Remember, eWorld wasn’t Apple’s first attempt. Before it there was AL-PE, which when Apple bailed became AOL. eWorld came when Apple realized how much they had screwed up by bailing on AL-PE. eWorld was too little and too late, but I did have an account.
AL-PE? I never heard of that. Maybe I’m not quite as old as I thought. I can’t even turn up anything in an Internet search.
I do remember getting endless AOL CDs in the mail.
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Oops, that was the short version. The full name was “AppleLink - Personal Edition”
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Ah. AppleLink does ring a bell.
I remember eWorld well because I was a beta tester. I was a subscriber to AppleLink Personal Edition (whose backend operations were outsourced to GEnie, a division of General Electric, if I recall correctly) and received a beta invite.
eWorld was OK for its era but was released at a terrible time for proprietary “walled garden” online services. It ran head-on into the rise of the WWW, Netscape’s IPO, and the creation of web portals.
Another (hopefuly accurate) memory is that AOL predated eWorld. When a collaboration between the two companies didn’t work out, Apple licensed AOL’s backend and client code.
I have a hazy recollection of eWorld, but don’t think I used it. I don’t remember AppleLink-Personal Edition, but I did use GEnie for a chat group and perhaps for email.
There were all kinds of services in the mid to late 1980s. A major reason why I bought my first Mac (512K) was to get an electronic connection to a magazine I wrote for in London. Western Union had a service called EasyLink, that I used for a while, and Software Tool and Die, which was among the first companies to offer an internet connection anybody could get.
We wrote about eWorld in TidBITS, of course. :-)
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Yes, AppleLink-Personal Edition predated AOL which predated eWorld. Click on the link in my reply above to read about AppleLink. I got a copy of AL-PE for free at AppleFest SF 1988 when I bought a high-speed modem that ran at a blazing 2400 baud! When Apple bailed on AL-PE, Quantum Computer renamed it America Online and then later added a DOS version to the Apple II & Mac versions of AOL. When Apple realized they had screwed the pooch by bailing, they licensed a version of AOL but with different graphics to create eWorld. But by then they were at least a day late and a dollar short.
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