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"The GameLine was an oversized Atari cartridge (manufactured by a company called CVC) that had the ability to transmit data through a simple phone line. After activating your account by calling a toll-free number -- and supplying your mom's credit card information -- you could connect your Atari to a central computer and download over 80 games for about a dollar each. Every game would then be playable for about five to 10 times before you had to pay to download it again. If the GameLine seems a little expensive, that's because it came from the motherfucking future.

But wait, it gets even more mindblowing: This technology was originally developed as a way for people to download songs into their homes through cable providers. Twenty years before Napster or iTunes, the planned "Home Music Store" would have made it possible for anyone to buy music online. Yes, in an era when people were trying to update their music library from vinyl to state-of-the-art cassette tapes, the "Home Music Store" would have completely bypassed CDs and gone straight to the next format. The only problem: All the major record companies refused to provide music for it, afraid to piss off retailers.

That's when Bill Von Meister, one of the founders of CVC, acquired this brilliant but now completely useless technology and turned it into a way to download video games. But besides the GameLine, CVC started developing other online services like the MailLine (the ability to send electronic mail from your Atari 2600), NewsLine (read news headlines and weather updates, like in an RSS feed) and OpinionLine (an early version of Internet message boards). Add a PornLine and some cat memes and we've got ourselves a full Internet, decades ahead of time.
All these projects would have probably come to fruition if the GameLine had done well, but it didn't. The problem, once again, was that none of the major game developers like Activision, Coleco or even Atari wanted anything to do with it, which meant that the GameLine's impressive 80-game library consisted mostly of obscure, shitty games nobody wanted to play. Add that to goddamn ET and the video game crash of '83, and the whole company went bankrupt.
That doesn't mean Von Meister abandoned his plans, though -- it only means it took him a little longer to realize them. He went on to create another company that reused the same technology: something called America OnLine. So, basically, a failed gaming peripheral nobody wanted anything to do with revolutionized modern life as we know it.

So what if all of that?

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