During the recent thread about TDD and Dr. Marsters, Tymnet came up for discussion.
I'm interested in opinions about why Tymnet went under. They were in service, had code/speed conversion down to a science, and had access numbers everywhere. What happened?
ISTR that Tymnet/Telenet morphed into the companies that carry credit-card verification traffic, but Wikipedia says Tymnet died and Telenet was absorbed into Sprintnet, so I don't know which company carries credit-card data, or how.
Not necessarily in order --
(A) *lots* of competitors sprang up -- it became a 'commodity' market, with 'lowest price' being "the" decision criteria (in the early 80s one service bureau I used changed network carriers _three_times_ in less than a 2 year period. Simply because the new carrier offered a better rate package. (B) Long distance rates _plummeted_. (C) long distance 'voice' call quality improved, _radically_.
(B) and (C) resulted in a situation where one could make a cross-country voice call for -less- than the connect rate that one of the 'packet' services charged, *and* get a higher-speed connection.
For a while, one could 'move bits' for lower cost over the voice network (using state-of-the-art modems) than one could over dedicated "data" circuits.
Competition, price and the Internet all contributed to Tymnet's demise.
Even PacBell's PPS*NET was a major competitor, charging only 50 cents per hour for their public packet-switched network at the same time Tymnet was charging $2.50 per hour. I used PPS*NET to connect to, for example, The Well; 50 cents an hour over PPS*NET was considerably cheaper than the toll charges for 50 miles calling The Well directly.
Tymnet cried "Foul!" to the California PUC claiming PacBell's pricing for PPS*NET was predatory. Uh, users thought Tymnet's pricing was predatory at 5 times PacBell's. It took several years to resolve this, and sadly PPS*NET was forced to shut down (early 1990s).
I've included some additional info about Tymnet in another article in this thread. The info at Wikipedia is not definitive.
I used PC Pursuit for some years for our Apple II BBS network, their people helped with system problems, little did we know is that we were their testers for the fiber network until they turned it off. We used it for GTE telemail for a few more years.
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