GEnie

GE Information Services ran large time-sharing systems for business customers during the day. In 1985 it started selling the evenings and weekends to home users as GEnie — the General Electric Network for Information Exchange — priced well below CompuServe. The offering was the standard mix: email, chat, file libraries and discussion forums called RoundTables, where a number of game and science fiction publishers kept official presences.

GEnie was also an early home for pay-by-the-hour multiplayer games, including the flight sim Air Warrior. It lost ground once the web and flat-rate plans arrived, and shut down at the end of 1999 — partly, users were told, because it wasn't Y2K-ready.