On Mon, 1 Aug 2022, Ryan de Laplante via cctalk wrote:
Has anyone ever seen promotional videos showing Prodigy, Compuserv, Delphi, GENie, AOL? I've collected disks, but the systems are long gone so archived video is all we have to remember them by. When I was young, I remember seeing disks and pamphlets for these services in the box when upgrading modems. They had serious brand recognition. By the time the Internet was becoming available to the public, I remember being more interested in getting a Compuserv account lol. After getting our first Internet account in 1994, I was confused because I didn’t know where the “file areas”, “message areas” and “chat” were after being so used to BBS menus. Eventually I learned about FTP, USENET, and IRC. We even had a “yellow pages” paper book where you could look up topic specific FTP, USENET, and Gopher sites.
In 1995, there were two paperback books that purported to be "Internet Yellow Pages". (New Riders and McGraw Hill) No resemblance at all to the real TPC ("The Phone Company") Yellow Pages, which were the primary business advertising medium. Instead, the books were compilations of amateurish blurbs by the authors about sites that they were excited about.
Yes, in the 1970s and 1980s, I had listings, and sometimes ads, for my businesses in the Yellow Pages. In those days, people would believe that a business didn't exist if it wasn't listed in the Yellow Pages. ("TPC" was the revelation about The Phone Company in James Coburn's "The President's Analyst")
