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Delphi Forums is a
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online service provider An online service provider (OSP) can, for example, be an Internet service provider, an email provider, a news provider (press), an entertainment provider (music, movies), a search engine, an e-commerce site, an online banking site, a health site, ...
and since the mid-1990s has been a community internet forum site. It started as a nationwide
dialup service Dial-up Internet access is a form of Internet access that uses the facilities of the public switched telephone network (PSTN) to establish a connection to an Internet service provider (ISP) by dialing a telephone number on a conventional telepho ...
in 1983. Delphi Forums remains active as of 2025.


History

The company that became Delphi was founded by
Wes Kussmaul Wes or WES may refer to: Organizations * World Education Services, United States and Canada (founded 1974) * Wiltshire Emergency Services, South West England (1998–2014) * Women's Engineering Society, United Kingdom (founded 1919) People * ...
as Kussmaul Encyclopedia in 1981 and featured an encyclopedia,
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, and a primitive chat. Newswires, bulletin boards and better chat were added in early 1982. Kussmaul recalled:
Delphi was actually launched in October 1981, at Jerry Milden's Northeast Computer Show, as the Kussmaul Encyclopedia--the world's first commercially available computerized encyclopedia. (Frank Greenagle's Arête Encyclopedia was announced at about the same time, but you couldn't buy it until much later.) The Kussmaul Encyclopedia was actually a complete home computer system (your choice of Tandy Color Computer or Apple II) with a 300-bps modem that dialed up to a VAX computer hosting our online encyclopedia database. We sold the system for about the same price and terms as Britannica. People wandered around in it and were impressed with the ease with which they could find information. We had a wonderful cross-referencing system that turned every occurrence of a word that was the name of an entry in the encyclopedia into a hypertext link—in 1981...
In November 1982, Wes hired Glenn McIntyre as a software engineer primarily doing internal systems. Glenn brought in colleagues Kip Bryan and Dan Bruns. Kip wrote the software that became Delphi Conference and Delphi Forums. Dan upon finishing his MBA at Harvard, become President and subsequently CEO when Wes moved on to form Global Villages. On March 15, 1983, the Delphi name was first used by General Videotex Corporation. Forums were text-based, and accessed via
Telenet Telenet was an American commercial packet-switched network which went into service in 1975. It was the first FCC-licensed public data network in the United States. Various commercial and government interests paid monthly fees for dedicated lin ...
, Sprintnet,
Tymnet Tymnet was an international data communications network developed and operated by Tymshare. It was based at the company’s headquarters in Cupertino, California. The network used packet-switching techniques, including statistical multiplexing, an ...
, Uninet, and
Datapac DATAPAC, or Datapac in some documents, was Canada's packet switched X.25-equivalent data network. Initial work on a data-only network started in 1972 and was announced by Bell Canada in 1974 as Dataroute. DATAPAC was implemented by adding packet swi ...
. In 1984, it had 4 million members. Delphi was extended to Argentina in 1985, through a partnership with the Argentine IT company Siscotel S.A. Delphi partnered with ASCII Corp. of
Japan Japan is an island country in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean off the northeast coast of the Asia, Asian mainland, it is bordered on the west by the Sea of Japan and extends from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea ...
to open online services in 1991. Delphi provided national consumer access to the Internet in 1992. Features included E-mail (July 1992),
FTP The File Transfer Protocol (FTP) is a standard communication protocol used for the transfer of computer files from a server to a client on a computer network. FTP is built on a client–server model architecture using separate control and dat ...
,
Telnet Telnet (sometimes stylized TELNET) is a client-server application protocol that provides access to virtual terminals of remote systems on local area networks or the Internet. It is a protocol for bidirectional 8-bit communications. Its main ...
,
Usenet Usenet (), a portmanteau of User's Network, is a worldwide distributed discussion system available on computers. It was developed from the general-purpose UUCP, Unix-to-Unix Copy (UUCP) dial-up network architecture. Tom Truscott and Jim Elli ...
, text-based
Web Web most often refers to: * Spider web, a silken structure created by the animal * World Wide Web or the Web, an Internet-based hypertext system Web, WEB, or the Web may also refer to: Computing * WEB, a literate programming system created by ...
access (November 1992),
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s,
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, and
Gopher Pocket gophers, commonly referred to simply as gophers, are burrowing rodents of the family Geomyidae. The roughly 41 speciesSearch results for "Geomyidae" on thASM Mammal Diversity Database are all endemic to North and Central America. They ar ...
. "To a lot of people at the time, we seemed to be in an enviable position" says Dan Bruns, Delphi's CEO. "But we didn't have a lot of financing to fuel our growth..." In 1993, Delphi was sold to
Rupert Murdoch Keith Rupert Murdoch ( ; born 11 March 1931) is an Australian - American retired business magnate, investor, and media mogul. Through his company News Corp, he is the owner of hundreds of List of assets owned by News Corp, local, national, a ...
's
News Corporation The original incarnation of News Corporation (abbreviated News Corp. and also variously known as News Corporation Limited) was an American Multinational corporation, multinational mass media corporation founded and controlled by media mogul Ru ...
. News Corporation recognized that there would be growth in consumer use of the internet and attempted to use Delphi as its vehicle. It had 125,000 text-based customers in 1995 and had 150 employees. Murdoch hired away IBM's director of high-performance computing and communications, Alan Baratz, in 1994 to run Delphi. Under Baratz, Delphi acquired space in Cross Point, an office complex in
Lowell, Massachusetts Lowell () is a city in Massachusetts, United States. Alongside Cambridge, Massachusetts, Cambridge, it is one of two traditional county seat, seats of Middlesex County, Massachusetts, Middlesex County. With an estimated population of 115,554 in ...
constructed for
Wang Laboratories Wang Laboratories, Inc., was an American computer company founded in 1951 by An Wang and G. Y. Chu. The company was successively headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts (1954–1963), Tewksbury, Massachusetts (1963–1976), Lowell, Massachuse ...
, and built a large state-of-the-art server farm. Bruns and General Manager Rusty Williams stayed on. Delphi peaked with 500,000 paid subscribers and about 600 employees. By 1995, Delphi had lost many of its subscribers, and Bruns left Delphi. In 1996, NewsCorp decided to exit the online business, was laying off almost half of Delphi's employees and wanted to sell or close Delphi. Dan Bruns and some of Delphi's original investors bought Delphi from NewsCorp for an undisclosed amount. With only 50,000 paying subscribers left, Delphi was back to its pre-NewsCorp size. "We were on the same growth slope, but this time we were going down instead of up," he says. "It felt a little poetic." In 1996, Delphi launched a free, ad-supported managed-content website with associated message boards and
chat room The term chat room, or chatroom (and sometimes group chat; abbreviated as GC), is primarily used to describe any form of synchronous conferencing, occasionally even asynchronous conferencing. The term can thus mean any technology, ranging from ...
s, under the management of a team led by Dan Bruns and which included Bill Louden, who had headed
GEnie GEnie (General Electric Network for Information Exchange) was an online service provider, online service created by a General Electric business, GEIS (now GXS Inc., GXS), that ran from 1985 through the end of 1999. In 1994, GEnie claimed around ...
during its heyday. For a period of time, both text-based and web-based community services were available. After a year as a managed content site, Delphi reinvented itself as a community-driven service that allowed anyone to create an online community. Prospero Technologies was formed in January 2000 as the merger of Delphi Forums and Wellengaged. Webpages for forums were discontinued. In 2001, Rob Brazell purchased Delphi Forums, merged it with
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and Idea Exchange, and formed Blue Frogg Enterprises. The Delphi.com domain was sold to
Delphi Corporation Aptiv PLC is an Irish- American automotive technology supplier with headquarters in Schaffhausen, Switzerland. Aptiv grew out of the now-defunct American company, Delphi Automotive Systems, which itself was formerly a component of General Moto ...
, the auto parts manufacturer. Prospero was sold to Inforonics. In 2002, Prospero reacquired Delphi Forums, joining it with Talk City to form Delphi Forums LLC. In 2008, online community developer Mzinga acquired Littleton-based Prospero Technologies LLC, which was then owned by Bruce Buckland, chairman and CEO of Mallory Ventures. In March 2009, a Forrester Research analyst reported on
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that Mzinga was having financial difficulties after it had completed a second round of layoffs. On September 1, 2011, Mzinga sold Delphiforums back to early owner Dan Bruns. In January 2012, Delphi Forums resigned from the
Better Business Bureau The Better Business Bureau (BBB) is an American private, 501(c)(6) nonprofit organization founded in 1912. BBB's self-described mission is to focus on advancing marketplace trust, consisting of 92 independently incorporated local BBB organizati ...
in protest of their support for the
Stop Online Piracy Act The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) was a proposed United States congressional bill to expand the ability of U.S. law enforcement to combat online copyright infringement and online trafficking in counterfeit goods. Introduced on October 26, 20 ...
(SOPA). In February 2013, Delphi Forums celebrated its 30th anniversary. Delphi owner Dan Bruns said, "It's true that the Delphi that launched in 1983 was very different from today's internet," Bruns said, "but one thing remains the same: places like Delphi Forums provide a friendly, comfortable setting for people to share common interests and passions and to build lasting friendships. If we keep that simple truth in mind, we have a terrific legacy to build on going forward." During 2014, Delphi Forums began a beta test of a new forum interface, called Zeta. The current long-time format, now called Classic, also remains, and hosts may use either interface.


See also

* ''Stellar Conquest''


References


External links


Delphi Forums History Project


{{DEFAULTSORT:Delphi (Online Service) Internet service providers of the United States Internet forums Pre–World Wide Web online services Communications in Massachusetts History of computing History of the Internet