Genie

Genie was the invidual online service that initially hosted GemStone III (and before it, GemStone II). Before the advent of the World Wide Web and common content, each online service--such as Prodigy, American OnLine, CompuServe, and suchlike--had their own games, forums, pictures, research capabilities, et cetera.

Initially, the service was named GEnie because it was part of the General Electric family of companies. General Electric owned GEIS (General Electric Information Services), one portion of which was GEnie. Later, GEIS sold GEnie to another company which retained much of the name, but changed the first E to lowercase.

The bulletin board that GemStone III used on GEnie/Genie was quite active, especially taking into account the relatively small population of players. Since GEnie players paid an hourly rate to be online, most used a program called Aladdin to download and upload new messages to the bulletin board. Older posts were bundled and archived periodically, thus still available to be perused.

While on GEnie/Genie, GemStone III had a "normal" online population of between thirty and fifty (30-50) people. Special events like the Gladiatorial Games or merchant events would see the number logged in rise to the eighty or one hundred person (80-100) range, but more than that made it increasingly likely that the whole system would crash. Finally, in 1995 when the GemStone server was switched over to a Unix processor, more than one hundred twenty (120+) people were all logged in simultaneously... and the system kept running!

(We were easily impressed in those days.)