BIX
More info
- Creator
- BYTE (McGraw-Hill)
- Released
- 1985–2001
- Type
- Online service
BYTE magazine's own dial-up conferencing service, where readers, writers and developers argued about technology in depth.
The BYTE Information Exchange opened in 1985 as the magazine's answer to CompuServe, aimed at a narrower and more technical crowd. It ran on CoSy, a conferencing system from the University of Guelph in Canada, and was organised into conferences and topic threads rather than general-interest forums. Several of the magazine's columnists were on it and answered readers directly.
That gave BIX a reputation as the place to get answers from people who had actually written the code. It was sold in 1991 to General Videotex, owner of Delphi, and faded as the web made dedicated conferencing services redundant. It shut down in 2001.