The Sierra Network

"In a 1990 address, Steve Jobs, a visionary who gets lots of credit for the many things he got right but little blame for the equal number of things he got wrong, said that the 1990s would be “the decade of interpersonal computing.” When he said it, he was talking of small-scale connectivity via LANs, not the wide-scale connectivity that was already being enabled by services like CompuServe and Prodigy, much less the epoch-making invention that would be the World Wide Web. Ken Williams responded, rightly, that Jobs was “thinking too small. I agree that ‘interpersonal computing’ — the idea that the individual computer owner will soon find himself acting as part of a bigger connected computer community — is the next step in the evolution of personal computing. But I disagree with Jobs’s vision of the company office as the birthplace of this technology.”"

My sister and I were both big fans of Sierra. It’s unfortunate that bad business deals and timing killed the company.

They were pioneers in many ways.

> The typical pattern on CompuServe or America Online was for customers to sign up with plenty of sober, practical reasons in mind or at least on the tongue — online news, online stock-market quotes, etc. — and then get inadvertently hooked on chat and games. The Sierra Network couldn’t pull the same bait and switch, for the simple reason that it lacked the same bait. To sign up for The Sierra Network, you had to be willing to say up-front that this was strictly an entertainment expense — strictly an indulgence, if you will. For some reason, many potential subscribers — even the ones with gigantic cable-television bills — seemed to find that a hard admission to make.

Tax deductibility of CompuServe and even AOL (regardless of whether 95% of your time was in chat or games) was a huge factor. Not to mention it allowed selling it to one's spouse or parents as more legitimate.

So many fond memories of TSN.

In 7th grade, trapped in the house during snowy winter nights, it became a real place to hang out. And unlike say, CompuServe, there were a lot of kids my age there.

Way ahead of its time.

Boy did I love TSN. Still remember the music that played when you got to the main town screen.

Got in trouble once when the access number I chose wan't considered local. Phone bill was high that month!

Did Halt and Catch Fire writers look to the history of Sierra On-Line when coming up with the idea for Mutiny in the show?

There was an open source project to run/emulate TSN/INN services. You could run the old software in Dosbox and connect to it. People rarely used it though, and people on the mailing list would try to start scheduling times for people to "meet" on the service just so it wasn't a ghost town.