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DDial was an online chat server that was popular during the mid-1980s. It was a specialized type of bulletin board system that allowed all callers to send lines of text to each other in real-time. In some ways, it was a sociological forerunner to IRC, and was a cheap, local alternative to CompuServe chat, which was expensive and billed by the minute. At its peak, at least 35 major DDial systems existed across the United States, many of them in large cities. During the evening when telephone rates were low, the biggest DDial systems would link together using Telenet or PC Pursuit connections, forming regional chat networks.
Customers typically paid the local DDial owner a flat rate of about $10 to $20 per month. Open access to anonymous visitors (called nons) was an effective hook to draw in paid registrations. Nons were typically logged off after fifteen minutes and were shut out of the system during peak usage hours.
A typical DDial system ran on a small cluster of Apple II computers, with seven connections per computer. In 1989, DDial was ported to the IBM PC, but by this time it was outpaced by alternatives like GEnie. By the mid-1990s, DDial was no longer feasible because of the advent of the Internet and IRC.
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