I was a successful real estate broker and past president of the San Diego Association of REALTORS at the time and I was hired by NAR as a consultant, first REALTOR user, and Vice President of Marketing for a short period until Bob Goldberg was hired. Along with Carol Weinrich, I developed the very first marketing pieces for RIN (with a Private Side and a Public Side), and sent out across the country to evangelize and train for the coming “Paradigm Shift.”
It was while working on the RIN project that I first heard the term “Data Dictionary,” and it was labeled “DxM,” for Data Exchange Method.”
The RND was a closed, proprietary network developed for REALTORS by RIN, a $13,000,000 funded, wholly owned subsidiary of the National Association of REALTORS, and the birthplace of REALTOR .com.
GeoData was an early version of RPR.
Mail was email in a closed network, that could travel out to the Internet, but that was more secure inside the closed network.
RealTalk, was NAR’s first online community. It was a seed of today’s NAR Hub, only better (I say that as I was the “Electronic Publisher and creator of what was behind that button).
HomePage took you out to the public side of RIN, outside of the closed network and onto the budding Worldwide Web (WWW) and the newly created REALTOR .com
RIN Mall was a place for technology purchases, at a discount, for REALTORS. At the time, few REALTORS had laptops, or even desktop computers.
Library took you to the digital recreation of the NAR Library and newly created content.
News was a button for which no content was ever developed.
Lookup was a place to find User Information.
Intro explained what RIN was and was never fully developed.
Hangup – You connected to the Internet and to RIN over plain old telephone service (POTS). It was important to “hangup” as RIN was not a free service but had a subscription cost. I recall it being $8.00 per minute (that is in 1995 dollars!) and no one I know actually subscribed to the RND. All of the initial users were beta testers.
There is a lot more to the story, that few people are still around to tell…and some of their memories have been blurred with time.
I still have all of the original communications, presentations, and explanations in my garage…some in paper form, some on 3.5 inch “floppies,” and some since digitized.
The original version of the RND had to be loaded onto your computer with 16 “floppies.”
