Talk:Online service provider

Before the mid90s, "online service provider" referred specifically to CompuServe, Prodigy, and America Online nee Q-Link. Surely there were other services with a similar architecture, but I can't think of them, and those were by far the biggest three. They were considerably more than merely a BBS, but didn't yet have connections to the Internet so they weren't ISPs.

My brain is too tired right now to be up to the task of describing the real differences between BBS's, online services, ISPs, networks in general, and the Internet in particular. And that is the key contribution needed for this article.

At this time, the online service providers do still provide their original online service, which is separate from the Internet that they also provide a connection to. (I haven't checked, but I think Prodigy still does?) However, a few insiders speculate that this may disappear in the future, leaving only the Internet connection and a few customer-access-only pages on the World Wide Web.

Um, I guess EWorld is on the list as an online service provider. It was a version of AOL whose servers were leased out to Apple Computer for their exclusive use as an online service for Apple customers. It operated under the EWorld brand name. Despite good support at first from Apple, it never attracted a critical mass of subscribers.

MSN 1980's or 1995?

Page says: "In the mid-1980s graphics-only online services such as Prodigy, MSN, and Quantum Link ("Q-Link", which was later merged with its Mac-only sister company, America OnLine) sprang up." I'm pretty sure that MSN was launched in around August 1995, with a beta trial here in Australia - which I was part of - a few months earlier. It was to be a 'rival' to the internet - effectively a walled garden of content similar to compuserve. Is there any way of confirming the launch date of MSN, did you guys in the States have it earlier? Laurel Papworth 21:01, 20 September 2007 (UTC)