(1) An organization that provides an information service over the Internet. Examples are search engines, cloud storage services and application service providers.
(2) An organization that provides access to the Internet. See
ISP.
(3) An earlier organization that provided proprietary content online. Before the Internet was offered to the general public, online services such as AOL and CompuServe contained a unique mix of databases and resources available via dial-up modems. If email was provided, it could only be sent to members of the same service.
After the Internet became popular, all the proprietary services provided Web access to their content. Proprietary email systems were either switched to Internet mail protocols (SMTP) or their formats were routinely converted back and forth to the Internet format. The following online services predate the Internet explosion of the mid-1990s and are here for historical purposes. See
portal.
America Online, Inc. (AOL)
Internet access, variety of databases
www.aol.com
CompuServe Information Service, Inc.
Internet access, variety of databases
www.compuserve.com
DataTimes Corporation
Newspapers, magazines, financial
www.cambiumlearning.com
DIALOG (ProQuest company)
Largest collection of databases
www.dialog.com
Dow Jones Interactive
(now Factiva.com)
Finance, daily news & news searching
www.factiva.com
Genie (now defunct)
Internet access, BBSs, roundtables
LexisNexis
Legal and news information
www.lexisnexis.com
National Library of Medicine
MEDLINE and MEDLARS databases
www.nlm.nih.gov
Prodigy (owned by SBC in 2001
merged into AT&T in 2005)
Internet access, variety of databases
www.prodigy.com
Questel - Orbit
Patent, trademark, scientific, chemical,
business and news information
www.questel.orbit.com
West Publishing/WESTLAW
(Thomson Reuters company)
Legal databases
www.westpub.com