" * Mail has arrived for you.. "

Here in the UK, years before the internet took root there was something called Compunet (oh, and Prestel and Compuserve but they were expensive and boring:). Compunet was different as it was aimed purely at C64 users and many of the programming and magazine personalities of the time had accounts. It was dead simple: once you'd subscribed and acquired your CBM modem, you'd slam the black brick into the C64's cartridge port and away you'd go - well as fast as the 1200/75 baud rate would allow at least! (There was no software to load, the modem contained all the software to "surf" Compunet as well a text editor to make your own pages and Email). Living in a big city we had access to one of Compunet's local nodes - which kept the phone bill acceptibly low, ie: horrendous by today's standards! If dial-up was successful, you'd be greeted by the familiar Compunet ASCII logo and oh the excitement if a little mailbox appeared too :)

Like a mini internet, you could access users's "Home pages" (me and my brother ("Grah" GR9) had a games review page going for a while called "Wallop"), send Email to other users, contribute to newsgroups or chat live on Partyline, IRC style. Partyline was one of the most fun features of Compunet and they knew it, you were supposed to buy the special "link software" but hardly anyone did cus you could get the limited session software for free, log off, enter some pokes, and save it out to use later - heheheh:)

The demo scene really had its roots in those early days. In the beginning, groups like "The Meanteam", "Alloy", "KGB" etc made demos by ripping game music and loading screens, adding scrolling messages and uploading the resultant programs in their DIRs. Upcoming musicians like Johnathan Dunn (Choroid) & Wally Beben (Hagar)) uploaded their tunes, graphics artists like Bob Stevenson uploaded their latest cool pictures and coders showed off their new tricks + effects (Sprites in the border for example)... at the time this was all cutting edge stuff.. (Well not "all" - Barry Leitch's dire Electrosound version of "The Chicken Song" gained immediate notoriety and other musicians wasted no time in uploading their "tributes" - poor old Bazza. Still he's now doing alright for himself so the publicity was probably worth it:)

What else, oh yes.. A dodgy voting system was used on uploaded files where people could give their verdict on the stuff available. This was somewhat flawed however, as anyone could vote 1 to 9. Because only an average was displayed, much mischief could be done by voting "1" all over the place.. ("Curse of the phantom One voter")

All good things come to an end and the beginning of the end for Compunet came when they updated the system. First they tried to speed it up by replacing their server and installing a "kilostream" link. Then there was talk of allowing other computers to access the system (Amiga and ST) but the chaos caused by all the changes went on for months and resulted in loads of people getting fed up and leaving. The prices went up, the local nodes started to disappear and the membership dropped rapidly... 'Click.... brrrrr' as they say.

Further Reading:

• Compunet entry at Wikipedia