What was this pre-WWW software to search news articles online?

May 31, 2022 7:39 AM

1995, my elementary school's computer lab: One of the computers has software on it that can access and search articles from hundreds of newspapers in real time via the internet (not the WWW, which barely exists at this point). What could this software have been? Why did my school have it?

A few further details:

• The interface was black and white, text-based (I think controlled from the keyboard, e.g. type S for Search). The computer was a Mac.
• I'm quite certain this was not a static database, since I remember being deeply impressed that I could find stories filed that same day.
• It wasn't LexisNexis, which I was familiar with through the public library.
• It could have been associated with a particular wire service. I didn't know what those were at that time, but I have a vague recollection of the word "wire" being associated in my mind with this software.
• 1995 was the last year I was at the school in question, so it couldn't have been later (but it could have been a year or two earlier). This was an ordinary suburban public school.

posted by aws17576 to Computers & Internet (17 answers total)

I don't have an answer and I'm not sure if this paper does but it might get you some better search terms to use.
posted by dawkins_7 at 7:45 AM on May 31, 2022

I'm going to guess it was Gopher, an early version of so-called hypertext. It was apparently a thing in libraries, schools, and related institutions, though I was too young for it personally. I've always been curious however.
posted by Alensin at 7:53 AM on May 31, 2022 [13 favorites]

I definitely used Gopher as a mid-90s high school and college student - I remember mostly using it to access "book" type material rather than news articles, though, so I wonder if your school had some kind of additional subscription.
posted by mskyle at 7:57 AM on May 31, 2022

The AP newswire and similar services were definitely available electronically as of the 90s. But I don’t know if the means of access specifically lived on the Mac in your computer lab — it may not have been client-based. Could the machine have had a telnet (terminal) session open to some server on the internet that provided searchable AP content? The interface you describe would have been exactly how that would work.

IIRC there were even some Usenet newsgroups around that time that distributed feeds from AP or the like, but I don’t think those were searchable directly.
posted by sesquipedalia at 7:58 AM on May 31, 2022

WWW totally existed in 1995. In 1993, you probably used CDs or microfiche. I started college that year, and was able to look up Red Dwarf scripts that someone had typed out and annotated, tons of music blogs, etc.
posted by The_Vegetables at 8:03 AM on May 31, 2022 [1 favorite]

Also look up the history of the Dialogue database, they spun off packages for educational institutions and were definitely around then.
posted by Melismata at 8:22 AM on May 31, 2022 [2 favorites]

Almost definitely GOPHER
posted by kschang at 8:33 AM on May 31, 2022

Infoseek, Magellan, Lycos, AltaVista?
posted by cocoagirl at 8:51 AM on May 31, 2022

WWW totally existed in 1995

+1
posted by j_curiouser at 9:15 AM on May 31, 2022 [1 favorite]

I agree that Gopher is a strong candidate. CompuServe (and its competitors) existed at the time and did provide up to date news reading/searching. I have no idea what the terminal news experience on a Mac in circa 1995 was like.
posted by mmascolino at 9:50 AM on May 31, 2022

Response by poster: The Telnet session and Dialog answers seem most plausible so far, and gopher seems like a possibility too. I'll have to follow up further on these leads!

I must insist that this was not on the web, though. I remember the early web quite well. While there were a handful of pages in 1994–95 (like... four digits' worth), this was before most newspapers had any web presence, and the tool I was using was more specialized than a web browser.
posted by aws17576 at 9:51 AM on May 31, 2022 [1 favorite]

Your description (especially the "one computer", and "realtime" bits) made me think of a system that used one of satellite or cable TV combined with a piece of hardware to receive (and store) a stream of news articles from several sources.

The name escaped me at first, but I think it was this: X*Press X*Change (Wikipedia article)

Looks like it ran from 1988 to 1997.

The timeline fits, but this probably does not match with your "search hundreds of newspapers" or "from the Internet" criteria.
posted by ffej at 9:54 AM on May 31, 2022 [1 favorite]

It's Dialog.

I was doing Teach For America during that time and wrote grants for my school to get a bunch of computers. One of the cases I made to get us money was that students would have access to current periodicals through Dialog.

It was pretty great, too.
posted by yellowcandy at 10:01 AM on May 31, 2022 [6 favorites]

LexisNexis and gopher came to mind first, and the second reminded me of Archie (for searching FTP sites), Jughead (for gopher) and Veronica (for gopher).
posted by Pronoiac at 11:00 AM on May 31, 2022 [3 favorites]

I worked with an academic media service in the early 90s at universities that had searchable abstracts of many major publications via a text based interface. I don't remember the name Dialog but it may have been that. It could take been accessed via a Mac but only in that a Mac could run a terminal program.
posted by Candleman at 11:10 AM on May 31, 2022

I learned about Dialog in library school, and remember hearing that only librarians knew how to run the searches. In one of my classes, we actually had to learn how to write a Dialog search, and it was NOT EASY. But maybe they had a spinoff product with a more user-friendly search interface?
posted by leftover_scrabble_rack at 2:10 PM on May 31, 2022 [1 favorite]

I'm also thinking Nexis.
posted by yclipse at 4:48 AM on June 1, 2022