CHAPTER3
Making Contact withCompuServe
They called it schlock time-sharing...
—Jeff Wilkins, CompuServe founder
For its first decade, the online world was elitist in the extreme. Getting in required ... well, connections. Affiliation with a university or government agency that had computer or terminal equipment could get you online. So could an employer who was willing to underwrite access and qualified as a government contractor, though that usually meant adhering to a rigorous set of rules. And even though other networking projects were under way, they weren't intended for the public, either.
Things had to change if the online world were to be accessible to everyone. The instrument of change would be the microcomputer.
A recent engineering ...
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