Binary Systems Holdings, Inc. puts up a commercial online service, called Portal Inc. (portalinc.com) that offered "a commercial online service (much like that of Delphi, Computerserve, even AOL) which, like the humble BBS, was the precursor to the ubiquitous Internet Service Providers we have now. (The system) was a proprietary online system with its own viewers (precursor to the browsers), email, etc. It started as a commercial online service that was available to its subscribers, 24 hours a day".
This ran along the same lines as EMC Online. The systems back then were "proprietary" since no unified standard for online systems has emerge, prior to the world Wide Web and today´s standard HTML-based interfaces.
