America 1982-Chapter 620 - 139: Do Me a Favor_2

This issue had actually been discussed internally many times. As a developer of AmigaOS, Jay Miner had always held his view, which was that if they wanted to make AmigaOS enter ordinary households, they must consider adding enough engaging playability.

However, Tommy always refused to have more fun mini-games built in.

Tommy made eye contact with Jay and said with certainty, "Bring him the whole world."

Seeing that Jay didn’t quite catch on, Tommy pointed at the computer screen: 𝐟𝕣𝗲𝕖𝕨𝗲𝐛𝗻𝗼𝐯𝗲𝚕.𝗰𝚘𝐦

"On the Amiga in front of you, we’ve installed a browser application developed by Stanford University’s Linear Accelerator Center World Wide Web Information Retrieval Office, codenamed Midas, which means tycoon. It doesn’t make you a tycoon in real life when you open this application, rather when you open this app, it means you’ll become a tycoon in the virtual world. Now, you can try opening it."

"I’ve used this thing before. The hypertext link search and retrieval function is pretty good, but I don’t think ordinary people will be interested in these academic..." Jason dropped out, but was still a student at Stanford University, which is involved in several computer hardware and software, as well as internet institutions. He had tried their new developments as soon as they were available.

Now familiar with the process, he opened the web browser icon, his tone certain that ordinary people wouldn’t use this thing to view various university documents and literature.

He was not unfamiliar with this application, a software from Stanford. Once opened, the window page would list links to various universities connected to Stanford’s network, allowing users to easily click to reach the desired university’s related web page, no longer needing to intentionally remember the IP addresses or domain names like before.

But now the window that popped up was completely different from the interface he used for research during development. The browser had been set to a new homepage, with no links to universities, but various categorized internet addresses, like a textual tour map, telling users where to go if they were interested in reading novels, watching news, discussing games, discussing sports, learning about celebrity gossip, wanting to know the TV schedule, or wishing to donate to charity. Jason even saw a category in the corner labeled dating, with the first website named Pimp... Can you really make friends of the opposite sex on Pimp?

Jason casually clicked a game-related address, and the page jumped to a rudimentary message board, similar to those used by universities for discussions based on certain topics, which had many discussions about well-known games already posted.

"This is what I meant by seeing the world. I had Susy help conduct a survey through her telephone BBS, and then we compiled twenty-four categories of sites that the general public is interested in. The browser application belongs to Stanford, but these twenty-four sites don’t. They are also some of the world’s first commercial internet public websites. According to the statistics from the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority, including Europe, there are just over fifty websites on Earth right now. Except for our twenty-four, the rest are all research institutions or academic organizations. These are not telephone BBS that are very regional, where you have to remember various numbers and queue up to log in every time. As long as the country you are in has an internet node and is connected to the network, just open this browser and you can enter these websites and forums to leave messages and chat with people around the world who share your interests."

Jason carefully looked at the links of these twenty-four websites; at this moment, these hyperlinks appeared to him as twenty-four future well-known internet brands. Just as people tend to habitually go to Walmart for shopping, they would also get accustomed to retrieving the information they want from these provided websites on the internet.

"These sites aren’t all owned by you, right?" Jason asked Tommy with some concern.

Although Tommy amended the communications act’s supplementary clauses, if it looked greedy, antitrust issues would sooner or later arise.

"I don’t even know who these sites belong to. Maybe they belong to an Indian Chief, maybe to some alumni of ONE or SDD, or even to my maid. In any case, I’m sure they don’t belong to me. I only have the right to decide how they should appear before everyone," Tommy told Jason.

Seeing that Jason did not speak further, Tommy continued:

"The second built-in software I insist on, MCI-Mail, is something you should be very familiar with, a paid email service. What I mean is, as long as customers purchase our AmigaOS, they will get a year of free MCI-Mail service and waive the delivery fee for twenty emails."

In America, the three major telecom service providers have all launched paid email services. An annual fee for an email account is roughly between thirty-five to fifty dollars, and each email is charged based on characters, fifty cents for every five hundred characters. The price of an email account doesn’t seem cheap, but compared to the cost of sending physical mail, it’s a bargain.

In America, mailing a physical letter costs around two dollars, and you needn’t worry about the delivery speed; it’s definitely slow enough. If you write a letter and have the postman deliver it to your neighbor in the same village, he can take a whole week.