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You've selected Mad Men? Moviefone redesign tacks on TV listings
Earlier this year, AOL shuttered Moviefone's call-in directory service. The brand lives on though, and today it outed a new look, with a retooled web site and mobile apps in tow. Chief amongst the changes? The addition of TV. Now, episode listings, cast info, curated Watch Lists and other details are baked in alongside a handy list of viewing options -- if you're itching to stream a selection right this second. There's an emphasis on search, too. A query box now appears at the top of every page you'll swipe or click to, and the results now include those Watch Lists -- allowing for theme- or occasion-based title hunting. Moviefone has also ditched its iconic red paint scheme for blue as a part of the UI makeover. What's more, the outfit is looking for a new voice, so if you've ever wanted to follow in Kramer's footsteps, now could be you chance to do so. Perhaps now the only thing left to do is to come up with more accurate name for the service. "Videofone" gets our vote.
AOL Mail breach includes mailing addresses, employee info and more
Earlier today, AOL posted an update on last week's spoofing incident with its email service. In case you hadn't heard, AOL Mail was hacked a few days ago and accounts were spoofed, sending out spam messages to the affected users' contact list. In a blog post, the company says that the breach only hit "roughly 2 percent" of its 20+ million accounts. The bad news? AOL says that the unauthorized access allowed the hackers to peek at mailing addresses, contact lists, encrypted passwords, encrypted answers to security questions and "certain employee information." While that's pretty awful, the outfit claims that "there is no indication" that the encryption had been broken or that any financial info was nabbed. As you might expect, AOL recommends all users and employed reset their passwords and security queries for any of its services while it continues the investigation. Disclosure: Engadget is owned by AOL. [Image credit: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images]
AOL strikes deal with Microsoft to get more eyeballs on its online videos
Judging by the comments y'all leave on every story about AOL, a few of you still think the company makes its money off grandmas who forgot to cancel their landline service. In fact, AOL owns, among other things, The Huffington Post, TechCrunch, Engadget (hey-o!) and the online video service AOLOn -- yep, the same one we use to publish our review videos. After inking a movie streaming deal with Miramax earlier this week, AOL has signed a distribution deal with Microsoft, which means depending on which OS you use, you might soon be seeing a lot more AOLOn videos than you're used to. In particular, the agreement brings a portion of AOL's 900,000-item catalog to MSN and Bing apps on Windows and Windows Phone. All told, according to Variety, the deal includes 15 channels ("technology," for example), along with AOL's 2014 original programming, though none of those shows have actually been announced to the public yet. Look for those videos to start popping up this summer; in the meantime, you can find our video reviews where they've always been.
AOL bringing Miramax movies to its online video platform
AOL doesn't just want short clips of newsy content on its online video platform, AOL On. That's why the company (which, disclosure, owns Engadget) has signed a non-exclusive deal with Miramax to screen some of its movies on the service. The first flicks from the agreement will go up on April 30th, with "tens" of films from the catalog being made available on a rotating basis each month. Neither company was ready to disclose what particular titles we could expect, so while most of us are hoping to catch Clerks, Trainspotting and Pulp Fiction for free, don't be surprised if they wind up being the lesser lights contained on this list.
Here's how Microsoft tried to win the early instant messaging wars
The battle between modern chat services like LINE and WhatsApp is fierce, but it has nothing on the war between Microsoft and AOL (Engadget's parent company) at the turn of the century. Former Microsoft developer David Auerbach has revealed that his MSN Messenger team fought hard for compatibility with AOL Instant Messenger in the summer of 1999, all in the hopes of attracting some converts. At one point, Auerbach was in a daily struggle -- AOL would break MSN support by the morning, and he'd have a fix in place by the evening.
Moviefone's phone service shutting down after 25 years
When your service is more fondly remembered as a Seinfeld plot than as something people use, it's probably time to drop the mic. After a quarter-century, Moviefone's movie-times hotline is winding down, as users abandon the phone in favor of sites like Fandango. The AOL-owned company isn't fading quietly into the night, however, as Moviefone's mobile app and website will still live on in their current form -- for now, at least.
Radionomy acquires Winamp and Shoutcast to boost its streaming efforts
There were rumors that Winamp would find a rescuer following its shutdown, and today that rescue is official. Online radio platform provider Radionomy has acquired both WinAmp and Shoutcast from AOL (Engadget's owner) for an undisclosed amount. The deal is primarily a play for market share; now that Radionomy owns Shoutcast, it's powering roughly half of all internet radio. The company also plans to improve Winamp, making it "ubiquitous" across multiple platforms that include mobile devices and car infotainment systems. It's doubtful that Winamp will reclaim the prominence it had during its heyday, but the acquisition should at least give it (and Shoutcast) a new lease on life. [Image credit: Theis Kofoed Hjorth, Flickr]
Relive Winamp's glory days with a retro Spotify music app
Winamp may be riding into the sunset today, but that doesn't mean you'll have to go without its classic interface in the future. Ludde is paying tribute to the jukebox software by releasing Spotiamp, a tiny Windows app that streams your Spotify playlists with Winamp's 1990s-era flair. The connection to the AOL-owned player isn't just skin-deep, though -- Spotiamp includes its own Shoutcast server, so you can send tunes to a Sonos speaker or anything else with native Shoutcast support. As long as you have a Spotify Premium subscription, you can take a musical trip down memory lane through the source link.
Winamp, the media player of your college years, is shutting down next month
Winamp, the AOL-owned mp3 player of yore, will close up shop for good on December 20th, which means you have exactly one month from today to use the service -- if you're still using it, that is. In addition to shutting down Winamp.com, AOL and co. will no longer offer downloads of the media player. It's hardly a surprising announcement, but it's a slightly glum one considering Winamp's popularity in the late nineties and early aughts. Go ahead, you have our permission to get nostalgic for a moment or two.
AOL Alto webmail client dropping support for iCloud in December
AOL has reached out to iCloud users of its Alto webmail client to announce it will be dropping support for the Apple service on December 2. Alto is a service that integrates your Yahoo, Gmail and other email services into one mailbox. iCloud users received the following email from Alto today. Thanks for using Alto to read and send mail from your @iCloud, @me or @mac account. We've been honored to host those accounts and get great, positive feedback on the experience from users like you. But we're sad to say that Alto will no longer support iCloud accounts as of December 2, 2013. We sincerely regret the frustration this will cause. You can close your account now by clicking the Plus sign (+) on the left of your Alto inbox, then clicking the iCloud account name and the Close Alto Account button at the bottom of the column that opens. Or you can simply wait and do nothing and you will automatically lose access on December 2nd. We would love to continue giving you Alto's great view of your non-iCloud email accounts. Any other supported IMAP-accessible email will continue to work, including Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, AOL Mail and others. AOL is TUAW's parent company.
Ask Massively: Grand conspiracies
Earlier this week, Massively's Mike Foster penned a Soapbox editorial that argued against obsessing over the definition of MMO to the exclusion of debating good game design. If you liked it, awesome. If you hated it, then take heart; next week, Brendan Drain will be arguing the flip-side of Mike's article. That's what our Soapbox is all about: writers talking about game-related things they're interested in or passionate about. It's a soapbox mounted by a different author every week, not a notarized declaration of the site's purpose and intent. We've intentionally collected a team with diverse opinions, and we rarely all agree on every opinion published on the site, especially the Soapbox, and that's the whole point. If we all agreed, we'd be boring. Plus I'd never get to waste an afternoon debating video games with Eliot in chat, which is tremendous fun, incidentally, and I highly recommend it. This week in Ask Massively, I want to address the conspiracy theory proposed in the wake of that Soapbox as well as a few other bits and bobs from our comments.
Origin Stories: Steve Sande
I certainly didn't start my career with plans to become a blogger and editor at one of the world's most active Apple websites. When I was a child dreaming about a future career path, computer science barely registered on the "What I want to do when I grow up" list since only corporations owned room-sized mainframes at that time and there was no such thing as a home computer. The first time I had any physical contact with a computer was in 8th grade in Aurora, Colorado in the Apollo moon landing year of 1969. The Aurora Public Schools had purchased a Data General Nova (see console photo of a similar model at top of this post) in that year for accounting and scheduling purposes, and some brilliant person came up with the idea of buying some Teletypes that could be used as dialup terminals to allow personnel at the schools to access the main computer remotely. Well, the administrators and teachers at the school weren't all that interested in computers, so guess who started using the Teletypes and Nova to learn how to program in BASIC? The students. Since they wouldn't let us save our programs to paper tape (that would come in about two or three years), any programs we ran were usually quite short out of necessity – we'd type 'em in, run them, try to figure out what the TOO MANY NESTED GOSUBS error meant, and then start all over again. It was fun, but frustrating with no real way to store the programs permanently. In 9th and 10th grade, I was only able to play rarely with the Nova or whatever computer they may have purchased as an upgrade. But when the school announced in 11th grade that the regular algebra class would also be offered in a "computer algebra" version providing access to the school system's minicomputer, I jumped on the opportunity to have a full semester of working with ... the future! Things were a little better at that point. We could save our programs out on paper tape, kind of the "floppy disk" of the era. I think part of the reason we wanted to save to paper tape was that the tape punch created some very good confetti for high school football games... About this time I became very interested in two things; transportation engineering and writing. I had a wonderful high school English teacher by the name of David Faull (still alive and kicking) who really taught me how to write, something I'd need to do in college in those pesky elective courses. I had decided to go into Civil Engineering, and was accepted at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Every engineering student at the time had to take an introductory computer class – CS 101 – in which they were introduced to two things: punch card input and FORTRAN IV. There was nothing worse than sitting down at a keypunch machine with a handwritten FORTRAN coding form, typing in several hundred cards, all of which needed to be read by a machine in order and without typos for your program to run. I can recall hearing of several computer science grad students who had nearly committed suicide after having ultra-long programs scattered to the wind when they accidentally dropped boxes of punch cards... One of my best high school buddies, Rick Brownson, was a student at CU at the same time in the Electrical Engineering department, and I recall that in 1976 he introduced me to an amazing game –- Lunar Lander –- that displayed vector graphics in real time onto a round green-screen terminal. We wasted many a weekend hour playing that game in one of the EE computer labs. Rick also introduced me to the nascent world of personal computing around that time, as he and I soldered chips into a MITS Altair 8800 kit in late 1975. I really wasn't all that impressed with the Altair, since when we finished it there was no way for us to connect it to a display (usually an old TV), and we had no keyboard for it. So we flipped switches on the front of the device to enter 8080 opcodes and then looked at the LEDs to see the results. I remember taking a weekend drive to Albuquerque, New Mexico in 1976 to go to a Altair convention of some sorts; the highlight was getting a pirated copy of Bill Gates' Altair BASIC on paper tape from another attendee. At the time I graduated from engineering school in 1978, word was getting out about Apple, but at the time I really didn't see any reason to buy a computer. Even while I was working in my first job and going to grad school, I refused to buy a computer. When I was able to get a Commodore VIC-20 for about $300 I bought one, then when Commodore reduced the price on the C-64 to about $250 the next week, I returned the VIC-20, got a refund, and picked up a Commodore 64. After a short amount of time I found myself hooked. I bought an Epson printer, got the cassette tape drive, and bought the height of communications technology at the time – a 300 baud modem. I quickly found myself on some of the early bulletin board systems of the time. But the Commodore 64 wasn't a "real computer", so when IBM compatible devices started hitting the market I went out and bought a Sanyo MBC-555 PC clone complete with two floppy drives (a Sanyo MBC-550 with only one floppy is shown below)! This is where I got my first introduction to business software, with WordStar as a word processor and CalcStar as a spreadsheet. At this time, I was working for a natural gas pipeline company called WestGas. The company was a subsidiary of a larger electric and gas utility (Public Service Company of Colorado, now part of Xcel Energy), and as a subsidiary we had of control over our destiny. In the fall of 1983, the Vice President of our company came to me to see if I would perform a study of possible uses for personal computers in our company and create a five-year plan to budget the introduction of those devices, so I jumped to the task. Everything was based on costs and benefits, and a calculated rate of return on the investment in IT. In retrospect, a lot of my numbers were probably quite suspect, as they were based on estimates of time savings that most likely never occurred... The final study saw a need for no more than about 15 PCs over the next five years as well as a handful of dedicated IBM DisplayWriter word processors. About the time that my study was completed, there was a lot of speculation in the computer world about Apple's forthcoming Macintosh. I was interested in seeing one, so a few days after they were introduced my boss and I went over to a Nynex Business Center store to take a look. While the mouse, the bitmapped display, and the 3.5" floppy drive were all amazing, the lack of memory (128K) was a real turnoff. Still, I felt as if I had seen the future, and I vowed to get myself a Mac if they ever built a model with more RAM. Towards the end of the year Apple introduced the 512K "Fat Mac", and the company was doing a "Test Drive A Mac" promotion where you filled out loan paperwork, took a Mac home to use for about three days, and if you decided you wanted to keep it they processed the loan. Having the Mac at home really made me fall in love with it, so in December of 1984 I bought my first Mac. Being enthralled with the Mac, I started lugging it with me to work. By this point I was the supervisor of a group called "Special Projects", and my team was charged with a number of things: regulatory compliance, studies, project management, and now IT. Pretty quickly, my co-workers got began to turn into Mac fans, and I started tweaking the five year plan to buy fewer PCs and more Macs. I was also going to a lot of Mac User Group meetings in those days; that was the place to really try out software, as most everyone would bring boxes of floppies as well as the original disks for new applications they had purchased. Copying was rampant, but I don't remember anyone doing outright pirating; if you tried a program and liked it, you'd end up buying it. That was the case for me in 1985 when I tried out a copy of Aldus Pagemaker (the first "professional" page layout application) and then bought the application. At one point, I bragged to our financial manager that I could use the app to lay out our subsidiary's annual report at a much lower cost than sending it out to a traditional printshop; he called my bluff and for the next month I worked with the very buggy 1.0 software to create the report. In the end, I was successful and the finance department decided to get Macs for everyone. In a few more years, the engineering role ended for me and I was a full-time IT manager. Starting in 1987 and through 1994, I attended Macworld Expo in San Francisco. From about 1990 to 1994, I also went to the Apple WorldWide Developer Conference, which was held in San Jose at that point. These were the years of trying to get a new Mac OS off the ground, the intro of the Newton MessagePad, the MPW vs. CodeWarrior battles, and extremely boring keynotes by such luminaries as Michael Spindler and Gil Amelio. I also spent a lot of time using Pagemaker to create printed newsletters for WestGas and for a number of groups I was a member of. While that was a bit of work that I never really ended up getting paid for, it taught me a lot about design, layout, printing, and writing. From 1986 to 1994, I also ran a Mac bulletin board system known as MAGIC (Mac And [Apple II] GS Information Center). This started off on my original Mac 512, and by the time I quit running the BBS and moved to a website, it was a three-phone-line setup running on two networked Macs Including my favorite Mac of all time, a Mac IIcx. The BBS was the "official site" for the MacinTech Users Group, a MUG that's still going strong to this day. My first website was PDAntic.com, a play on John Sculley's acronym for the Newton – Personal Digital Assistant – and the fact that my wife often refers to me as being pedantic. I chose to run the site with news posts written in a reverse chronological order, which means that I was essentially doing blogging in 1994! I was doing some half-hearted development for the Newton at the time, and still have a working MessagePad 2100. 1995 was the start of a bad period for me personally – our pipeline company was swallowed back into our parent company, and then all of us who had any dealings in information technology were outsourced to IBM's ISSC services group (later IBM Global Services). While I won't go into details, it was the worst part of my career, with incompetent and occasionally unethical managers, a strategy that consisted of trying to do more and more work with fewer employees (with predictable bad results), and the most demoralized staff I've ever seen. I survived for nine years, after which I chose to go out on my own. At the beginning of my time with IBM our client (the company I worked for) had a total of over 1,200 Macs company-wide; by the time I left we were down to a handful in the corporate communications department. One of my first IBM projects in 1996 was to move all of the Mac users to Windows 95 –- I should have quit when I was ordered to do that. One bright spot during the years 1999 through 2006 was my participation in a number of Microsoft's Mobius conferences. These were meetings of those of us who ran mobile-oriented websites, with Microsoft showing off concepts and picking our brains for ideas about UI, built-in applications, and the direction of the mobile world. I also met a number of the top bloggers in the mobile space, including Ryan Block and Peter Rojas, who were both instrumental in starting up Engadget. Peter was one of the co-founders of Weblogs, Inc., the blog network that TUAW was a part of before being purchased by our current owner -- AOL. In 2005 I started my own consulting firm, Raven Solutions, to do Mac consulting and support. I became a member of the Apple Consultant Network (ACN), which helped my business to grow quite quickly. I also started writing books at about this time, creating a book called "Take Control of your iPod: Beyond the Music" that is still for sale from Adam and Tonya Engst's Take Control Books. One top moment about this time was seeing Steve Jobs introduce the iPhone at the 2007 Macworld Expo. That was something I'll never forget, and I have a Nitrozac painting of the event within my field of view in my office. In late 2007 I was on a weekend trip to Vegas with my wife when a friend pointed out that one of my favorite Apple sites –- TUAW –- was accepting applications for freelance writers. I turned in my requisite three sample articles, but didn't hear anything ... until April of 2008. I was on a business trip when I received a call from former TUAWite Scott McNulty, who wondered if I was still interested in being a TUAW blogger. He gave me a test that I remember quite well; I had one hour (sitting in an airport waiting for a flight) to write a news post about a new and completely hypothetical Apple product. I zapped it to him via email with time to spare and was offered the job. Since that time I've become a full-time employee of TUAW parent company AOL, I've met thousands of TUAW readers at Macworld/iWorld and other events, written a number of books (many with fellow TUAW blogger Erica Sadun), and published almost 1.8 million words of blog posts. I love sharing time with TUAW fans every Wednesday afternoon on TUAW TV Live, as well as delivering the daily Apple news on the Daily Update podcast. And when I get to join with my teammates for one of the Sunday night Talkcasts, that's like getting together with family. The only way to describe my life right now is as "blessed." I work with a great team of professionals doing what I love to do the most, writing about a company that has had such a huge effect on the course of my career and my life. I don't know how long this ride will last, but I sincerely hope it's for a long, long time.
AOL for iPad now in the App Store
AOL, the parent company of TUAW, Engadget, TechCrunch and Huffington Post, today announced the availability of AOL for iPad (free). While for many longtime internet users the AOL acronym may bring back nightmares of receiving daily CD-ROMs in the mail, the company is quickly turning into a very nimble content provider around the world. The app was designed from the ground up for the iPad, featuring a tiled UI with stories that can be tapped to dive in deeper. While the app opens with a window onto general featured news, users can select their area of interest to focus only on stories in that area: entertainment, food, health, money, sports, style, tech, travel and world. %Gallery-192537% For those who use AOL for free email, there's a small envelope button on the top toolbar that provides access to your inbox. Another button provides a list of AOL On Network top videos -- a tap on a video icon expands the thumbnail to a fullscreen player for a quick view of the short blurbs. Want to save content for later reading or viewing? Every story sports a pair of buttons that provide instant access to sharing (via Facebook, Twitter and email), as well as giving readers a way to mark that content as a favorite. A tap on the "heart" button starts a cute animation in which a red heart flies up to the favorites list. It's an amusing way to reinforce the message that the article has been saved for future use. If you're looking for an all-in-one source for more than just tech news, the new AOL for iPad app is definitely worth a look. And hey, it's free (ad-supported).
AOL launches Reader for RSS
AOL has announced the debut of its latest online service --an RSS reader to replace the soon-to-be-defunct Google Reader. The new AOL Reader is a no-frills web app for reading your RSS feeds. There are no mobile apps, but the service does have a tablet-friendly layout for your on-the-go reading. The AOL Reader UI is straightforward with a left navigation bar that houses all your RSS feeds and a main pane that previews all your content. You can choose from a few different layouts including a list view, card view and full view that shows the entire article. Each view allows you to easily mark an item as read. You can also star it or share it on social networks like Google+, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. There are ads on the right side of the screen, which showcase other AOL content like AOL On. AOL Reader will let you add RSS subscriptions manually to the service or import them in bulk from your Google Reader account via an OPML file. You can also browse through AOL's catalog of suggested sites and add RSS feeds from there. AOL Reader is a decent first effort that'll give RSS fans another alternative to Feedly and Digg Reader. You can access the beta service by going to reader.aol.com and signing up for an account using your AOL login, a Facebook account or Twitter credentials. Note: TUAW is a part of AOL Tech.
AOL Reader beta officially available for your RSS-perusing needs (hands-on)
Wondering how AOL's RSS client will rank as a Google Reader replacement? Today's the day we find out, as the doors to the AOL Reader beta have officially swung open. Feedly's been absorbing Google's castaways for weeks now, and Digg's only two days away from launching its own freemium RSS client -- but we couldn't resist getting an early taste of what our parent company (Disclaimer alert!) is cooking. Join us after the break for all the details about this latest entrant in the field of feed readers.
The Daily Roundup for 06.21.2013
You might say the day is never really done in consumer technology news. Your workday, however, hopefully draws to a close at some point. This is the Daily Roundup on Engadget, a quick peek back at the top headlines for the past 24 hours -- all handpicked by the editors here at the site. Click on through the break, and enjoy.
AOL Reader launches into private beta, thanks Google for the opportunity
Google: "Eh, we're kind of over this Reader thing. Let's go launch some balloons." AOL: "Why, thanks guys -- don't mind if we do!" The above mentioned quotes are still unofficial, mind you, but it appears that AOL (disclaimer: that's Engadget's parent company) is joining Feedly and Digg in an effort to capture the audiences who will soon be forced to flee from Google's Reader product. AOL Reader launched today in beta form, promising to collect "all your favorite websites, in one place." It appears that the design language follows that introduced in the entity's Alto mail product, and if you've forgotten your AOL password, fret not -- those who request (and receive) an invite will be able to sign in via Facebook, Google or Twitter. Oh, and judging by the shot above, it's designed to work universally across screen sizes and devices, including your tablets, phones, desktops, laptops and space-age computational creations. Of note, it appears that the sign-up forms aren't entirely active just yet, as we're hearing that the bona fide launch won't occur until next week. Update: We've confirmed that invites will be accepted starting on Monday, June 24th.
The Daily Roundup for 06.07.2013
You might say the day is never really done in consumer technology news. Your workday, however, hopefully draws to a close at some point. This is the Daily Roundup on Engadget, a quick peek back at the top headlines for the past 24 hours -- all handpicked by the editors here at the site. Click on through the break, and enjoy.
Washington Post: NSA, FBI tapping directly into servers of 9 leading internet companies (update)
On the heels of yesterday's revelation that the NSA is bulk collecting call logs from Verizon Business customers, the Washington Post is reporting tonight on another initiative, code named PRISM. According to the report, it gives the FBI and NSA access to "audio, video, photographs, e-mails, documents and connection logs" from the central servers of Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL (parent company of Engadget), Skype, YouTube and Apple. Another program called BLARNEY sniffs up metadata as it streams past "choke points" on the internet, continuing the theme of bulk scooping of data most would think is private. The Post's knowledge of these programs comes from PowerPoint slides (like the one shown above) provided by a "career intelligence officer" driven to expose how deep it goes. So what can the project allegedly see? Analysts based at Fort Meade use search terms to determine at least 51 percent confidence in a subject's "foreignness" before pulling data, which can include that of people found in a suspect's inbox. On Facebook, they can utilize the service's built in search and surveillance capabilities, monitor audio, video, chat and file transfers or access activity on Google's mail, storage, photo and search services. So... are you still logged in? Update 4: Now we've come full circle, as the original Washington Post article has been expanded to include the various company's responses and denials (listed after the break). Another element that has changed is the mention of another classified report that suggests these companies may not be knowingly participating, and the NSA's access may not be as direct as originally claimed. Claiming the difference may be the result of "imprecision" by the NSA author, the arrangement is now described as "collection managers [to send] content tasking instructions directly to equipment installed at company-controlled locations." Update (June 7th): Google has now issued a longer statement, signed by CEO Larry Page and Chief Legal Officer David Drummond, which reiterates its earlier comments and also calls for a "more transparent approach" from both other companies and governments alike. Update 2 (June 7th): Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has denied involvement on his personal page, stating "Facebook is not and has never been part of any program to give the US or any other government direct access to our servers...We hadn't even heard of PRISM before yesterday." Like the others, he claimed Facebook only provides information "if it is required by law" and mirrored Page's call for more transparency regarding government programs.
The Game Archaeologist: GameLine
Modern MMO gamers are blessed with plenty of conveniences that we take for granted. One such convenience is the ability to simply download any online game without having to deal with the hassle of DVDs or CDs (trust me, young people, one day your children will be dubious when you tell them how you'd have to swap in discs to load a game). Game trials, downloadable content, access to a large library of titles, and simply being online are facts of life for us, not cause for us to fall on our knees in total awe. Before Steam was offering us loads of free-to-play MMOs, before Xbox Live Arcade was offering indie titles a platform for exposure, before CompuServe was making headway in online services, there was an odd artifact on the Atari 2600. Yes, that ancient console that has nary an "X" or "Play" in its name. The artifact was GameLine, and whether or not you've heard of it, it was one of the earliest pioneers of downloadable games services. When I found out about it, it just fascinated the crap out of me. I think it will impress you, too.
