GEnie

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Both 40,000 and 400,000 are listed as the peak number of subscribers for GEnie. Can someone verify which of these is correct?

After some hunting, I've fudged it a bit - 100,000 seems to be the best realistic number, although at this point who really knows? - DavidWBrooks 13:54, 13 August 2005 (UTC)

I used to be STAR on GEnie around 1990. It seems impossible to find information about it online now and I greatly appreciate the collective authors of this article. -Etoile 04:19, 12 January 2006 (UTC)

Contents

[edit] Subscriber Counts

I was founder and chief excecuitive of GEnie from 1985 through 1991. In 1991, we exceeded 400,000 subscribers. The term "subscribers" was often mis-used in the marketplace at the time. At GEnie, we counted a subscriber as one who was a paying user and had logged in at least once in the prior month. Other services at the time, notably AOL, counted subscribers by the number of 'active email addreses' - hence, one paying cusomer with 3 associated email addresses would be counted as three users (even if they had not logged in or received email.—Preceding unsigned comment added by Blouden (talk • contribs) 03:02, July 17, 2007

Hello Bill - is there any source we can use as citation for this? I'm sure you're right, but you understand there's a problem with including what amounts to anecdotal evidence. If any articles were published or other accessible documents to verify, that woul be great. GEnie was a great system in its day - ah the days of text-only! Tvoz |talk 04:43, 17 July 2007 (UTC)
According to Neil Harris, GEnie VP, the peak total was 115,000 in 1993.[1] --Elonka 16:27, 17 July 2007 (UTC)

[edit] History

I just removed the following material, just added to the article by an anon. It's good stuff, but is written more like a draft or notes and should be worked on before being put into the article. Rather than leave it half fixed-up, or mess up the material trying to tidy it, I moved it here for future work.

GEnie with the help of subcontractor - Robert Moore/WorldMusic, USA (visit http://www.hdfcp.com for current, also to verify this information, see the GEnie LiveWire newsletter announcement at; http://www.hdfcp.com/bomproducts - select or scroll to "Telecom"), beginning in 1987, was at the forefront of two revolutions, multimedia sharing and live worldwide chat rooms. Though primary clients were in the US, access to GEnie was international, including live chats from anywhere in the world. One such event was hosted live by Robert Moore from London, England in 1989, from the Olympus, where a Computer Trade Fair was taking place. While at the event, and from within the Atari Computer booth, Robert answered live text questions from clients in Hawaii, the US and other parts of the world. Robert Moore founded one of the most popular RoundTables, the MIDIMusic Roundtable (Worldwide Electronic Exchange of Songs, Sounds, Ideas and Information), which was the worlds first multimedia service, starting with MIDI Music, Music and Sound files (actually, second after Robert's own BBS, see "Telecom" link above). Robert's contract with GE/GEnie was from 1987 to 1992, and the MIDIMusic Roundtable was consistently within the top ten RoundTables during that time, many times being the number one Roundtable. In 1989, Robert proposed a new MultiMedia application/language (like, but 5 years before NetScape) to allow visual display and sharing of all types of multimedia, on any computer, using GEnie (and other IS), but that project was never funded. Robert had begun developement of this application in 1985, at his own company (see link above "Telecom", and the product "MidiCom").

I assume this paragraph was written by a certain Mr. Moore. :) It would be nice to list all the Round Tables (see the link he provides), but right now that's not a major part of the article. I'll try to sketch it out. Ashibaka tock 02:10, 8 December 2005 (UTC)

RE: Listing the full list of RTs...There was a Macintosh RT (run by Syndicomm); and in the games section, Chess, Checkers, a version of Reversi with some other name; there was also an online Backgammon game for which I was staff until I found it politic to leave. The Writers Ink group --at least some of them navigated to a batch of Yahoo groups called "inkies" http://groups.yahoo.com/group/inkies-admissions. Not many of them stayed since it is a weak substitute. There are MANY boards not listed. I remember a lucid dreaming RT and many others. Someone might try and find out if Alice Amore who edited the GEnie Newsletter is still around. I wouldn't be surprised if she had a list of all the old forums.

Also on GEnie: Max Adams (Screenwriter of Excess Baggage http://seemaxrun.com/ ), Billie Sue Mosiman (http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/m/billie-sue-mosiman/) Patricia Burroughs (Dallas Screenwriter and Romance Novelist http://patriciaburroughs.com/) The author who originated Indiana Jones was on Writer's Ink.

[edit] Early history

I removed the following personal account written by an anon, because it is "original research" kinda. Ashibaka tock 01:46, 11 December 2005 (UTC)

(Inside information: The CB Simulator received a lot of internal "beta" testing in the Spring of 1985 as a primary means for GEIS employees to share rumors and waste time waiting for a major layoff that was well-known to be pending. It took weeks for management to get their act together and finally, on May 22, 1985 it happened, decimating a third of the 400+ person Engineering Department and substantial numbers of employees elsewhere. The new GEnie group absorbed a few of the engineers, including one who had written the round-table software in his spare time. He was a C-compiler engineer assigned to help a 3rd-party company port their product onto the Mark III system from UNIX (but not for GEnie.) The file systems were so different he saw it would be faster to write a new product rather than port the UNIX one and did it himself just to prove he was right. That pet project became the GEnie RoundTables. Today that guy is a CTO for an Internet company.)


Please note this comment is ludicrous: The White House RoundTable for discussing the press releases and actions of the Clinton administration.

The Clinton Admin did not last from 1985-1999. The White House RT discussed the current administration, whatever it was at the time. 81-89 was Reagon, 89-93 was BushGHW, 1993-end of GEnie was Clinton

[edit] GEnie's Legacy

Please do not remove this section or move its contents to other parts of the article. It is intended to have additional material of which the Babylon 5 information is an example. The section is to show what effect GEnie has had to U.S. and world culture. Gentaur 20:24, 23 December 2005 (UTC)

Could someone please moderate this revert war with DavidWBrooks. I don't think the reverts are warranted. Gentaur 21:01, 23 December 2005 (UTC)

One of the secret histories of the world is how GEnie has affected U.S. and global culture. ... you're not serious about that, are you? - DavidWBrooks 00:16, 24 December 2005 (UTC)
I tend to agree. I was a big fan of GEnie, and consider B5 the best SF show ever, but c'mon, you wouldn't find a majority of American SF fans who'd call B5 the most influential SF TV show ever, never mind declare it a significant event in world culture. GEnie impacted American science fiction circles, online gaming circles and provided significant support for computer systems such as the Atari ST and the Amiga which are now moribund. To extrapolate from that to an enduring and significant impact on world culture is far beyond the service's merits. RGTraynor 01:19, 24 December 2005 (UTC)
Before the re-revert (re-re-revert?) I had moved Gentaur's comments about Babylon 5 to the section about RoundTables, since it's certainly notable and should be in the article, but within reason, please. - DavidWBrooks 01:21, 24 December 2005 (UTC)

Perhaps the secret history part was hyperbole, in hindsight, but from the perspective of someone who saw the beginnings on GEnie of a number of things that are taken for granted now, GEnie's influence is underrated. As I keep trying to point out, the Babylon 5 information is not supposed to be the whole of the section. GEnie encompassed a wide variety of fields covered by the RoundTables, including science, space, emergency response (recovery efforts for disasters like the Loma Prieta earthquake were coordinated on GEnie), game design, operating systems, electronics, philosophy, social science, politics, law enforcement, medicine, sports, and more. Important people in those fields did in fact use the RoundTables for networking and collaborating with peers. That history should not be lost, and I created the section for others to add the history they know. It's not just books and TV shows. Gentaur 05:29, 24 December 2005 (UTC)

There's no "perhaps" about it, and I'm afraid you're missing the point. It's not that we're not understanding what you are trying to say, it's that we disagree with you. GEnie had an impact on online computing, and no history of the same can be called authoritative without citing it, but people discussed politics, coordinated disaster relief, talked about science fiction and enjoyed games long before GEnie was founded and ever since it vanished. It would be tough to think of one of the "legacies" where GEnie both changed the way things were done and no other online service would have stepped up had GEnie never existed. RGTraynor 06:10, 24 December 2005 (UTC)
Even fans of The Well, whose self-importance may be unmatched in the online world, don't claim that it reshaped global history. GEnie was good, maybe the best of the early commercial online communities (Delphi adherents would dispute that), but please keep things in perspective. - DavidWBrooks 14:44, 24 December 2005 (UTC)

There doesn't seem to be any record of a change I made on Dec. 24--it's not even showing up on the history page. I wrote something like: ""GEnie, along with the CompuServe forums, newsgroups and mailing lists, were a precursor to Internet discussion groups such as blogs. Cory Doctorow, for example, was active on GEnie in the early 90s," and then I explained a bit about who Cory is. Did someone edit that out of existence? If so, why? Mitchwagner 14:58, 26 December 2005 (UTC)

He's there in the Genie Legacy section - greatly trimmed, though. (Your edit is listed as happening shortly after midnight on Dec. 25, presumably because the time difference between where you are and where the wikipedia servers are) - DavidWBrooks 15:05, 26 December 2005 (UTC)
Yup, Cory's in there--but I brought him up as part of a larger trend, which is that the GEnie SFRT was part of a larger trend of online communities, which included online discussion groups, including BBSes, e-mail mailing lists, the WELL, and CompuServe forums, that started inside the geek community and has since, in the form of blogs, spread to society at large. I'll take another stab at that when I have more time. Mitchwagner 17:42, 26 December 2005 (UTC)
That may not really belong in this article, since GEnie wasn't the sole, or even the dominant, part of this trend. It could be like writing about, say, the growth of suburbia in post-War America but putting it all in the article on New Jersey because Levittown was there. Have you tried looking around wikipedia to see if there are more general articles about online communities that you could contribute to? I think you might have more success if you appoach it that way, instead of confining yourself to GEnie. - DavidWBrooks 17:54, 26 December 2005 (UTC)
Mm, now, that's being needlessly picky. Of course GEnie wasn't the sole part of the trend, but the turn of phrase didn't claim it was. RGTraynor 18:44, 26 December 2005 (UTC)
DavidWBrooks: Not only do I disagree with you about this discussion about GEnie--I disagree with your hypothetical counter-example! :) Any article about New Jersey would have to include some discussion about the suburbanization of post-war America; suburbanization completely transformed the state, turning it from a region of small, industrial cities and vast swathes of farmland, to an appendage of the New York Metropolitan Area. Similarly, we need the discussion of online community on this page to put GEnie in its historical context. If there's an article about online communities on Wikipedia, well, I'll think about whether and how to contribute to that another day. Mitchwagner 22:59, 27 December 2005 (UTC)
Note I said we shouldn't put all of the suburbanization article in New Jersey, not "some discussion". Anyway, take a look at this article: Virtual community. It could use expanding, and it's right up your alley. - DavidWBrooks 13:58, 28 December 2005 (UTC)

Something that is probably worth adding here, is how GEnie proved its usefulness in an emergency. For example, I recall there was a major earthquake in San Francisco that knocked out phone service. Though the long distance phone lines were down, the GEnie network was up, and people could get messages out via GEnie chat. Many (outside of SF) volunteers stationed themselves in GEnie chat rooms to talk to the stranded GEnie members who were in SF, so that they could pass along messages to anxious loved ones in other parts of the country. I was very proud of GEnie's community that day, and it was a good early example of how online communication was a valuable addition to the ways that we stay in touch. Elonka 21:19, 28 December 2005 (UTC)

That's one of the examples I expected people would add the section, if I didn't get to it. Along with the other information that has since been moved or deleted, it would have been in context, but I think the context has been unraveled. Gentaur 07:51, 29 December 2005 (UTC)
I am not an official editor--just an anon, but even as a second class wikipedia citizen, I agree with Elonka. GEnie was all about community. The details about who said what and who did what are only relevant because GEnie performed as an active community. I worked in Writers Ink run by Peter Ziebel, and the people who were active on that board, and in the Screenwriter's Workshop which was located within Writer's Ink, are names you would recognize as substantial contributors to the world of popular culture. I know a number of writers and screenwriters who owe their careers to networking begun on GEnie. This wasn't unique to Writer's Ink.T he authors in the SFRT were the powerhouses of speculative fiction. GEnie abounded with small pockets of tightly knit communities
And--as someone whose brother was stranded in LA during the earthquake with his family back home not knowing if he was alive or dead--I too remember how the GEnie members in California went out of their way to provide a link of communication when all others were down. Allie (10:00, February 13, 2006 User:66.61.54.203)
Hi Allie, c'mon in and feel free to edit the page. Sometimes the only difference between an "official" and "unofficial" editor is who went to the trouble of signing up for a free log-in. Even anon editors are welcome to contribute! Also, if you add four tildes "~~~~" at the end of your posts, it'll automatically datestamp them. Though for all I know, the "Allie" name may be available. It's worth checking!  :) Elonka 17:26, 13 February 2006 (UTC)

[edit] GEnie vs Genie

User:Cas510's reversion is correct - the system was best known as GEnie due to its General Electric beginnings, and the article should consistently refer to it as GEnie, not Genie. Tvoz 23:19, 7 December 2006 (UTC)

I concur that the service is best known as GEnie. Most newspaper and magazine articles about the service used that version of the spelling, and that was how the name was spelled during the service's time of peak popularity. --Elonka 20:52, 8 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Famous users

I've heard of other SF authors on GEnie. Is this something that you're going by printed interviews, usenet posts, or something else? Thanks.

I'm curious because I've heard the Scribblies were also on GEnie...

=Chica= 05:49, 13 January 2007 (UTC)