Source: Commodore Magazine – July 1988
You millennials with your fancy social networking, eBay, VR chat, online gaming, etc. Well, when I was your age, we could do it all on nothing more than a Commodore 64 and a 1200 (or even 300) baud dial-up modem [end getting too old rant]…
Seriously though, all of these things were available via the online service Q-Link (or Quantum Link) that was specific to the Commodore 64. It had online auctions, instant messaging, discussion forums, games, downloads, and yes, even VR chat. It was called Club Caribe (or Habitat in its earlier form). You could wander around an island with your avatar chatting with people, playing games and other things. Granted, this was with lo-res 2D graphics but still…
Unfortunately, I never had Q-Link (well I had the floppy disk, it came with every disk drive at the time…but I never paid for the service). It was too rich for my 12 year old blood at $10/month plus 6 cents a minute for “plus” services. But I did always want to try it. The original Quantum Link service has been reverse engineered and implemented over the internet so that you can connect via a real or emulated Commodore 64 and Q-Link software. I’m have not tried it yet and am not sure exactly what the status is (see http://q-link.net/ for more info) but Habitat / Club Caribe is apparently being worked on too.
Quantum Link eventually became AOL which was for users of PCs only. While I loved Quantum Link (or the idea of it anyway), my perception of AOL was always much different (and really it was much different even if the back end was largely based on Quantum Link).
The above ad is from the July 1988 issue of Commodore Magazine.
