The Source (online service)

[citation needed] Having secured publishing rights and put in place the necessary software, the system was announced at Comdex in June 1979.

Reader's Digest had high expectations for The Source, and established for the company its own purpose-built installation of Prime minicomputers in McLean, Virginia.

However, subscriber numbers were slow to build, and (unlike the leaner set-up at rival CompuServe) this facility became an expensive and under-used overhead to maintain.

Rumors abounded of an impending sale, but eventually Control Data Corporation put up $5 million in 1983 in return for stock options, and came in as an operating partner.

To place these costs for data services into an historical context, The Source's base nighttime and weekend rate of US$7.75 (equivalent to $23 in 2023) per hour in 1984 was approximately twice the federal minimum hourly wage in this same time period, placing the ability to access data with a personal computer in the hands of businesses and wealthy households only.

PARTICIPATE provided what it called "many to many" communications, or computer conferencing, and hosted "Electures" on The Source, such as Paul Levinson's "Space: Humanizing the Universe" in the spring of 1985.