How I Invented The Internet

And you all thought it was invented by Al Gore. The following story is true.

In 1981, I read the back page column of “Inside Sports” magazine (RIP), entitled “The Fan,” in which the author talked about his fantasy football league. It had been organized in a bar in the Bay Area. I had never heard of anything like it, and was fascinated with the concept.

That fall, PEFA (P&E Football Association – I am the “P”) was born, comprised of friends and relatives of “P” and “E”, including the Doc. In September, PEFA will have its 26th annual draft. (Did I mention that I won last year?)

A couple of years later, I picked up a copy of the book, “Rotisserie League Baseball,” considered the original holy bible of fantasy baseball. I loved the book. It was brilliant, funny and incredibly well written. I was fascinated by fantasy baseball, but it seemed way too complicated to administer. Plus, I admit, at the time I wasn’t as interested in baseball.

Early in 1986, I obtained a Compuserve account. At that time, for all intent and purposes, Compuserve was the internet. The Source still barely existed, but was in the final throws of folding. The Defense Department had its pre-internet service, but it wasn’t available to the public. AOL had not yet been born. The World Wide Web was science fiction.

Compuserve was a monopoly. It was a wholly owned subsidiary of, believe it or not, H&R Block. It was growing by leaps and bounds and was hugely profitable.

How profitable? Compuserve charged $6/hour to be connected. Per Hour! That was with a 300 baud modem, not 300K DSL, but 300 bits per second. If you used a 1200 baud modem, making the connection 4 times as fast (but still painfully slow), they charged $12/hour.

You had to be a computer geek to get online back then. I was pretty advanced for an amateur, with my trusty IBM XT (10 MB hard drive built in!) and a Hayes Smartmodem, which only took about ten hours to install. Many people were online with Apple II’s and Commodore 64’s and Radio Shack build-it-yourself computers, plus the occasional “portable” Compaq or Osborne computers.

Compuserve’s great advantage was its coast-to-coast telephone node system, which allowed almost anyone to log on via a local phone call. The online experience of the time was nothing like the plug and play world we have today. We all felt like pioneers driving covered wagons. And we knew it was going to be enormous.

Compuserve had the first chat rooms, and the #1 topic of conversation was the size of everyone’s Compuserve bills. In addition to chat rooms, there were games, product support forums sponsored by companies to answer technical questions, news forums and special interest forums. Roger Ebert had a movie forum where you could ask him questions. Email was mostly within the Compuserve intranet only, and was primitive.

There were no graphics, not at 300 or 1200 baud. Everything looked like the “WHOPPR” scenes in the movie War Games – typed characters only. It was a DOS world, Microsoft Windows 1.0 having just been introduced a few months before and not yet successful. The whole Compuserve marketing plan was to find ways to keep users attached to the network because every minute generated revenue of ten cents. Fixed monthly invoicing did not become available until AOL introduced it, along with limited graphics.

One of the special interest forums was called the Sports Forum. Mostly people who logged in there would leave messages or chat in the forum’s own chat rooms about sports. I asked if they ran any fantasy leagues on the network, as the medium seemed a natural for the idea. Most people had never heard of fantasy leagues, so I offered to start one.

In the fall of 1986 at the start of football season, I initiated two 8 team online football leagues inside the Compuserve Sports Forum. The rules were based on our rules in PEFA, with weekly matchups and scoring for both touchdowns and yardage. Anyone who wanted to play was welcome, and I was the “Commish”.

Team owners were of all ages, from teens to retired folks, living all over the country. There were many Compuserve members who lived abroad as well, but I don’t think anyone in those leagues was from outside the US. We held two live drafts, online, in the Forum’s chat rooms. The players were in one room and the kibitzers were in a second room chatting while they each simultaneously monitored the draft in the other room.

It sounds simple today, but this was space age technology back in 1986. The drafts each lasted about 5 hours, and generated a nice little income stream for Compuserve. Each week I did the scoring for both leagues offline, and uploaded the standings and weekly scores in a word processed file (using Wordstar). It would have been easier to use a spreadsheet program (Lotus 1-2-3), but I could never figure out how to upload a Lotus file such that everyone could read it no matter what kind of computer they owned.

I had a team in one of the leagues, and I vaguely remember I made it to the finals before losing. I don’t have any idea who won those leagues, but they were a big success. The Forum introduced baseball leagues in the spring of 1987, though scoring those leagues had to be done by hand and turned out to be a problem. I organized the drafting of ten leagues, with two or three leagues drafting simultaneously in separate rooms and dozens of non-participating observers watching in the “bullpen,” as they monitored the drafts.

At six buck per hour per person, Compuserve was overjoyed. For me, that’s where my management involvement ended. I realized from the experience that fantasy sports was going to be a big thing in the online world, but I had an accounting business to run. I considered getting involved in fantasy sports as a business. I even drafted a 15 page outline of a fully automated online fantasy sports league provider. Compuserve was mildly interested. My wife, on the other hand, thought I was nuts to consider it.

But what I really found was that although the internet was a great delivery system, online leagues were actually boring. Nothing beats a live draft with your friends, face to face in a room, with alcohol. Playing against a faceless teenager from Dubuque, Iowa can’t match it.

Back in 1986 H&R Block owned the internet. A few years later they sold the remains to AOL for a song. Leave it to a bunch of accountants to blow it completely and not end up as the Google of today.