PlayNET
Encyclopedia
PlayNet was a U.S. online service for Commodore 64
Commodore 64
The Commodore 64 is an 8-bit home computer introduced by Commodore International in January 1982.Volume production started in the spring of 1982, with machines being released on to the market in August at a price of US$595...

 personal computers that operated from 1984 to 1987. It was operated by the PlayNet, Inc of Troy, New York
Troy, New York
Troy is a city in the US State of New York and the seat of Rensselaer County. Troy is located on the western edge of Rensselaer County and on the eastern bank of the Hudson River. Troy has close ties to the nearby cities of Albany and Schenectady, forming a region popularly called the Capital...

.

History

PlayNet was founded in 1983 by two former GE Global Research
GE Global Research
GE Global Research is the research and development division of General Electric.GE Global Research's primary facility is located in Niskayuna, New York. The Advanced Manufacturing and Software Technology Center is a satelite facility located in Van Buren, Michigan...

 employees, Dave Panzl and Howard Goldberg, as the first person-to-person, online communication and game network to feature home computer based graphics. The PlayNet software became the foundation for the first version of what is today America Online.

The founders launched the business initially with their own money. They then raised over $2.5 million from a variety of investors, including the venture capital funds of the Town of North Greenbush NY, Key Bank, Alan Patricof & Associates, and the New York State Science and Technology Foundation, and a group of individual investors through a limited R&D partnership led by McGinn Smith.

In 1985 PlayNet licensed their system to Control Video Corporation (CVC, later renamed Quantum Computer Services), which in October 1991 changed its name to America Online. The modified version of the PlayNet software (Quantum Link
Quantum Link
Quantum Link was a U.S. and Canadian online service for Commodore 64 and 128 personal computers that operated from November 5, 1985 to November 1, 1995. It was operated by Quantum Computer Services of Vienna, Virginia. In October 1991 they changed the name to America Online, which continues to...

 or Q-Link) was ported by Quantum to the PC to create the first version of the AOL software. As recently as 2005, some aspects of the original PlayNet communication protocols still appeared to be used by AOL.

The PlayNet offices were initially located in the J Building on Peoples Avenue in Troy, NY part of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Stephen Van Rensselaer established the Rensselaer School on November 5, 1824 with a letter to the Rev. Dr. Samuel Blatchford, in which van Rensselaer asked Blatchford to serve as the first president. Within the letter he set down several orders of business. He appointed Amos Eaton as the school's...

 incubator program. It subsequently moved to RPI's Technology Park in North Greenbush NY. At its peak, PlayNet employed 30 people including software developers, customer service staff, etc.

The maximum number of subscribers was approximately 3000, with up to around 200 logged in at a time. PlayNet declared bankruptcy
Bankruptcy
Bankruptcy is a legal status of an insolvent person or an organisation, that is, one that cannot repay the debts owed to creditors. In most jurisdictions bankruptcy is imposed by a court order, often initiated by the debtor....

 in February, 1986 and ceased operations in 1988 after Quantum stopped paying royalties.

Software details

PlayNet was originally designed around online interactive games which allowed chatting while playing. PlayNet also featured electronic mail, online chat
Online chat
Online chat may refer to any kind of communication over the Internet, that offers an instantaneous transmission of text-based messages from sender to receiver, hence the delay for visual access to the sent message shall not hamper the flow of communications in any of the directions...

, bulletin board
Bulletin board
A bulletin board is a surface intended for the posting of public messages, for example, to advertise things to buy or sell, announce events, or provide information...

s, file sharing
File sharing
File sharing is the practice of distributing or providing access to digitally stored information, such as computer programs, multimedia , documents, or electronic books. It may be implemented through a variety of ways...

 libraries, online shopping, and instant messaging
Instant messaging
Instant Messaging is a form of real-time direct text-based chatting communication in push mode between two or more people using personal computers or other devices, along with shared clients. The user's text is conveyed over a network, such as the Internet...

 (using On Line Messages, or OLMs). Games were mostly 'traditional' games and some well-known boardgames. Games were programmed in a mixture of BASIC
BASIC
BASIC is a family of general-purpose, high-level programming languages whose design philosophy emphasizes ease of use - the name is an acronym from Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code....

 and assembly language
Assembly language
An assembly language is a low-level programming language for computers, microprocessors, microcontrollers, and other programmable devices. It implements a symbolic representation of the machine codes and other constants needed to program a given CPU architecture...

.

Unlike other online systems of the era, PlayNet was highly graphical and required client software, and included error correction in the communication protocols. The server software for PlayNet ran on Stratus
Stratus Technologies
Stratus Technologies, Inc. a major producer of fault tolerant computer servers. The company was founded in 1980 as Stratus Computer, Inc. in Natick, Massachusetts, and adopted its present name in 1999. The current CEO and president is Dave Laurello. Stratus Technologies, Inc. is a privately held...

 fault-tolerant computers and was written in PL/1. AOL continued to use Stratus computers and parts of the PlayNet server software until the late 1990s or later.
  • The client software on the Commodore 64 ran a multitasking pseudo-operating system based on a Finite State Machine
    Finite state machine
    A finite-state machine or finite-state automaton , or simply a state machine, is a mathematical model used to design computer programs and digital logic circuits. It is conceived as an abstract machine that can be in one of a finite number of states...

     language.

Game list

  • Checkers
  • Chess
    Chess
    Chess is a two-player board game played on a chessboard, a square-checkered board with 64 squares arranged in an eight-by-eight grid. It is one of the world's most popular games, played by millions of people worldwide at home, in clubs, online, by correspondence, and in tournaments.Each player...

  • Backgammon
    Backgammon
    Backgammon is one of the oldest board games for two players. The playing pieces are moved according to the roll of dice, and players win by removing all of their pieces from the board. There are many variants of backgammon, most of which share common traits...

  • Hangman
    Hangman (game)
    Hangman is a paper and pencil guessing game for two or more players. One player thinks of a word and the other tries to guess it by suggesting letters.-Overview:...

  • Bridge
    Bridge
    A bridge is a structure built to span physical obstacles such as a body of water, valley, or road, for the purpose of providing passage over the obstacle...

  • Stratego
    Stratego
    Stratego is a board game featuring a 10×10 square board and two players with 40 pieces each. Pieces represent individual officers and soldiers in an army. The objective of the game is to either find and capture the opponent's Flag or to capture so many of the opponent's pieces that he/she cannot...

  • Connect 4
  • Chinese Chess
  • Go
    Go (board game)
    Go , is an ancient board game for two players that originated in China more than 2,000 years ago...

  • Several others


Games/features never finished/released:
  • Multiplayer Dungeons and Dragons
  • Poker
    Poker
    Poker is a family of card games that share betting rules and usually hand rankings. Poker games differ in how the cards are dealt, how hands may be formed, whether the high or low hand wins the pot in a showdown , limits on bet sizes, and how many rounds of betting are allowed.In most modern poker...

  • Various other card games and wargames
  • Auditorums and panel discussions


The never-released D&D game was very similar to Neverwinter Nights (AOL game)
Neverwinter Nights (AOL game)
Neverwinter Nights was the first multiplayer online role-playing game to display graphics, and ran from 1991 to 1997 on AOL.-Gameplay:Neverwinter Nights was developed to be played similarly to the Gold Box series of games...

.

Connections to PlayNet were made by modem
Modem
A modem is a device that modulates an analog carrier signal to encode digital information, and also demodulates such a carrier signal to decode the transmitted information. The goal is to produce a signal that can be transmitted easily and decoded to reproduce the original digital data...

s at 300 baud via X.25
X.25
X.25 is an ITU-T standard protocol suite for packet switched wide area network communication. An X.25 WAN consists of packet-switching exchange nodes as the networking hardware, and leased lines, Plain old telephone service connections or ISDN connections as physical links...

 providers such as Tymnet and Telenet. In 1985, pricing was $6 per month, with additional fees of $2 per hour, after a one-time membership fee of $30.

The system competed with many other online services like CompuServe
CompuServe
CompuServe was the first major commercial online service in the United States. It dominated the field during the 1980s and remained a major player through the mid-1990s, when it was sidelined by the rise of services such as AOL with monthly subscriptions rather than hourly rates...

 and The Source (service)
The Source (service)
The Source was an early online service, one of the first such services to be oriented toward and available to the general public. The Source described itself as follows:...

, as well as Bulletin board system
Bulletin board system
A Bulletin Board System, or BBS, is a computer system running software that allows users to connect and log in to the system using a terminal program. Once logged in, a user can perform functions such as uploading and downloading software and data, reading news and bulletins, and exchanging...

s (single or multiuser). PlayNet's graphical display was better than many of these competing systems because it used specialized client software with a nonstandard protocol. However, this specialized software and nonstandard protocol limited its market to the Commodore 64.

In 2005, hobbyists managed to reverse engineer the communications protocol and allow people running the QuantumLink software on an emulator or original hardware (via a serial cable) to run a reduced version of the service called Quantum Link Reloaded.

External links

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
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