GEnie

General Electric's text-only online service, home of the RoundTables and the first big multiplayer games, sold twice and switched off for the year 2000

Shut down
19902026

GEnie (General Electric Network for Information Exchange) was a dial-up online service launched by GE Information Services on 1 October 1985 under Bill Louden, a former CompuServe manager. Text-only and cheap in the evenings, it was known for its RoundTable forums, its LiveWire chat and for hosting early massively multiplayer games such as Air Warrior, GemStone and Federation. It claimed around 350,000 members in 1994, was sold to Yovelle and then IDT in 1996, and closed on 27 December 1999.

Timeline [edit]

  1. 1985
  2. 1 October 1985 Launch
    GEnie opens

    $6 an hour in the evening, half of CompuServe.

  3. 1987
  4. 1987 Feature
    Air Warrior arrives

    Kesmai's multiplayer flight combat game.

  5. 1988
  6. April 1988 Feature
    GemStone opens on GEnie

    Simutronics' first game.

  7. 1994
  8. 12 July 1994 Peak
    About 350,000 members
  9. 1996
  10. 24 January 1996 Acquisition
    GE sells GEnie to Yovelle
  11. 20 August 1996 Acquisition
    IDT takes over Genie

    About 20,000 customers.

  12. 1999
  13. 4 December 1999 Shutdown announced
    Closure announced for 27 December

    Not worth making Y2K compliant.

  14. 27 December 1999 Shutdown
    Genie closes

The site through time

Browse genie.com as it was, via the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine:

1985 1987 1989 1991 1993 1995 1997 1999 Full archive →

Ownership [edit]

General Electric Information Services 1985–1996 Founded Run on GE Mark III time-sharing mainframes; Bill Louden the founding manager
Yovelle Renaissance Corporation 1996–1996 Acquisition A small Queens firm acting for IDT; undisclosed sum
IDT Corporation 1996–1999 Acquisition About 20,000 customers at purchase; folded into Genie Interactive

Key figures [edit]

MetricValueAs ofConfidence
Registered accounts ▲ 350,000 12 July 1994 Reported Members claimed in July 1994
Registered accounts 20,000 20 August 1996 Reported Paying customers at the IDT purchase

Confirmed official figures · Reported media, cites a source · Estimated analyst or our estimate

Why it shut down [edit]

Official line: IDT, which had bought GEnie in 1996 and never made it pay, told the remaining users on 4 December 1999 that the service would close on 27 December because it was not worth making the old GE mainframe software Year 2000 compliant. By then the web, AOL and CompuServe had taken nearly all of its members, and a 1996 price change that abolished the flat-rate basic tier with a day's notice had driven away many of the rest.

Our analysis: GEnie existed because General Electric's time-sharing mainframes sat idle at night, and it was priced and run as a way of filling that idle time rather than as a business GE wanted to grow. That gave it cheap evening rates, a fiercely loyal community and some of the best online games of the era, and it also meant nobody invested in graphics, a Windows client or marketing when Prodigy and AOL did. GE sold it as soon as the web made the whole category look old, and the buyers were too small to save it.

History [edit]

Filling the mainframes at night

General Electric Information Services ran a worldwide time-sharing network out of Rockville, Maryland, and its Mark III mainframes were busy by day and idle by night. In 1985 Bill Louden, who had run the games, forums and email products at CompuServe, was hired to put a consumer service on that idle capacity, and GEnie opened on 1 October 1985: an ASCII text service reached at 300 or 1,200 bits per second, priced at $6 an hour after 6 pm against CompuServe's $12.50, and immediately called the first serious competition CompuServe had faced.

GEnie's forums were RoundTables, each with a bulletin board, a real-time conference room and a file library, run mostly by independent sysops paid a share of the connect time they generated; the Macintosh, Atari ST, Amiga, Apple II, science fiction and writers' RoundTables were among the busiest places online in the late 1980s. Its chat was the LiveWire CB Simulator. And it was, above all, the games service: Kesmai's Air Warrior, the first graphical multiplayer flight combat game, ran on GEnie from 1987; Simutronics opened GemStone there in 1988 and DragonRealms in 1996; Federation, Stellar Emperor, MegaWars and Hundred Years War all lived on GEnie. In 1994 the service claimed around 350,000 members and up to 10,000 online at once, and it published a print magazine, LiveWire.

Sold twice

GE was never sure it wanted to be in the consumer business, and it did not spend on the graphical front ends that Prodigy and AOL were using to reach millions. On 24 January 1996 GE agreed to sell GEnie to Yovelle Renaissance Corporation, a small firm in Queens acting for IDT; IDT took it over directly on 20 August 1996, when Genie, as it was now written, had about 20,000 paying customers, and folded it into a Genie Interactive service meant to compete with AOL. Earlier that year the flat-rate Star Services tier had been abolished with 12 hours' notice and prices raised, and much of the community left; a graphical client arrived too late to matter.

On 4 December 1999 IDT announced that Genie would close on 27 December because it was not worth making the old software ready for the year 2000, and the last few thousand members gathered in the surviving RoundTables to say goodbye. Simutronics, which had grown up on GEnie, records the closing date in its own timeline. The games moved to the web; the RoundTable culture went to Usenet, mailing lists and, eventually, the web forums that copied its shape.

The domain today

genie.com belongs to Genie Energy, an IDT spin-off. Nothing of the online service remains online.

Similar projects

AOL Dial-Up The modem noise stopped, AOL did not 1991–2025 MobileMe The Apple service Steve Jobs apologised for 2008–2012 CompuServe The internet before the internet 1979–2009 Amazon Drive Amazon's cloud locker, unlimited for $60 a year until it was not, closed at the end of 2023 in favour of Amazon Photos 2011–2023 Pocket Eighteen years of saved-for-later, gone before you read it 2007–2025 MSN TV WebTV: the internet on your television through a set-top box, bought by Microsoft in 1997, switched off in 2013 1996–2013

Sources [edit]

  1. A boom for on-line services The New York Times 12 July 1994 [archived]
  2. N.Y. firm agrees to acquire Genie on-line service from GE The Washington Post 24 January 1996
  3. Genie on-line service is sold to N.J. company The Washington Post 20 August 1996 [archived]
  4. IDT buys Yovelle's Genie on-line service for undisclosed sum Computer Business Review 20 August 1996
  5. Simutronics timeline Simutronics 1 January 2000 [archived]
  6. GEnie GEIS history archive (ammannato.it) 1 January 2010
  7. CompuServe, Prodigy et al.: what Web 2.0 can learn from Online 1.0 Computerworld 15 July 2009 [archived]

Last verified: 18 August 2026. Spotted an error? Suggest an edit (corrections with sources are reviewed and applied).