CIX
From Free net encyclopedia
CIX (Originally Compulink Information eXchange) was one of the earliest British Internet Service Providers. Founded in 1985 by Frank and Sylvia Thornley, it began as a TBBS bulletin board system, but in 1987 was relaunched commercially as CIX Conferencing.
CIX was one of the first commercial services to enable users to communicate over the telephone network. In 1988 it provided the first commercial internet email and usenet access in the UK. CIX grew rapidly, reaching a peak of over 16,000 users in 1994, before losing customers to the newly-formed Internet Service Providers providing access to the general public.
In its heyday, CIX was the premier location online for both technical and social interaction. The technical side was due to CIX's hosting of several offical online support areas for companies such as Borland and Novell. Its popularity was no doubt enhanced by its policy of giving complimentary accounts to many of the UK's technology journalists, which ensured regular mention in the computing press.
As the popularity of the Internet has increased at the expense of specialist systems such as CIX, concern grows amongst the remaining users that the falling subscriber numbers may fall or already have fallen below critical mass.
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Later Company History
Following the launch of the ISP Demon Internet, which started life as a conference on CIX, in 1995 the Thornleys decided to expand CIX's services to include full dialup internet access as CIX Internet. Unfortunately, due to coming late to market with an inferior product to the competition meant that take-up was less good than it could have been.
In 2000 CIX was sold to Telenor, a Norwegian telecommunications company. Telenor subsequently sold the business to PIPEX.
In 2003 CIX Conferencing 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 2006 CIX Online is provided by Parkglobe, a company set up for the purpose by several long-term staffers/directors. Between 2004 and present, several additional services including online calendars, contact lists and document libraries, plus phone-to-email and conference call facilities have been added in an attempt to brand the service as a Virtual Office.
CIX Internet, some email, DNS, and connectivity continue to be provided by PIPEX. The two companies' billing and services are heavily intertwined, often causing considerable customer confusion.
Technical Information
CIX Conferencing is based on CoSy ("Conferencing System"), though it has been heavily modified by succeeding generations of staff. The CoSy conferencing system used by CIX was initially run on a SysV UNIX server, and was gradually modified from the original CoSy to add new features. In 1996 the decision was taken to port the system to SunOS due to the obsolesence of the then-running hardware.
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. An offline reader (OLR) is a program that gathers together all messages waiting for a user and downloads them en bloc for reading at leisure. The official OLR for CIX, Ameol, handles email, CIX conferencing and Usenet, and is freely available to anyone to use. It was originally written by Steve Palmer in the early 1990s, first as a customer, then as a staff member.
See also
- WELL - US equivalent of CIX