🚀 go-pugleaf

This post was poignat.  It captured the last days of the Commodore 
community on Q-link.


[ Article crossposted from alt.aol-sucks ]
[ Author was RVTP18B@prodigy.com (David Tuomi) ]
[ Posted on 20 Oct 1995 05:32:38 GMT ]

Q-Link went off-line on October 30th 1994.  We're coming up to the first 
aniversary to it being off-line.

I was on-line to the service up until the very last.  The letter they 
sent out was touching, saying that QLink was being closed down because of 
"lack of use" and welcoming one and all to come over and try AOL.

The real story behind this was that Q-Link's OS had a few bugs in it.  It 
began eating itself somewhere around November of '93 and finally they 
shut down all uploads as of Jan of '94.  With no new uploads, what's the 
point.  They made a half hearted attempt at repairing the service, but in 
reality no one understood how Q-Link worked, as they had sacked all the 
employees who knew anything about it long ago.

They kept the service going because despite the problems, Commodore users 
are a very hearty bunch.  They've survived all the people jumping ship to 
go over to the IBM clones, or some-such machines, so they hung in there.  
AOL kept it going, bleeding the Commodore community of money (ever try to 
cancel a QLink account, it basically means canceling the credit card or 
bank account it was on).  
But, finally, the day had come that Mr. Case had long been waiting for.  
He was ready to finally jetison those annoying Commodore users who won't 
seem to go away.

The real blow to the Commodore community was that on the last night of 
operation, a lot of people wanted on-line one last time.  AOL had shut 
down most of the service, and only alocated about 70 slots for users to 
sign on.  Meaning, that even in the end, AOL screwed them.

The one last story relating to all of this is perhaps the saddest.  At 
least for Commodore users.  There is now a movement for running Commodore 
emulators on PC and MAC machines, to break out the old games and play for 
nostalgia.  One problem.  About 10 years worth of Commodore software 
existed on Q-Link.  When it began to eat itself we lost access to about 
half the Q-Link libraries.  That was okay, we felt, because AOL had 
stated that they had tape backups of the library.

So the final chapter began.  A number of people came forward offering to 
purchase these backup tapes of the Q-Link library.  There were even a few 
people who were interested in doing CD-ROM's for the Commodore emulators 
on the PC from these libraries.  AOL, however, refused to even consider 
an offer of any kind, siting security reasons.  In the end they wiped the 
tapes removing a legacy of software.

At the end there was a preservation effort underway to try to bring 
together all the software that was on Q-Link and make it available.  When 
it was all counted, however, about 1/3 of the software on Q-Link was 
unavailable anywhere.  When Q-Link went down, it went out of existance.

There are probably many people out there saying, "So, who cares if a 
bunch of antique 64 software goes bye, bye."  But, I think the real point 
is that this is something that will never exist again.  Think of all the 
archeological digs that are going on around the world to recover mundane 
stuff that no longer exists.  Well, there won't be some 64 software for 
future generations to admire in museums, because AOL burned it in the 
last days of Q-Link.

So, I hate AOL.  And I hope it dies.