I think Plogue did this (farm out code/libraries for any company that wants/needs it) for a long time, and perhaps they still do. Finale and Sibelius both sit on a Plogue Engine. I think Plogue also had a good bit to do with the SFZ protocol, and Cakewalk was heavy into that with whatever instruments came bundled in Cakewalk. Finale is going defunct…but Sibelius is still around and in the AVID arsenal as far as I know.
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But for a small fortune you could get a 300-9600 baud modem and join GEnie/Compuserve/AOL. If you lived a rural or small-town life, get ready to pay massive long distance tolls to call the nearest major city. You might have to auto-redial for 2 hours to get an open line (and even if your area always had busy lines and you couldn’t use it much, you still got that big BILL from GEnie/Compuserve/Whatever).
Someone in your house pick up the other phone while you were online? Borked!
A good many independent hobbyist BBSes existed. Many of those were quazi networked, as they’d all call each other to swap information (fidonet hierarchy…like a pyramid scheme). There were a few servers around the world that independent BBSes could call in a few times a day to update things on the ‘internet’ like ‘usenet’ news groups.
The internet did exist, but was pretty new, and mostly a military and ‘university’ thing. Usenet came to be…it often got shuffled in with the old fidonet (and similar) databases. The providers like GEnie and Compuserve would also dig into this stuff and make it available for their subscribers.
Seems like GEine and Compuserve had some Shell GUI things Subscribers could tag their favorite stuff in, call in once a day and grab things to enjoy ‘offline’. Whatever ‘interaction’ you did while offline (responses to news groups, emails, etc.) would get uploaded next time you logged in. You could tunnel out over telnet to do things in real time…like IRC chat, mucks/muds, archie search, hit ftp sites, and so on.
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Well said! Not to mention the obstacle on the track, which was the arrival of Apple Silicon and, of course, the tough battle that will come (in fact, it already is) with AI.
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Great read U. For a moment I was lost in the old world of Cakewalk and SEMPTE time code. Has all this technology made music better? Is some of it actually even music?
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GENie was pretty cool. I only used it for a few months before moving to something called the NVN Network (I think thats what it was??). Started off on Prodigy in 92, then in 94 they started charging hourly rates and PER message and everybody bailed. The gaming group I was in based around the Ultima games moved to various dial up services until the internet got more widely available a year or so later. I remember having access to ‘the internet’ for a bit through the Delphi service but there wasn’t really anything to do unless you really knew what you were looking for. All I can remember was being able to use Gopher to browse all these file servers thinking ‘Are there games here somewhere??’ but that was it… Started getting into local BBSes around then and started my own RBBS/WWIV/Telegard sites and joined up in the whole fidonet thing (parents LOVED it when the phone rang at 2am to collect all my Fidonet mail with DBridge!). That was fun times, except downloading a 1MB game to install for your BBS took you literally 24 hours to do with a 2400 baud modem., and if anybody picked up the phone or you had call waiting…
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