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Consumer-facing internet wasn't widely available at the time. I'm not sure if this represented the potential to sell people on the Internet, or just on online
by hakfoo 3y ago
Consumer-facing internet wasn't widely available at the time.
I'm not sure if this represented the potential to sell people on the Internet, or just on online services as a whole. As I understand it, the NABU platform was still (in its original form) a walled-garden, just like CompuServe, The Source, or GEnie in the same era, or even the Minitel-style platforms in Europe. The unique proposition of connecting to another system ran by an unrelated party was still not there.
If we roll it back to "this might have kickstarted adoption of online services", that's an interesting discussion.
From my perspective, I think people were averse to early online services because most dial-up online services were extremely expensive before the 1990s. A few dollars an hour adds up fast especially at low bandwidth. I can recall my family getting its first PC (~1992 or so) and being warned never to click the icons for AOL (the early GeoWorks based version) or the terminal emulator due to cost concerns (although it would have been moot because the PC didn't have a modem!)
Part of that was that a lot of the walled-garden services used existing commercial timesharing networks for access, and those were priced for people whose business was paying for it. In the NABU design, the infrastructure was owned by the cable firm in the first place, and there's no risk you're pushing off a better-paying customer. What did the price plans look like? If they had treated it as an unlimited, flat-rate package, then adoption would have been a lot higher.
I also understand at least some forms of the NABU system were aggressively unidirectional-- a lot of the software was on an 'endless loop' where you waited for what you wanted to cycle past again to start downloading it. That probably helped keep the infrastructure costs manageable, only the much smaller upstream link needed to be managed on a per-user basis.
- giantrobot 3y ago> Part of that was that a lot of the walled-garden services used existing commercial timesharing networks for access, and those were priced for people whose business was paying for it. Cable television deployments were completely unidirectional. A cable headend typically pulled in a satellite feed and injected that into their coax. There was no upstream connection at the client side and more importantly no upstream at the headend. Cable companies didn't need so didn't have upstream links so they weren't just lying around waiting for some service to use them. So a counterfactual NABU online service would have needed cable headends upgraded with 1) bidirectional transceivers and 2) the headend offices would need long distance backhaul. Early online services were expensive in part because that backhaul was expensive. A counterfactual NABU service would have needed that same expensive backhaul.