| 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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| All, that is, except Q-Link and its members. The service that made the others possible was allowed to operate until AOL finally killed it early in the morning of November 1, 1994; four days shy of its ninth birthday. The end was almost anticlimactic. One minute we were all chatting, nervously eyeing our watches, 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 cold blue of the C64 “READY” screen replacing the warm, friendly colors of Q-Link’s Lobby.
| The redesigned Commodore 64C |
| AOL had offered Q-Link members the opportunity to convert their memberships into AOL memberships, but for many 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.
| Two public rooms named “Lobby”??? |
| 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 to the left. It supposedly was impossible for two public rooms in People Connection to have the same name, but that didn’t prevent two rooms named “Lobby” from appearing one night. (February 20, 1993 to be exact.)
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