StarText was an online ASCII-based computer service run by the Fort Worth Star-Telegram and the Tandy Corporation and marketed in the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex newspaper circulation area from May 3, 1982 until March 3, 1997. Its name was derived from Star (representing the newspaper which would provide the content) and Text (representing the computer company which would provide the technology).
ASCII, abbreviated from American Standard Code for Information Interchange, is a character encoding standard for electronic communication. ASCII codes represent text in computers, telecommunications equipment, and other devices. Most modern character-encoding schemes are based on ASCII, although they support many additional characters.
The Fort Worth Star-Telegram is a U.S. daily newspaper serving Fort Worth and Tarrant County, the western half of the North Texas area known as the Metroplex. It is owned by The McClatchy Company.
Tandy Corporation was an American family-owned leather goods company based in Fort Worth, Texas, United States. Tandy Leather was founded in 1919 as a leather supply store and acquired a number of craft retail companies, including RadioShack in 1963. In 2000, the Tandy Corporation name was dropped and the entity became the RadioShack Corporation.
StarText was an "information on demand" online computer service created by Joe Donth, offered for the first time in 1982 by the Fort Worth Star-Telegram to subscribers in the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex. On May 3, 1982, StarText officially started providing its news and all-text content online, updated from 5am to midnight. There were no graphics, pictures or colors. Subscribers were called StarTexans. The content within StarText was written by subscribers of the service as well as employees of the newspaper.
Initially, the service charged $5.00 a month to subscribers who received updated news each day from 5am until midnight daily. At first subscribers had to call StarText using a 300 baud modem and enter four requests out of a choice of 50. StarText then delivered the information without further interactivity. To receive more information the subscriber had to repeat the same process. The first StarText system was provided by a Tandy Model II.
The subsequent multi-user version of StarText, developed by Serge Stein, was written in DIBOL and ran on Digital Equipment VAX 11/750s connected to banks of 1200 & 2400 baud modems. This version provided a menu of content including the Star-Telegram's news and classified advertising, and provided messaging between subscribers (early email), Grolier's encyclopedia, American Airlines Sabre flight schedules and home banking to a group of over four thousand dedicated computer users. Users could define their screen size to the system which would then deliver only as much text as would fit on the screen giving the user the opportunity to read the content before 'paging' on to the next screen of text. At one point billing for this service was based on the number of words sent to the user.
In May 1996 an additional Internet service, StarText Net, was introduced, and the earlier service was rebranded as StarText Classic. The original service finally closed down on March 3, 1997, and in June 1998, StarText Net changed into Star-Telegram Online Services, which eventually became a conventional online Internet service of the Knight-Ridder group.
Subscription history
Six months following start-up, the service only had 50 customers because many computers then on the market could not connect to StarText. Some of the early subscribers accessed the service using the Timex 1000 with its 16k RAM and 300 baud modem. At its height the service attracted about 2,000 subscribers.
Timex Group B.V., or Timex Group, is a Dutch holding company headquartered in Hoofddorp, the Netherlands. It is the corporate parent of several global watchmaking companies including Timex Group USA, Inc., TMX Philippines, Inc., and Timex Group India Ltd.
StarTexans
StarText benefitted from a loyal group of columnists who acted as unpaid content producers who were also subscribers. Their columns were in text only and originally without color, but the content of the columns were original, varied and of a sufficiently reasonable standard to maintain their own readership. Because these columns were basically under the control of their creators the originality, scope and depth of the information presented was both unique and extensive.[citation needed]
In the 1990s, these columnists enjoyed meeting with each other at functions arranged by the StarText service of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.
StarText Ink
The StarText service also produced a printed newsletter, StarText Ink, published for subscribers. This newsletter carried logs of the subscriber columns, and it also featured its own articles.
StarText Net and GEnie
Three years after the start of the original StarText service, General Electric's Information Services division launched its ASCII-based online service, GEnie, in October 1985. The main difference between the original StarText and GEnie was that StarText offered online news from the newspaper that owned the service, plus the electronic magazine whose content was created by the subscriber-writers. GEnie was a collection of RoundTable forums, but it did not offer news or individual features written by subscriber-writers. However, the one advantage that GEnie had was its nationwide scope via its General Electric servers, in contrast to the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex coverage offered by the Tandy system.
General Electric Company (GE) is an American multinational conglomerate incorporated in New York City and headquartered in Boston. As of 2018, the company operates through the following segments: aviation, healthcare, power, renewable energy, digital industry, additive manufacturing, venture capital and finance, lighting, and oil and gas.
GEnie was an online service created by a General Electric business, GEIS, that ran from 1985 through the end of 1999. In 1994, GEnie claimed around 350,000 users. Peak simultaneous usage was around 10,000 users. It was one of the pioneering services in the field, though eventually replaced by the World Wide Web and graphics-based services, most notably AOL.
Ten years after start-up, the nationwide appeal of GEnie became attractive to many StarText subscribers, and a word-of-mouth membership migration began to take place. In response to this competition and in an attempt to retain its own membership base, a decision was made by the owners of StarText to rebrand the original service as StarText Classic and to create the new StarText Net, offering access to the early Internet, including an email address. In late 1995 StarText Net began its beta version. The service was offered to the public in May, 1996.
Termination of StarText Classic
The demise of the original StarText service came with the growth of the Internet. StarText Classic service closed March 3, 1997 at 5:12pm CST with only three users still logged on.
Star-Telegram Online Services
In June 1998 the name StarText Net was changed to Star-Telegram Online Services. Because of competition from other Internet service providers, the original theme of original featured content that once made StarText into a unique home for StarTexans was not promoted. When the newspaper was bought by the Knight-Ridder group, the online service was then transformed to mirror the more conventional services offered by other newspapers over the Internet, and all but a few references to the StarText trademark disappeared.
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(A) As used in subsection (a), the term "service provider" means an entity offering the transmission, routing, or providing of connections for digital online communications, between or among points specified by a user, of material of the user’s choosing, without modification to the content of the material as sent or received. (B) As used in this section, other than subsection (a), the term "service provider" means a provider of online services or network access, or the operator of facilities therefore, and includes an entity described in subparagraph (A).
The Dallas–Fort Worth metroplex encompasses 13 counties within the U.S. state of Texas. Residents of the area also refer to it as DFW, or the Metroplex. It is the economic and cultural hub of the region of North Texas, and it is the largest inland metropolitan area in the United States.
Prodigy Communications Corporation was an online service from 1984 to 2001 that offered its subscribers access to a broad range of networked services, including news, weather, shopping, bulletin boards, games, polls, expert columns, banking, stocks, travel, and a variety of other features.
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XBAND was the first competitive online console gaming network, and was available for Super NES and Genesis systems. It was produced by Catapult Entertainment, a Cupertino, California-based software company. It is the only modem released in America to have been officially licensed by Nintendo. It debuted in various areas of the United States in late 1994 and 1995. Online console gaming networks were eventually stabilized in the sixth and later generations of video games, such as Xbox Live, PlayStation Network, and Nintendo Switch Online.
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Computer User is a computer magazine that was founded in 1982, and which, after several owners and fundamental changes, is still in business today online as computeruser.com. It should not be confused with a magazine published in 1983-1984 by McPheeters, Wolfe & Jones that was also titled Computer User, but with the subtitle "For the Tandy/Radio Shack System".
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Started in 1983, Boston CitiNet was a local online service developed by Applied Videotex Systems, Inc. of Belmont, Massachusetts. The service allowed modem-equipped personal computer users to dial-in and access a range of information and messaging services including chat, forums, email and a variety of content. There were several other companies offering paid/subscription services as the time like The Source, CompuServe and Boston-based Delphi. Boston Citinet was unique since it was free to access and was supported by advertising. Messaging services such as email and chat required registration and a monthly fee of $9.95 - an early example of the now popular freemium business model.
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