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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. :-)
| One of the "improvements" Steve Case made to Q-Link was the elimination of the monthly publication for members, the Q-Link Update. I have 16 or 20 issues of the Update. Eventually I may scan and upload the covers from them all. For now, however, here are the highlights.... |
| Ah yes. Q-Link´s third anniversary. |
| Another milestone... the public release of Lucasfilm´s long-awaited Habitat, renamed Club Caribe. |
| The release of Music Connection was a very big deal. It was an even bigger deal later on when it was re-released as SuperQ. It was so big that it had the potential of being the salvation of Q-Link, if only Steve Case had been interested in Q-Link´s salvation. For those of you who weren´t there, Music Connection/SuperQ was an enhancement to Q-Link´s People Connection. When using SuperQ, certain remote staff members (those with QGuide, MrMusic & MsMusic screen names, and a few others) could broadcast any music file in Q-Link´s software libraries to everyone in the same room they were in. Anyone in that room who was also running SuperQ would hear the song, unless they had disabled that feature. (The best that can be managed today on AOL is to cause everyone´s computer to play a sound file if the "audience" members all have that specific file on their own computers. Anyone not having that particular file will hear nothing. Needless to say, this otherwise worthless AOL feature is taken advantage of only by teenagers who love to broadcast AOL´s "Good-bye" sound file in an attempt to trick people into thinking they´ve been signed off. "You´ve got mail" is another favorite, for obvious reasons, as is AOL´s incoming Instant Message sound.) This was just one of SuperQ´s features. Others were the ability to stack and hide OLMs from several different people at one time, thus allowing you to toggle back and forth between OLMs and whatever room you were in; improved email handling; special graphical characters that could be sent to screen; and others that I´ve prolly forgotten. The upshot is that, in 1989, any Q-Link member running SuperQ could do things that today´s AOL members running the latest, fastest Pentium-powered PC´s, cannot do. That´s called "progress". Thanks, Steve.
| Puzzler was a pretty cool game show, modeled after the long-running (it´s still on!) television show, Wheel-of-Fortune. I never played Puzzler, but some people I knew really enjoyed it. I´m not sure why, but I don´t think Puzzler ever did live up to everyone´s expectations. (If there are any former QPUZ´s out there who would care to disagree with me, please write. I´d love to hear from you! :-) |
| This issue commemorated Q-Link´s 4th anniversary. Unfortuntately, there never would be a 5th anniversary issue. Good old Steve discontinued the Update prior to that. In fact, if I remember correctly, Q-Link´s 5th anniversary (and all subsequent anniversaries) passed without any official mention at all from the folks at 8619 Westwood Center Drive in Vienna, Virginia. Which reminds me of the time that I tried to send 10 large anchovie pizzas (collect, of course) to an especially inept System Monitor while he was on duty. The only thing that saved him was the fact that the guy at the Domino´s Pizza place in Vienna claimed that there was no such street as Westwood Center Drive and had never heard of either Q-Link or Quantum Computer Services. ::sigh:: 0;-) |
| This web site Copyright 2001 © by Al Evans. All rights reserved. |