Connect Business Information Network, formerly known as MacNET, was a proprietary

Property

Property is any physical or intangible entity that is owned by a person or jointly by a group of people or a legal entity like a corporation...

 dial-up online

ONLINE

ONLINE is a magazine for information systems first published in 1977. The publisher Online, Inc. was founded the year before. In May 2002, Information Today, Inc. acquired the assets of Online Inc....

 network with a graphic user interface

Graphical user interface

In computing, a graphical user interface is a type of user interface that allows users to interact with electronic devices with images rather than text commands. GUIs can be used in computers, hand-held devices such as MP3 players, portable media players or gaming devices, household appliances and...

 similar to AppleLink

AppleLink

AppleLink was the name of both Apple Computer's online service for its dealers, third party developers, and users, and the client software used to access it. Prior to the commercialization of the Internet, AppleLink was a popular service for Mac and Apple IIGS users...

.

Launch

Mike Muller, a former VP of Apple Computer

Apple Computer

Apple Inc. is an American multinational corporation that designs and markets consumer electronics, computer software, and personal computers. The company's best-known hardware products include the Macintosh line of computers, the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad...

, launched MacNET in 1988. The mainframe end was program

Computer program

A computer program is a sequence of instructions written to perform a specified task with a computer. A computer requires programs to function, typically executing the program's instructions in a central processor. The program has an executable form that the computer can use directly to execute...

med by Robert Lissner, the author

Author

An author is broadly defined as "the person who originates or gives existence to anything" and that authorship determines responsibility for what is created. Narrowly defined, an author is the originator of any written work.-Legal significance:...

 of AppleWorks

AppleWorks

AppleWorks refers to two different office suite products, both of which are now discontinued. Originally, AppleWorks was an integrated software package for the Apple II platform, released in 1984 by Apple Computer...

. The terminal software

Computer software

Computer software, or just software, is a collection of computer programs and related data that provide the instructions for telling a computer what to do and how to do it....

, also called MacNET, was sold through Macintosh software outlets and the network charged an hourly use fee.

Growth and decline

Use grew rapidly during the first years, but there was significant competition

Competition

Competition is a contest between individuals, groups, animals, etc. for territory, a niche, or a location of resources. It arises whenever two and only two strive for a goal which cannot be shared. Competition occurs naturally between living organisms which co-exist in the same environment. For...

 from America Online when that service launched a year later on the Macintosh

Macintosh

The Macintosh , or Mac, is a series of several lines of personal computers designed, developed, and marketed by Apple Inc. The first Macintosh was introduced by Apple's then-chairman Steve Jobs on January 24, 1984; it was the first commercially successful personal computer to feature a mouse and a...

 platform. Eventually, the MacNET service name and the company name were changed to CONNECT.

The software remained MacNET on the Mac side and PCNet came out for the PC market. By the early 2000s, Connect became web-based

World Wide Web

The World Wide Web is a system of interlinked hypertext documents accessed via the Internet...

and closed within several years of the widespread adoption of the WWW standard.