The second part of Computer Chronicles’ two-part look at online services to open 1987 has a strong sense of deja vu. That’s because there’s a repeat guest, Roger Summit, who previously appeared in a 1984 program to discuss Dialog, which is also why he appeared in this episode. Dialog was one of the earliest online database services. And while the previous show focused more on the nascent market for commercial online services like CompuServe and QuantumLink, here the emphasis was more on what Stewart Cheifet described as “high-end databases.”

An ad in the October 6, 1985, edition of The Scrantonian announced an upcoming meeting of the Scranton (Pennsylvania) Commodore Users Group on October 8 that would feature a demonstration of QuantumLink, a “new computer information network.” The people who attended that meeting could not have known this, but they were likely among the very first members of the general public to see what a few years later would morph into America Online, one of the dominant online services of the 1990s.