The year before the first Cable-Tec Expo took place, CBS began developing a plan for a consumer online service. CBS had just signed an agreement with AT&T to run a market test of a prototype service using technologies from AT&T and content from CBS — then leaders in those fields. In retrospect, those days were the start of the world as we now know it.
     CBS's strategy officers had just been hired out of AT&T. Convinced that online services would be the next mass medium, they wanted to position CBS as the industry leader. During the summer and fall of 1982, I led an effort to show how online services could help providers such as retailers and airlines eliminate the costs of bricks and mortar by working directly with consumers and "removing the middleman." Making information and pricing visible would increase competition and bring consumer prices down. CBS would receive advertising and transaction revenue from providers, making it possible to offer the service to consumers at a low price — the same model magazines had used for years.
     In early 1983 I joined the group working on the field trial. It was going well and CBS assumed it would form a joint venture with AT&T to develop and launch a commercial service. But it quickly became clear that under the terms of the 1982 consent decree (which broke up the Bell System late in 1983), AT&T could not engage in "electronic publishing." I was asked to lead an effort to formulate CBS's own technology plan.
     The key architectural question was distribution of function. Should intelligence be centralized or decentralized? Should it be in the data center or in the network? What should the home terminal do? AT&T had assumed intelligence would be centralized. Since it owned the entire telephone network, it tended to view communications as practically free. Their home device would be a dumb terminal, with intelligence used only to provide a graphical user interface.