CIX then grew rapidly, reaching a peak of more than 16,000 users in 1994, before starting to lose customers to the newly formed Internet service providers that offered free access to the mass market using 0845 dialup, such as Demon (which was started by Cixen Cliff Stanford, whose CIX nickname was 'Demon'), Pipex, AOL and Freeserve.
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It hosted several official online support areas for companies such as Borland and Novell and counted among its subscribers many of the UK's technology journalists (some of them wooed with free accounts), which ensured regular mention in the computing press.
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The Liberal Democrats have used CIX as a conferencing system and a branded version of the Off line reader Ameol is provided for their use.
After experiments with Prestel, he found an early British online community, CIX in the late 1980s, before direct connections to the internet were cheaply available outside academia, and this provided him with a new social and business life.
CIX |
In March 1998, CompX International Inc. completed its Initial Public Offering, making it a public company with stocks traded on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol of ‘’’CIX’’’.
Winder was contacted through CIX email over the internet by technological culture writer Howard Rheingold, a habitué of The Well, another early online community based in the United States, and eventually the two met in person at Winder's home; the meeting is described in Rheingold's book, The Virtual Community.
This, along with the rise in popularity of forums such as Compuserve and CIX, led to a significant shareware scene, (still) archived by Steve Litchfield and the 3-Lib shareware library, started in 1994.