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| I'd like to thank Leslie Miller for her great article about Q-Link (and this web site), which appeared in the February 10, 2000 issue of USA Today. :-)
| QGUIDE ae's Saturday morning Lobby on Q-Link. SquidAgain is entertaining the room with his graphics skills. |
| Remember Q-Link By Al Evans, aka UNCLE AL What, you may ask, was Q-Link? Q-Link was one of the earliest online services. It was built upon the ashes of a still-earlier service called PlayNet which had gone out of business without warning. [You can read more about the PlayNet/Q-Link/AOL connection in a fascinating letter from one of PlayNet´s engineers on the Commodore Knowledge Base website.] After PlayNet folded, Quantum Computer Services acquired the rights to the PlayNet software. The resulting new service was called Quantum Link, a name which members quickly shortened to either "Q-Link" or just plain "Q". Q-Link was opened to the public on November 5, 1985, and was America Online's direct predecessor. Today's revisionist historians would have you believe that serious personal computing began with machines made by Apple and IBM. Not so. Q-Link was designed to support the best-selling personal computer in the world, the Commodore 64. (Owners of the C64's big brother, the Commodore 128, also were able to access Q-Link when running their machines in C64 mode.) The Commodore 64 did for personal computers what the Model T Ford did for automobiles. At a time when PC's came with monochrome displays and emitted nothing more than beeps from their built-in speakers, the Commodore 64 came with color graphics, and music and sound capabilities. Remember the hoopla when Microsoft released their graphic user interface (GUI), Windows? Thanks to a company then called Berkeley Softworks, Commodore 64 users had already been enjoying a GUI, called GEOS, for several years. All of this, combined with an affordable price, made the Commodore 64 the computer that most who saw it wanted to own and that literally anyone could own. The GEOS Desktop may look primitive compared to the latest version of Microsoft's Windows, but in its time it was light years ahead of anything available for the PC. Commodore 64 owners were and are a steadfastly loyal lot. To this day, the Usenet newsgroup comp.sys.cbm continues to flourish, as do a number of Commodore 64-related web sites. Click here for links to some of them. Other now-vanished online services eventually were cloned from Q-Link: PC-Link (for PC's, obviously) and Apple-Link (for Apple Macintosh users), followed by Promenade (for OS/2 machines). Somewhere along the line, Steve Case (who had been Executive Vice President of Quantum Computer Services) bought control of the company from its founders and changed the company name to America Online, Inc. One-by-one the individual services were discontinued and their members merged into a single service named America Online. An early Commodore 64 All, that is, except Q-Link and its members. The mother (or father) of them all, if you will, was allowed to continue in operation until AOL finally euthanized it early in the morning of November 1, 1994. The end was almost anticlimactic. One minute we were all chatting, eyeing our watches nervously, waiting for the moment we knew was only seconds away. Then the screen seemed to draw in on itself a bit and ::poof:: Q-Link was gone forever, the warm, familiar Lobby replaced by the cold two-tone blue of the C64 "READY" screen. AOL had offered Q-Linkers the opportunity to convert their Q-Link memberships into AOL membership, but for many Q-Linkers that was not a realistic option. The AOL software was not compatible with the Commodore 64 or 128, thus 'Linkers without PC's or Macs were pretty much abandoned. When Q-Link finally passed into computing history, it was a pale shadow of its former self. AOL had long been loath to spend any time or money on system maintenance for Q-Link, and it showed. Areas of the system "broke" and went unrepaired. Strange things happened in People Connection, as you can see in the photo below. Look carefully and you´ll see "Lobby", "Lobby A", and... another room named "Lobby"? In other areas of the system, files vanished from the software libraries even though to all appearances they were still there. In preparation for the announced shutdown, AOL quit allowing new Q-Link memberships in August of 1994, but that only kept out honest people; hackers created new bogus accounts seemingly at will right up until the end. Hackers were the bane of the QGuides' existence, but not all staff took their presence that seriously, as you can see in this joking OLM (remember OnLine Messages?) to me from an inhouser... Q-Link's influence on AOL is still obvious even today. Many of AOL's features (such as People Connection and RabbitJack's Casino) were first begun on Q-Link. AOL's so-called "channels" are really only an expanded version of Q-Link's "departments", with a new name slapped on. The redesigned Commodore 64C Not all features were improved by the transfer to AOL, however. For example, on Q-Link, the casino offered bingo, slot machines and different versions of poker. On AOL, the casino offers bingo and ... well, bingo. (Unless you're using the latest version of AOL's software, 4.0, in which case you can't even play bingo.) Other features never were moved over to AOL. Examples include the game Puzzler (an online "Wheel-of-Fortune" clone) and Club Caribe. A creation of Lucasfilm, Ltd., Club Caribe was an immensely popular online resort island. Members could create their own persona (called "avatars") and move about the island, interacting with other members in a variety of ways. I never spent too much time in Caribe, but some people lived for it. After the demise of Q-Link, Fujitsu took the Club Caribe software and developed it into a virtual playground called Worlds Away. The link I had for Worlds Away ceased to work some time ago, so apparently it´s no longer in existence. It's interesting to note that in their General FAQ, Fujitsu mentioned the original Lucasfilm software, called Habitat, but failed to mention either that Habitat was developed expressly for Q-Link or that, prior to its public debut, it was reworked and renamed Club Caribe. As of this writing (10-31-98), AOL now has over 13 million members and people like to compare it to a big city. By that same yardstick, Q-Link was the small town that many of us grew up in. Most of the "regulars" knew one another, and we were for the most part like one big, family. Like many "real-world" families, our Q-Link family was a bit dysfunctional, and yes, there were a few jerks from time-to-time. For the most part we all got along pretty well, however. The Commodore 64's big brother, the C128 Our family has scattered since AOL shut down Q-Link. There are a lot of us on AOL (over 50 that I know of), but most former 'Linkers are elsewhere. Many of them are able to keep up with one another, however, thanks to the efforts of JohnD39 and SirFitz. If you're a former 'Linker who's been out of touch for a while, click here to go to JohnD39's web page. Once there, you'll find a gRaFiTi board, an impressive list of former Q-Linker's current email addresses, photos of some former Q-Linkers, and more! ::nostalgia mode ON:: My small part in all that? At various times I had the pleasure of being an Applications Chat host in Q-Link's Commodore Information Network (UNCLE AL), an Auditorium Emcee (Al E), and a QGuide (QGUIDE ae). Did you know BadBreath, RunnyNose, Toe Fuzz, DawgCatchr, HedgClipr0, Huck F, LURK NAME, ZAPFormie, Navel Lint, LLDsBrat or JoeTourist? At one time or another, those were all me. ;-) Yours truly, signing on to Q-Link, December 1989 Text Copyright © 1996-2001 by Al Evans. All rights reserved. QGuide ae's Lobby photos Copyright © 1992 and 1994 by Al Evans GEOS Desktop Copyright © Berkely Softworks Uncle Al photo Copyright © 1989 by Al Evans This page last revised 4-21-2001
| This web site Copyright 2001 © by Al Evans. All rights reserved. |