Tonight we’ll log in like it’s 1979.

Teletypes may have killed a lot of the woods by outputting each line to hard copy rather than a screen, but there’s something to be said for the permanence of paper. While working on a functional Silent 700 Model 765 ASR teletypewriter, I came across a set of teletypewriter transcripts from several users logged into The Source, one of the first online services, and a complete photocopy of the service’s user manual.

This can only mean one thing: it’s time to get out your copy of Pink Floyd’s “The Wall”, start playing “In The Flesh”and go back to 1979 and 1980 when these transcripts were printed. We’ll talk a bit about the service in general, and then we’ll log in exactly like these people did, because the Silent 700 transcripts really show exactly what was going on and how people were using them.

A Brief History of the Source

Source was one of the first online services billed as “information utilities”that targeted the general public, and it presaged later operations such as Prodigy, Delphi, and QuantumLink that came years later. (Although CompuServe was already in existence as a company, the consumer services for which it became better known did not exist until 1979.)

The original concept, founded in 1978, was to send email over FM radio subcarriers, but the technology has proven to be effective. unreliable. Instead, focusing on telephony, the Source company made a deal with time-sharing provider Dialcom to use its “surplus”mini-computer time at night and on weekends for the same concept.

Dialcom was already providing business-oriented services such as word processing and customer relationship management, and in 1978 it developed the world’s first commercial email service, which the company later offered internationally. For a time, the service controlled almost the entire market outside the United States.

Because the cost of acquiring and maintaining minicomputers was more or less constant regardless of how they were used, the new venture gave Dialcom an additional revenue stream by allowing parent company The Source, by then named Telecomputing Corporation of America (TCA), to offer substantially lower rates in those periods of underutilization. (For the same reasons, off-peak and peak rates were ubiquitous among early services, most of which at the time were also based on minicomputers;

TCA launched The Source at COMDEX in June 1979. The $100 one-time subscription fee put everyone off except for decisive and even off-peak hours, it was $2.75 per hour billed by the minute and rounded up (in 2022 dollars, that was $391 per hour). start and $10.75 each). Off-peak time was defined as the time between 6:00 pm and 7:00 am ET and all day on weekends and selected holidays. If you were stupid, desperate, or rich enough to use it during work hours, it cost $15 an hour (about $59 an hour today).

Dialcom used Prime minicomputers, and Prime was once the sixth largest supplier of such systems. The earliest Prime systems from 1972 were backwards compatible with Honeywell Series-16 16-bit machines. Their developers originally worked on the machines at NASA, but they were 32-bit. Because of this engineering-oriented background, early Primes were designed to run Fortran and the Prime PRIMOS (or, for a time, “PR1MOS”) operating system. All the transcripts here indicate the 2.x version of the system, so the Dialcom systems in use at the time were Prime 200 machines running that particular version.

Dialcom’s servers were located in the Washington, D.C. area, where many of its customers (including a large number of US representatives) were also located; The source was in nearby McLean, Virginia. Accessing Dialcom from DC consisted of dialing a local number that directly connected you to the server as a terminal.