Delphi online service

Delphi Forums is an U.S. online service provider and since the mid 1990s has been a community internet forum site. It started as a nationwide dialup service in 1983. Delphi Forums remains active as of 2016, claiming 4 million registered members and "more than 8,000 active Forums" in 2013.

The company that became Delphi was founded by Wes Kussmaul as Kussmaul Encyclopedia in 1981, featured ASCII-based encyclopedia, E-mail, and a primitive chat. Newswires, bulletin boards and better chat were added in early 1982.

Kussmaul recalled:

Delphi was actually launched in October 1981, at Jerry Milden's Northeast Computer Show, as the Kussmaul Encyclopedia--the world's first commercially available computerized encyclopedia. (Frank Greenagle's Arête Encyclopedia was announced at about the same time, but you couldn't buy it until much later.) The Kussmaul Encyclopedia was actually a complete home computer system (your choice of Tandy Color Computer or Apple II) with a 300-bps modem that dialed up to a VAX computer hosting our online encyclopedia database. We sold the system for about the same price and terms as Britannica. People wandered around in it and were impressed with the ease with which they could find information. We had a wonderful cross-referencing system that turned every occurrence of a word that was the name of an entry in the encyclopedia into a hypertext link—in 1981...

In November 1982 Wes hired Glenn McIntyre as a software engineer primarily doing internal systems. Glenn brought in colleagues Kip Bryan and Dan Bruns. Kip wrote the software that became Delphi Conference and Delphi Forums. Dan, (another very strong software person) upon finishing his MBA at Harvard, become President and subsequently CEO when Wes moved on to form Global Villages.

On March 15, 1983, the Delphi name was first used by General Videotex Corporation. Forums were text-based, and accessed via Telenet, Sprintnet, Tymnet, Uninet, and Datapac (Canada).

Delphi was extended to Argentina in 1985, through a partnership with the Argentine IT company Siscotel S.A.

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