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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5 Responses to “A requiem for CompuServe”

1. AustinRoth says:

   July 8, 2009 at 11:22 pm

   Of course, there was also Prodigy and Delphi, for those of us old enough to remember (at least 300 years old in internet years).

   How many of you out there also started out using BBS, or UUNET?
2. T_Steel says:

   July 8, 2009 at 11:47 pm

   I was in junior high school helping a friend run a BBS off a Commodore 128, one 1581 disk drive and a 20MB Lt. Kernal hard disk system. Used the New Image BBS software (formerly Perspective Software). My friend's father was an electrical engineer and seemed to have all the gadgets and gizmos. And how could I forget the Commodore 1670 1200 baud modem!!

   Ah those were the days… Hearing the phone ring, the sound of the “handshake” coming across the modem, and watching a SINGLE user log in. We felt like techie gods. LOL!
3. Solomon Kleinsmith says:

   July 9, 2009 at 12:19 am

   I had my own BBS for a few years before I had even heard of the internet. I had to get a login to the local university's network (I was in middle school at the time, most college students didn't use their account and we found out the default password) to get on, which consisted of just black and white at the time I think.

   Used Prodigy at my father's house, but usually went with a local ISP.

   The good old days, heheh… before AOL.
4. DLS says:

   July 9, 2009 at 2:11 pm

   I was on a state-wide (all-campuses) “underground” BBS when I was in school, as well as running one myself on my own campus (local-campus only). I also did “chatting” which not called that back then.

   * * *

   How long will it be before America Online itself gets shut down?
5. DLS says:

   July 9, 2009 at 2:12 pm

   “a Commodore 128″

   Captain Kirk still is a-huckstering, now on the Internet (Priceline).