The Source (online service)

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The Source

Native name	Source Telecomputing Corporation
Company type	Private
Industry	Online Services
Founded	1978
Founder	Parent	CompuServe

The Source (Source Telecomputing Corporation) was an early

, one of the first such services to be oriented toward and available to the general public. The Source described itself as follows:

It's not hardware. It's not software. But it can take your personal computer anywhere in the world.

The Source was in operation from 1978 to 1989, when it was purchased by rival CompuServe and discontinued sometime thereafter. The Source's headquarters were located at 1616 Anderson Road, McLean, Virginia, 22102.

History

The Source was founded in 1978 as Digital Broadcasting Corporation by

.

Reader's Digest had high expectations for The Source, and established for the company its own purpose-built installation of

stock options

, and came in as an operating partner.

As the microcomputer boom continued, subscriptions reached a peak of 80,000 members, but later fell back (compared to 500,000 at CompuServe by 1989). During much of its existence The Source charged a start-up fee of about $100 and hourly usage rates on the order of $10 per hour. In 1984, the registration fee was $49.95, and The Source charged $20.75 per hour between 7:00 a.m. and 6:00 p.m. Monday through Friday, and $7.75 per hour on nights, weekends and holidays for 300 bits-per-second service. For service at 1200 bits per second there was a $5.00 per hour surcharge during weekday hours, and a $3.00 per hour surcharge at all other times. To place these costs for data services into an historical context, The Source's base nighttime and weekend rate of US$7.75 (equivalent to $23 in 2023) per hour in 1984 was approximately twice the federal minimum hourly wage in this same time period, placing the ability to access data with a personal computer in the hands of businesses and wealthy households only. Just as the expense of books gave rise to the library, the advent of data services provided by school and public library computers was a natural progression during this period in history.

The Source provided news sources, weather, stock quotations, a shopping service, electronic mail, a chat system, 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 and 1200 bits-per-second

for most of its existence.

External links

• David Carlson's Virtual World - The Online Timeline
• Article on The Source at The Online Timeline
• The Source Keeps Trying, InfoWorld, 5 November 1984. Including a box on the service's early history.
• YouTube video from Bits and Bytes Episode 5, demonstrated The Source and interviewed some of its employees