Ooohh, neato. CompuServe was the way we first got online at my house, in 1992. I still have a copy of CompuServe Magazine from July 1992 [0], which describes their online shopping portal - quite impressive for the time! Funny bit on page 8: "My best advice for people thinking of entering game programming is --don't! If you're a good programmer, you'll take a pay cut of at least 25% to work in the games field".<p>[0] <a href="http://www.vtda.org/pubs/CompuServe_Magazine/CompuServe_Magazine_1992-07.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://www.vtda.org/pubs/CompuServe_Magazine/CompuServe_Maga...</a>
In 2021 I was doing work for a client and noticed an email address of @cs.com. Two letter domains are pretty rare, and I wasn't familiar with this one.<p>To my great surprise, it was an original CompuServe email address. There are still some (original?) CompuServe users with intact email addresses.
The Computer History Museum is such an amazing place and I try to visit it every single time I'm in the Valley and I always see something new.<p>This might be the first time there's just a tiny, tiny piece of my online history there. Bought my first computer with a modem just so I could join CompuServe in 1984. My phone bill in the tiny town I lived in at the time was the only thing limiting me from spending every waking moment on CompuServe.
Back when I first signed up for CompuServe (1979?) I ordered a bunch of manuals from them. They were for things like "FILGE" (File Generator and Editor) and their FORTRAN compiler. I am always battling my hoarding instincts so knowing that I would <i>NEVER</i> <i>EVER</i> have any need for them in the future, I tossed them about 15 years ago. I probably should have offered them to CHM or Jason Scott first.
This page weirdly freezes my browser every 30 seconds or so. But reloading it you can then move to another section quickly. Strange. But very interesting how these treasure troves keep turning up, some day well into the future people will be ecstatic that someone took the time and made the effort to preserve all of this.
Interesting facts from Wikipedia[0]:<p>CompuServe was founded in 1969 as Compu-Serv Network (as a subsidiary of an insurance company), a commercial time-sharing service with focus on business customers. It did so by renting time on its PDP-10 midrange computers during business hours.<p>In 1977, they changed their name to CompuServe Incorporated.<p>In 1979, it began offering a dial-up online information service to consumers. Radio Shack marketed the residential information service MicroNET, in which home users accessed the computers during evening hours, when the CompuServe computers were otherwise idle. Its success prompted CompuServe to drop the MicroNET name in favor of its own.<p>By the mid-1980s, CompuServe was one of the largest information and networking services companies, and it was the largest consumer information service.<p>CompuServe was the first online service to offer Internet connectivity, albeit with limited access, as early as 1989 when it connected its proprietary e-mail service to allow incoming and outgoing messages to be exchanged with Internet-based e-mail addresses.<p>[0] <a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CompuServe" rel="nofollow">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CompuServe</a>
The colleague who forwarded this to me also sent the blog article from Internet Archive's Jason Scott about the project[1]. Can't wait for those "operations manuals" to show up in the IA!<p>1. <a href="https://blog.archive.org/2022/03/29/mission-impossible-the-compuserve-chapter/" rel="nofollow">https://blog.archive.org/2022/03/29/mission-impossible-the-c...</a>
I remember asking for "the internet" one Christmas growing up and we ended up getting Compuserve. I recall learning the various local numbers you could dial into and our email address which was a randomly assigned number @compuserve.com.<p>Glad they took the time to preserve some of this stuff!
I still have wonderful memories of paying $6.25 an hour ($16.18 an hour according to the official inflation rate) to play British Legends in 1986 at 300 baud (plus huge land line phone fees). Not sarcasm - it was good times!
CompuServe was the first system I accessed when I got a modem, back in 1988. I dialed in at 1200 baud! The "CB simulator" (multi-user chat) was amazing for the time. I still remember my login... which was a bunch of random numbers separated by a comma.