A requiem for CompuServe

It’s a few days late, but I don’t recall seeing much comment on this milestone: CompuServe has been shut down by AOL, the current owner of the name and whatever was left of the company.

To enlighten those younger than their forties, CompuServe was one of the first online services, back in the dark ages before the Internet (which was indeed capitalized in the early days…) and the World Wide Web (again, capitalized before becoming ubiquitous), starting 30 years ago in 1979 to be exact, over dial up, which involved hogging a telephone line (no cell phones, only the house land line) and slow connection speeds. You were hot stuff if you could get above 10k bits (not bytes, bits) per second. No streaming video here, even simple text like email took minutes to download if you had more than a few messages.

It is difficult to describe the feelings evoked in those early days, when connecting to a server in Switzerland was a cause for excitement and being able to run a Gopher search was the best way to find documents over the nascent Internet.

Thirty years… and then gone…

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Cross-posted between Random Fate and The Moderate Voice .

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