Submitted by “Back in the mid-nineties, Apple was a company without focus. After the explosive growth of the Macintosh in the late eighties, Apple was flush with cash, but had little strategy to guide its investments. As a result, products like eWorld were developed while Apple’s core products languished. Meant as a substitute to the very expensive AppleLink online service, eWorld was based on the AOL network, and presented a friendly face to several proprietary online services and limited internet connectivity. eWorld failed to gain much of a foothold in the market, and was quietly discontinued in 1996 (only months before CEO Michael Spindler, was ousted).”
I remember using it, I grant you it was expensive, but it was simple and did what it said on the tin
And it was cool if you were a Macuser. Lots of easy support options, and no busy signals unlike AOL at the time.
Well, it was easier to cancel than AOL. “‘poof’ and it went away!”
(I jest, I am a mac user, but that video is good fun)
It was a playful place, as the article said, and it was a lot of fun. Because of the low membership, you knew almost everyone in the “circles” you hung around in. I had a Newton and NewtonMail worked wonderfully. The article is also right – so many remember it with tremendous fondness and nostalgia.
eWorld was awesome! I had Prodigy at the time and both were great.
Both were great??!! I remember Prodigy for Macintosh, it was a total piece! Mac users paid outrageous amounts for Prodigy service, and had far less features than Windows users.
BTW, wasn’t Prodigy (classic) an old DOS program, converted to run under Windows, and crappily ported to MacOS?
Then it probably ain’t all that cool.
I have no experience with said service, but I learned real quick that if it just didn’t give you and IP address and unlimited access to the internet, then it wasn’t worth your time.
I’m a former compuserve, delphi, prodigy, and AOL user.The first account I enjoyed and felt was worth using was a boring ol’ ISP that set up a nice dial up service in the area.
I happened to be a Mac user during the eWorld days. I loved it because it had a sense of community, most everyone knew each other. I was an assistant administrator for a kids-oriented area (I was 13 at the time), spending most of my time hosting chat sessions and what not. I was granted a free, unlimited use account, which was gold in the days of online services charging by the hour. It was sad when they pulled the plug.
I also happened to be a beta tester for eWorld for Windows. The Windows version was never released, but it was essentially complete and stable. I remember waiting months trying to figure out why the Windows client wasn’t being released until the day they announced the closure.
FYI/background info: eWorld licenced the AOL client/server system. It was essentially a rebranded AOL client. I can’t recall the version(s) exactly, but I am thinking eWorld 1.0 was a rebranded AOL 2.0 client, and eWorld 2.0 was a rebranded AOL 3.0 client. I could be wrong about the versions, but I do remember being able to log into eWorld and then starting a web browser (spyglass mosaic, i think??) for www access. Of course this was before the web took off, and there was very little to do.
RIP eWorld: I will always remember paying $250 for a 28.8kbps modem when it was rare to find a dialup number that exceeded 14.4. Those were the days…being impressed by the speed of 28.8 when I was finally able to use it! These days I sometimes curse my 4m cable connection for being too slow!
This doesn’t look too much different than The Sierra Network from back around that same time.