A Very Vintage Tech Christmas

The terms "Dow Jones" and "fun" don't seem to belong in the same sentence. But there they are, sharing the headline. In the early 1980s, Dow Jones's News/Retrieval service competed with other online services such as CompuServe and the Source. It offered online reference material, shopping, news, weather, and, of course, financial information. Unsurprisingly, the last feature won out: Dow Jones's electronic offering proved more valuable to hard-core investment types than to the general public. The News/Retrieval dial-up service continued well into the 1990s, after which it joined Dow Jones's other Internet offerings on the Web.