GEnie

GEnie was an ISP created by General Electric. It was launched as an ASCII-based service by GE's Information Services division in October 1985, and received attention as the first serious comercial competition to CompuServe. The initial price for connection, at both 300 bps and then-high-speed 1200 bps, was $6 per hour.

Although GEnie developed a loyal following, particularly for its hosted forums, it never had enough backing from GE and failed to keep up when Prodigy and America Online produced graphics-based online services that drew the masses.

GE sold GEnie in 1996, and Genie is now an Internet connection service.