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AppleLink
AppleLink was primarily created as an online service for Apple dealers before being opened up to software developers and other users. Replaced by eWorld until it was later shutdown in favor of standard world wide web sites.
Service originally launched in 1985. The version available for end users was called AppleLink - Personal Edition.
The AppleLink online service was originally available for use only by official Apple employees, dealers, and developers. Gradually Apple broadened access to the service to include consultants and other partners, and finally made limited areas of the service available to anyone who wished access and didn’t mind paying the steep hourly and per-character rates and dealing with the Mac-like, but very sparse, interface.
For many years AppleLink was the only official online access channel to Apple. As software updates were released, they would often be available only on AppleLink (or available much earlier on AppleLink than on the other large services), thus forcing users anxious for the latest software to maintain AppleLink accounts and pay huge transfer fees every time a new update was released.
In 1988, Apple announced plans to release a separate online service geared toward consumers called AppleLink Personal Edition (see America Online), but they quickly canceled the project for political reasons. Several years later, Apple officially released the eWorld online service as their official channel to Apple customers. Apple had originally intended to move all of its current AppleLink users to eWorld, but as the transformation was about to take place, they changed their strategy and started providing resources and maintaining customer relations over the Internet, eventually shutting down the eWorld service altogether.
Most companies in the Macintosh market have AppleLink accounts and it’s sometimes the only way to send email to companies that make Macintosh hardware and software.
AppleLink is perhaps the most expensive of the commercial online services. It also allows only messages under 32KB because that’s all the text that fits in the mail software’s text box. AppleLink also only accepts incoming messages under 30KB, the headers stealing 2KB or so. AppleLink’s email interface is bare, although it comes with a nice address book feature.
If you want to send email to the Internet from AppleLink, first take your Internet address and append @internet# to it. (Remember that AppleLink cannot send mail to addresses longer than 35 characters.) To send email from the Internet to AppleLink, take the userid, which sometimes resembles a name or word and other times is just a letter plus some numbers, and append @applelink.apple.com.