Anyone Here From GEnie (back in the day) ?

[wiseguyusa]

Back in the days of CompuServe, The Source, Prodigy etc General Electric had a dial up online service called "GEnie" or General Electric Network Information Exchange.

 

To my knowledge it was the only commercial online service to support Atari 8its (and ST's)

 

Is there anyone here that used to post on the GEnie groups?

[+wood_jl]

I remember using GEnie, too, but I'm afraid I can't remember too much about it. But CompuServe also had Atari SIG (special interest group) for A8 and ST on it, too. But it was too expensive!

 

GEnie was $5/hr and no surcharge for 1200 baud. I can't remember what CompuServe charged, but the only affordable way was 300 baud an non-peak hours. I think 1200 baud - depending upon the hours - could run like $15 an hour, or something ridiculous. One must recall that each $1 in 1985 was like $2.18 today!!!

[AtariGeezer]

Yep, back in my dial-up addiction days, I was on GEnie and CompuServe. It wasn't uncommon for my phone bill to be a bit over $200 a month

[danwinslow]

Yep, I dropped a LOT of money being addicted to GEnie, and in particular, a game called Gemstone III.

[+Stephen]

I was also on Genie, although only for a short time. I still have some screen caps (i.e., buffer saves) on 5.25" floppy, showing some of the menus, and online shopping, as well as a bill. I'll post the files when I find them.

[wiseguyusa]

The was a front end "Aladdin" that you could use offine, the UL/DL all of your msgs in just a few min, there was another one that would stop you from going on in "Prime Time" the use of both of those kept my monthly bills in single digits!

[Kyle22]

I was a CompuServe kind of guy. 72347,3014.

[Bryan]

I was a member of the Delphi Atari group for several years.

[Lynxpro]

I wasn't on them but sever members of the Atari users groups I belonged to were so they'd download the chatroom discussions, shareware, etc and then post them to the users group BBS.

 

Atari Corp had been on GEnie, Compuserve, and Delphi. Some people enjoyed Atari's own BBS.

 

I like the local [sacramento] based Atari BBSes myself on my SX212...

[mellis]

I was on the Atari 8-bit and ST roundtables on GEnie. My handle was old enough that it was [FIRSTNAME]-[LASTNAME], not the usual [iNITIALS].[LASTNAME] that came to be used later on.

 

Good times.

[tschak909]

72711,2702

[raindog]

I was on GEnie, Compuserve, and Qlink (C64/Apple specific, with a proprietary client that eventually became AOL). I was also on other pre-Internet dialup services briefly, like Delphi, Prodigy, and some weird proto-web thing for MS-DOS that spread across BBSes in the mid-'90s, I think based on Citadel.

 

Like others, I used some GEnie client, maybe Aladdin, maybe macros in some terminal program I was using, to do as much as I could offline. Compuserve I vaguely remember getting free access somehow, but always found it too byzantine to enjoy. I would just log in and race through my messages and boards, and then read the log file after I logged out. Qlink was a lot cheaper and I spent quite a lot of time in their chat rooms, especially the ones called "swapin" and "AlternateLifestyles". But there was no logging, while somewhere on floppy disks I probably have logs from GEnie and Compuserve from my Amiga days, along with logs from many, many BBSes I called, most of which are not really appropriate to discuss here, and my university's chat system, and the early days of IRC. I just found a USB floppy drive on Saturday; I wonder if I could read any of those disks today.

 

I don't remember my IDs on any of these services, though toward the end of my Amiga days was where I settled on "raindog".

[Alfred]

I was on GEnie the last couple of years it was around. I ported Aladdin to the 8-bit, but GEnie was fading by then.

[Ransom]

I was on CompuServe for a long time, then I switched to GEnie for a while before ending up at Delphi as my last stop before switching to a local ISP. I don't recall much about GEnie, though.

[+Allan]

Bumping and old topic.......

 

Does anybody remember any specific software that was put out by Genie for the 8-bits? Compuserve had this 

http://www.atarimania.com/utility-atari-400-800-xl-xe-vidtex_33630.html

 

I was just wondering if there had been anything that Genie published.

 

Allan

 

[+David_P]

GeNIE had a program called (I think) Aladdin for the 8 bits.  In fact, I believe its author is an AtariAge member.

 

EDIT: Here's another thread with some discussion of Djinni, by our own Alfred.  It was a clone of Aladdin on the 8-bit, which was impossible, until he did it.

 

 

Edited June 18, 2019 by David_P
Added link

[Kyle22]

GEnie files would be nice, also CompuServe SIG*ATARI.

 

[fujidude]

Yep sure was.  GEnie was an affordable alternative to Compuserve.

[zzip]

Was a member for a few years before I got a dial-up internet account and it became redundant. 

[Dan Iacovelli]

Yep Iwas on GEnie in good old days dial up, Iused hang out in Atari section mostly and go to the Real time chats (Remember DateLine Atari RTC with bob brodie? I was there when they were announcing the jaguar and  mad dog mcree possibly coming to jag from American laser games)