Remembering eWorld - Apple's Online Walled Garden
2012/02/11 16:21
I don't hate Walled Gardens. I have fond memories of Apple's eWorld online service from the mid 90s. It competed (or at least tried to compete) against AOL and it was a battle it was never going to win so Apple shut it down in 1996. Despite the relatively small membership (by today's standards), it was the first place where I connected with complete strangers online and talked about common interests. And even though I only used it for less than a year, its welcome screen (an internet-as-town-square UI metaphor) is etched in my mind. That first emblematic internet welcome screen has, to this day, left a screen-burnt ghost image that I see everywhere I look online. So when in 2012 John Battelle ponders What Commons do we wish for?, this is the picture I see in my head...
... It might look quaint by today's standards but in 1995, this was my on-ramp to the Internet and it was the most exciting piece of software on the Macintosh. I loved eWorld, the Town Square metaphor, the cute little people that looked like daubs of paint. In 1996 I began working at Apple Computer in Quality Assurance testing Apple's connectivity software and hardware. One of my favorite aspects of this job was putting eWorld through its paces ;-) It turns out I'm not alone in fondly remembering eWorld. There's an (incomplete) Flash simulation of the eWorld interface here.
Back in 1995, The Internet really did come on Floppy Disks :-).
Apple was also hard at work developing a Browser in 1996 - CyberDog. It was a dog. It was meant to be a showcase for OpenDoc - Apple's rival to Microsoft's OLE (Object Linking & Embedding). Cyberdog was slow and crashy and nowhere near as good as it needed to be to compete with Netscape which was going gangbusters at the time. Anyway, I doubt if as many people remember Cyberdog and if they do, I doubt they are fond memories. It's funny to think how much has changed.