CIX
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CIX (Originally Compulink Information eXchange) is one of the earliest British Internet Service Providers. Founded in 1985 by Frank and Sylvia Thornley, it began as a TBBS ("The Bulletin Board System for TRS-80") system, but in 1987 was relaunched as CIX Conferencing. The system is based on COSY ("Conferencing System"), though it has been heavily modified by succeeding generations of staff. CIX was one of the first commercial services to enable users to communicate over the telephone network. While initially users read the text-based CIX messages whilst online, the UK's practice of charging per minute for telephone calls led to the development of offline readers, programs that gather together all messages waiting for a user and downloads them en bloc for reading at leisure. The official offline reader, Ameol, which handles email, CIX conferencing, and Usenet and is freely available to anyone to use, was originally written by Steve Palmer in the early 1990s, first as a customer, then as a staff member.
In 2000 it was sold to Telenor, a Norwegian telecommunications company. In 2003 it was relaunched as CIX Online and given a Web interface, whilst retaining the existing text-based interface. Customer acceptance of the web interface has not been great, due partly to its cumbersome nature when compared to offline readers, and partly due to customers' established ways of using CIX. As of 2004 the majority of the service is provided by Parkglobe, a company set up for the purpose by several long-term staffers/directors. Some email, DNS, and connectivity are provided by PIPEX. The two companies' billing and provision are heavily intertwined, causing considerable customer confusion. Major concern exists that the falling subscriber numbers may fall or already have fallen below critical mass. In its heyday, the system was home to most of the UK's technology journalists as well as many highly skilled technical people.
External links
- CIX Online (http://web.conferencing.co.uk/)
- Ameol (http://www.ameol.com/)