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Information about The Source (service)

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Originally, accounts on The Source were sold via retail packages which included manuals along with access information.
The Source (Source Telecomputing Corporation) was the name of an early online service. One of the first online services to be oriented toward and available to the general public, The Source was in operation from 1979 to 1989, when it was purchased by rival CompuServe and discontinued sometime after. The Source, based in McLean, Virginia, was owned for most of its existence by Readers' Digest and Control Data Corporation.

At its peak, it had 80,000 members. During much of its existence it charged a startup fee of about $100 and hourly usage rates on the order of $10 per hour. It provided news sources, weather, stock quotations, a shopping service, electronic mail, various databases, online text of magazines, and airline schedules. It also had a newsgroup-like facility known as PARTICIPATE (or PARTI), which was developed by Participation Systems of Winchester, Massachusetts. PARTICIPATE provided what it called "many to many" communications, or computer conferencing, and hosted "Electures" on The Source, such as Paul Levinson's "Space: Humanizing the Universe" in the spring of 1985.

Intended for use with 300 bit/s and 1200 bit/s dial-up telephone connections, The Source was text-based for most of its existence.

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An online service provider can include internet service providers and web sites, such as Wikipedia's or Usenet (commonly accessed through Google Groups). In its original more limited definition it referred only to a commercial computer communication service in which paid members
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19th century - 20th century - 21st century
1940s  1950s  1960s  - 1970s -  1980s  1990s  2000s
1976 1977 1978 - 1979 - 1980 1981 1982

Also: 1979 by Smashing Pumpkins.

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19th century - 20th century - 21st century
1950s  1960s  1970s  - 1980s -  1990s  2000s  2010s
1986 1987 1988 - 1989 - 1990 1991 1992

Year 1989 (MCMLXXXIX
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CompuServe

Subsidiary of AOL
Founded 1969
Headquarters Columbus, Ohio, USA

Industry Internet & Communications
Products ISP
Website www.compuserve.
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McLean, Virginia

Seal
Motto:
Location of McLean, Virginia.
Coordinates:
Country United States
State Virginia
County Fairfax
Area
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''' Reader's Digest is a monthly general interest family magazine. Although its circulation has declined in recent years, the Audit Bureau of Circulation says Reader's Digest
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Control Data Corporation (CDC), was one of the pioneering supercomputer firms. For most of the 1960s they built the fastest computers in the world by far, only losing that crown in the 1970s to what was effectively a spinoff.
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Paul Levinson BA, MA, PhD (born 1947) is an American author and professor of communications and media studies at Fordham University in New York City. Levinson's novels, short fiction, and non-fiction works have been translated into twelve languages.
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hot Dial-up access is a form of Internet access via telephone line. The client uses a modem connected to a computer and a telephone line to dial into an Internet service provider's (ISP) node to establish a modem-to-modem link, which is then routed to the Internet.
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