Linked by Thom Holwerda on Fri 15th Sep 2006 15:14 UTC, submitted by Saad
"Back in the mid-nineties, Apple was a company without focus. After the explosive growth of the Macintosh in the late eighties, Apple was flush with cash, but had little strategy to guide its investments. As a result, products like eWorld were developed while Apple's core products languished. Meant as a substitute to the very expensive AppleLink online service, eWorld was based on the AOL network, and presented a friendly face to several proprietary online services and limited internet connectivity. eWorld failed to gain much of a foothold in the market, and was quietly discontinued in 1996 (only months before CEO Michael Spindler, was ousted)."
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Member since:
2006-06-11
I happened to be a Mac user during the eWorld days. I loved it because it had a sense of community, most everyone knew each other. I was an assistant administrator for a kids-oriented area (I was 13 at the time), spending most of my time hosting chat sessions and what not. I was granted a free, unlimited use account, which was gold in the days of online services charging by the hour. It was sad when they pulled the plug.
I also happened to be a beta tester for eWorld for Windows. The Windows version was never released, but it was essentially complete and stable. I remember waiting months trying to figure out why the Windows client wasn't being released until the day they announced the closure.
FYI/background info: eWorld licenced the AOL client/server system. It was essentially a rebranded AOL client. I can't recall the version(s) exactly, but I am thinking eWorld 1.0 was a rebranded AOL 2.0 client, and eWorld 2.0 was a rebranded AOL 3.0 client. I could be wrong about the versions, but I do remember being able to log into eWorld and then starting a web browser (spyglass mosaic, i think??) for www access. Of course this was before the web took off, and there was very little to do.
RIP eWorld: I will always remember paying $250 for a 28.8kbps modem when it was rare to find a dialup number that exceeded 14.4. Those were the days...being impressed by the speed of 28.8 when I was finally able to use it! These days I sometimes curse my 4m cable connection for being too slow!