| Copyright © 1996-2004 Al Evans. All rights reserved.
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| I’d like to thank Leslie Miller for her great article about Q-Link which appeared in the February 10, 2000 issue of USA Today. It was a pleasure to be interviewed for the article. :-)
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| 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.
| An early Commodore 64 |
| The Commodore 64, quite simply, 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, Windows? Thanks to a company then called Berkeley Softworks, Commodore users had been enjoying a GUI called GEOS for 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. 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 a list of links to some. 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, the executive vice president of Q-Link’s parent company, Quantum Computer Services, bought control of Quantum from its founders. In short order he changed the company name to America Online, and one-by-one discontinued the individual services and merged their members into a single service named America Online.
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