The Amiga has two excellent off-line readers for the CiX service, including Lucy by Toby Simpson.
Many people don't see the point of commercial services such as CiX (Compulink Information eXchange) or Compuserve. After all, their argument goes, if you can get at all of this stuff free through your local BBS, why should you bother with services which cost money?
The answer to this is very simple. Although many BBS are run in a very professional manner, the sysop doesn't make any money out of them, so he (or she) can't afford to spend lots of money on expensive equipment. A commercial service, however, can and does do this. For instance, CiX has somewhere in the region of 50 gigabytes of disk space, and most of the best Amiga Public Domain and Shareware programs find their way there eventually. What Sysop could afford that much disk space?
There are a variety of commercial services of this type. The biggest one in the UK is CiX (Voice: 0181 390 8446, modem: 0181 390 1244), which has several thousand users. There is a £25 setting up fee for a new account, but the charges are a very reasonable £2.40 per hour (off peak). The other big system in the UK is Compuserve (Voice: 0800 289378), which began life in America. Although Compuserve now has a UK base, it is still heavily biased towards the US, with the billing being in dollars. In off peak times, you should expect to pay around $7.70 per hour (around £4). As well as all sorts of computer stuff, Compuserve offers such delights as on-line shopping and a very large travel database.
A newcomer to this scene is Rupert Murdoch's Delphi service (Voice: 0171 757 7150). Once again this has a heavy bias towards all things American, but at least your bills aren't determined by the exchange rate. There is a strong Amiga presence on Delphi on-line and it boasts a wide selection of other delights such as the opportunity to chat live with Net guru Dave Winder. There are too many billing options to detail here, so call Delphi for more details.
Although all commercial services cost you money, it needn't be an overly expensive business. For instance, if you use an off-line reader (a program which automatically calls the service, collects together all your messages and allows you to read them without having to stay on the phone), you could easily keep the cost down. Another reason why commercial services are worth investigating is that they are usually the haunt of the real hard core of Amiga users. Post a technical query on a service such as CiX and you are likely to have an answer (or even several answers) within minutes or hours as opposed to the days that Fidonet can take.
And there's more to it than talking about computers. Most commercial services will have areas on any number of subjects, ranging from anatomy to hill walking via philosophy. CiX, for instance, had a grand total of 2,576 conferences at the time of going to press. And if you can't find one about your pet subject, you can just go ahead and create your own.
