Quantum Link: AOL before it was AOL

I used AOL before it was AOL. And if you had a Commodore and a modem in the 1980s, you may have too. On May 24, 1985, Control Video reorganized and became Quantumlink, or Q-Link for short, on its way to reinventing itself as an online service for home computers. It opened for business November 5 of the same year.

Origins in Play Net

Quantum Link’s UI resembled early AOL. The backend was essentially the same too.

The Q-Link origin story is a series of unlikely events. It started in 1983 with an online service called Play Net. Why not was a service using dedicated, bespoke client software running on a Commodore 64 communicating with a Stratus mini computer running as a server, with the server software being written in a language called PL/1.

Play Net tried to build market share by pricing its service extremely low. The problem was they ran out of capacity and their subscriber base wasn’t generating revenue for them to be able to expand.

They went looking to be acquired, and in their mind, the ideal partner would have been Commodore.

Commodore liked the service but they didn’t like Play Net’s management. They also didn’t want to run an online service. They wanted to partner with someone who would run an online service for Commodore computers, but not run it themselves.

Control Video: the Atari game streaming service

Not long after, Control Video approached Commodore with a similar proposal. Control Video was a subscription-based game streaming service for Atari 2600 consoles, wiped out by the video game crash of 1983. They hoped to sell their infrastructure to Commodore so Commodore could turn it into an online service. Commodore was even less interested in that, but they liked Control Video’s management, which included Steve Case.

Control Video is the company that became AOL.

How Commodore played matchmaker to create Quantum Link

Rather than tell both companies to get lost or politely wish them luck, Commodore decided to play matchmaker. Maybe Control Video could license the technology from Play Net or buy Play Net outright, build a nice online service, and then Commodore would be glad to promote it by including their software with their modems and computers.

Play Net agreed to license their technology to Control Video for $50,000 plus a recurring royalty payment. It wasn’t the deal either of them were looking for, especially Play Net. For Play Net, all it really did was delay the inevitable. And for Commodore, it was a lost opportunity for the ages.

Quantum Link launched November 5, 1985. The two services coexisted until 1988. Control Video, now known as Quantum Computer Services, saw that Playnet was about to go out of business and in no position to fight them if they stopped making payments. So Quantum stopped paying royalties, the company went under, and then Quantum was able to purchase the technology outright when playing at liquidated.

It’s not an ethical way to do business, but justice is usually for the people who can afford it, sad to say.

Why Quantum Link and Play Net looked almost exactly alike

But this relationship answers a question I had for a very long time. I remember seeing ads for both services, and both services included a screenshot in their ads. And aside from the logo in the middle of the screen, they sure looked like they were the same thing. And indeed they were.

But it worked out well for Quantum. Quantum learned from Play Net’s mistake, priced their service at a slightly higher monthly cost, and they weren’t afraid to raise their price from $3.60 an hour to $4.80 an hour. This allowed them to buy adequate capacity, and they were able to expand further than Playnet ever had been able to.

Quantum Link and Lucasfilm

I read about it in magazines and it sounded like absolute magic. Especially after they teamed up with Lucasfilm and produced something they called Habitat, and ambitious project to create a multiplayer online game that used the distributed power of a central mini computer and the customers’ Commodore 64s.

Habitat experienced delay after delay and ultimately proved unsuccessful. A scaled down version of it eventually appeared called Club Caribe, and the SCUMM game engine that ended up powering Lucasfilm point-and-click adventures like Maniac Mansion, Zack McCracken, and The Secret of Monkey Island was another offshoot of this project.

Every Commodore owner who heard about Q-Link wanted a chance to play Habitat, and we would have settled for the cut down version that eventually appeared. But even though I had a Quantumlink subscription for a while, I never played Club Caribe. As best I can tell, it cost extra above and beyond the regular service, and it required a second disk that you had to order.

What using Quantum Link was like

The Q-Link disk was easy to get. Not quite as easy as getting an AOL disk a few years later, but they did persuade Commodore to include a Q-Link disk with every modem they sold, and they convinced Berkeley Softworks to save one disk side of its GEOS operating system for the C-64 and 128 and put Q-Link on it.

And the reason I didn’t ever play the online games was because Q-Link was expensive. The subscription cost $9.95 per month, and you got one hour of free usage. Additional time was $3.60 per hour, which later increased to $4.80 per hour. That was on top of phone charges, if it wasn’t a local call.

One thing that was nice about it was that a lot of Commodore journalists were on the service, and they published their Q-Link handles at the end of their articles. If you had a question about anything they wrote, you could email them. I did that at least couple of times, and to my surprise, they all actually responded.

But I didn’t do that very often. I spent most of that free hour downloading stuff. And I had a couple of friends who also had a subscription. We would coordinate with one another to get the most out of that hour. Since all of the software was public domain, it was completely legal to do that.

And it was a hotbed of activity for several years. The Stereo SID originated on Q-Link. Its message boards were the cheapest and easiest place for Commodore engineers and third party developers to brainstorm and collaborate. Subscribers could hobnob with like-minded people from around the country, learn and use emoticons, and do most of what we do online today. It felt like living in the future.

Life beyond Commodore

But nothing lasts forever. Q-Link’s management had ambitions beyond what the Commodore market was able to provide them. In the two years immediately prior to the Q-Link launch, the C-64 sold 3 million units each year. But by the time Q-Link was off the ground, Commodore was selling more like a million units per year. PCs became the growth market, selling nearly 10 million units per year late in the decade. So it is not at all surprising that the company focus shifted to the PC market and the product that became AOL.

That’s why Playnet’s legacy lived much longer than the company did. Quantum wrote new client software for additional computers, and that technology eventually became the early version of AOL. Essentially, they stood up a parallel version of Quantum Link and pointed different clients at it. Commodore computers never connected to AOL, but Macintoshes ended up connecting to the parallel version that had originally hosted Apple II computers, and then PCs did as well.

Neither company ran local phone lines everywhere. CompuServe could afford to do that, but these up starts couldn’t. Instead, they licensed to providers who did have a presence in major cities nationwide: Telenet and Tymnet. They provided local numbers which then connected to Quantum’s servers and allowed them to communicate over the x25 protocol, essentially the same protocol ISDN used a decade later.

I remember being thrown for a loop when I saw Telnet in the early days of the internet. I remembered Telenet, saw Telnet, and wondered if the two things were related. They were not. But it is pretty surprising how much stuff under the hood of Quantum Link remained relevant even after Commodore and Quantum Link were gone.

Nostalgia for Quantum Link

I didn’t use Quantum Link as much as some other people did. So my sense of nostalgia for it is different than it would have been for people who hung out in the chat rooms or played the online multiplayer games.

As a former user, I have mixed feelings about the service, and always did. There was a certain fantastic magic to it, but it did fall short of the hype that Quantum Link and the magazines amped up about it. It was a place to talk to people from all over the country including people who you only knew as bylines in magazines, and the huge selection of files to download was really cool. But the media hype around it made it sound like it was going to be equal parts Amazon.com, social media, and Ultima online. And that just wasn’t feasible with the computing power we had available in 1988. I’m not just saying the Commodore 64 was incapable of that. Nothing we had in 1988 was up to the task.

My experience with Q-Link support

For some reason, the thing I remember boast about Quantum Link was their tech support. I had trouble connecting to them at first. It worked, but only intermittently. When I called tech support, they had a script. Did they ever have a script. Make sure to unplug your printer, your second disk drive, and your fast load cartridge.

At the time, the only one of those things we had was a printer. Unplugging that didn’t make it any less intermittent. They insisted I must not have unplugged the printer all the way.

Eventually I figured out the cheap modem that we had just didn’t do very good line filtering, and we didn’t have an especially clear phone line.

In some small way, that experience probably inspired my own IT career. I even did a stint for 6 months where part of my job was troubleshooting modems. Sometimes you have to go back to your roots to find yourself, and for those 6 months in 2005, I went all the way back to 1987, when I wasn’t even a teenager yet.

So it’s not a thing to thank Quantum Link for, but that early experience helped me to hone those skills I needed to tread water while I figured out what I was going to do with my career when it was at a crossroads. It’s funny how things work out sometimes.

It wasn’t the only time I went all the way back to the Commodore 64 to help me figure out how to smooth out a rough transition in my career. That is one of the reasons I like retro.

How the Web fulfilled Q-Link’s promise

I don’t remember exactly when I canceled my Q-Link subscription, but it was probably 1990 or 1991 at the very latest. But Q-Link lasted a surprisingly long time. Even though they didn’t really add any additional capability to it after about 1988, they kept the system running until mid 1995, more than a year after Commodore was out of business. Commodore owners were pretty loyal, so I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. But I’d be lying to you if I said I was there at the end.

But I will admit, when I first saw the World Wide Web even in its infancy in the early days of Netscape, one of the things I thought was that this technology might make good on all those things Q-Link had been promising in the previous decade. It didn’t happen right away, but I would say it did end up doing all of those things and more. For better in most cases. And unfortunately, for worse in a few cases.

But I would argue that what my kids do online with Roblox today is largely what I imagined Habitat would be. So my kids are living my dream, which isn’t a bad thing.