45 years ago CompuServe connected the world before the World Wide Web

You paid by the minute to connect to CompuServe. I eventually found free software - shared in the CompuServe forums - that would dial up, collect messages from threads you had marked offline, then hang up your modem so you could read and reply at your leisure. This was my first exposure to shareware and a huge $$ saving. I contacted the developer and offered to pay him for this and he replied with, "No thanks. Just pay it forward." A couple of great lessons there.

There's a great TV show called "Halt And Catch Fire" that parallels the development of the tech industry, including what I think may be a nod to CompuServe mentioned in the article. It's only four seasons, it has some fantastic characters, excellent writing and is thoroughly enjoyable. It's fresh in my mind as I've only just rewatched it!

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2543312/

It used to be $6/hour (adjust for inflation, would now be about $18/hr). How do I know this? Because as a teenager, my dad let me use his account to play a multiplayer game called Island of Kesmai that was available through CompuServe, and I ended up putting hundreds of dollars on his credit card (and got in a lot of trouble). I worked as a page at my local public library in order to make enough money that I could pay him back, which itself led to a life-long love of books and reading. In the end, it was an important life lesson about moderation and personal responsibility.

Competitors to CompuServe were even more expensive. GEnie was $9/hr, and Byte Information Exchange (BIX) was $12, and I think at the start was even higher.

56 years ago tymshare connected the world before compuserve: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xIWMvtM02NA (oral history interview with my friend ann hardy, who wrote the operating system that ran tymshare for many years)

but the more interesting systems, to my mind, were usenet (born 01980) and fidonet (born 01983), because those were bottom-up, federated, peer-to-peer, grassroots systems

I hadn't thought about my CompuServe ID in many years and wasn't sure I remembered it, but Google-searching it revealed exactly one hit, with three mentions, the first being from January 1990, when I uploaded something: "EMACS keyboard mapping for Word Perfect 5.x. Not complete implementation; please pass along any enhancements you make. Freeware - no warranties, no royalties, enjoy."

http://annex.retroarchive.org/cdrom/640_studio_ii/INFO/IBMAP...

I spent a lot of time, and a lot of my parent's money, on Compuserve in the mid to the late eighties. For me and my best friend all our time was spent in two places. First, and absolute foremost, was Island of Kesmai. This game, and its graphical successor Legends of Kesmai, was the stuff dreams were made of for me as a kid. I still play variants of this game today. The second big draw of Compuserve was "You Guessed It!". This was a wacky multi-player trivia game show. My friend and I (both around 13) posed as young navy fighter pilots (top gun was a thing at this time). We wrote down all the questions and answers and frantically looked them up in the next games.

Compuserve was a huge part of my life at that point in time and I'm so glad it existed. I'm really glad we got away from hourly charges though.

The first $5 i ever made online was on Compuserve. I was walking home from school (i think 1994) and i found a used Boston Bruins ticket stub on the ground. I put it on the classifieds section and sold it. The buyer sent me a $5 bill in the mail.

For years, there was a Commodore 64 in COSI (the science museum) in Columbus, OH, connected to CompuServe. I was fascinated with that thing as a kid -- it was this window into a parallel world that I didn't really understand, but immediately understood in a sort of a Snow Crash way. Looking back, it's quaint, but such a harbinger of the future!

Compulserve was the first Walled garden.

I find it very interesting that we went from people mostly being on Compulserve, to AOL, to Yahoo and the concept of integrated portals, to a bunch of small websites strewn around the internet, and then back to a few social networks. All that happened organically, with no antitrust scrutiny or regulatory changes (beyond the commercialization of the internet) that I know of.

For me, the interesting takeaway from this article is that CompuServe started as a way for a big insurance company to monetize its idle computing capacity in the off hours.

I can still remember my CompuServe ID. I wonder why they had the curious pattern of xxxxx,xxx.

I miss Prodigy as well. Both excellent services in different ways.

I never had internet until I was 13, 2000, but CompuServ was always bundled with the Windows 95 companion disc with the game Hover!

While I could never connect to; however you could launch the browser GUI of buttons upon buttons which always left me excited.

The days where you were excited to get a 512mb memory stick for xmas or a new graphics card are long gone, it's sad now that technology nowadays are just a rehash.

There was always something special about AGP but maybe because i'm an adult rather than an edgy teen it's just not the same.

Surprised my boss at work today when I told him I wanted to work on the Solaris boxes.

Was it connecting the world 45 years ago, or was it just the US and perhaps Canada?

CompuServe was my first experience connecting to the online world. I remember the "free parts" and the "per minute charge" parts. Young me thought that if I stayed in the "per minute charge" areas less than 60 seconds, it was free. It was not, and dad raised his eyebrows at the bill I generated that month.

My CompuServe email address is still working!

For example Fractint was first developed on compuserve by the "stone soup group" https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg13117834-200-review-f...

Always find it weird that we rejected compuserve and AOL yet ended up all using Facebook....

Even though CompuServe was mostly gone by the time I moved here, its influence on the Columbus tech scene is still felt. You can draw lots of fuzzy cause-and-effect lines from Compuserve to the huge data center boom we are having right now.

Bought my first PC and ordered it with a brand new 'high speed' 1200 baud modem specifically so I could join CompuServe. It was my introduction to a new online world and I never regretted it.

My father used the CB simulator, but I was more inclined to use the chat features they added to the popular forums. I met my partner of more than 25 years in one of those. Good memories.

I used to make my own plane reservations using the CompuServe SABRE gateway. Normal people just couldn’t comprehend this.

(At that time, youngsters, the normal thing was to use a travel agent because the only other way to compare fares was to call each airline individually on the phone. The agent did this using their very expensive SABRE terminal.)

I have been trying to find an article I saw years ago that I have not been able to find since. It was about the folks who are trying to grab as much of the stored CompuServe data from peoples computers. It cached some of its stuff on the HDD and they are hoping that get as much of it as possible before it hits the rubbish tip or the drives die.

British Legends

I was obsessed with that MUD on CompuServe.

My father had a second phone line at home for work and I'd log in on that line.

Then the bill came in. Something ridiculous for at the time. Hundreds of dollars.

He walks in and says "do you use ... CompuServe?".

"Yes, I like this game that it has"

"Ok, sorry but you can't play that game anymore"

Oh well.

So later I went on to run a dual-node BBS and I could play TradeWars. Not quite the same. Still was cool.

Compuserve Magazine - only 19 issues at https://archive.org/details/compuservemagazine Seems very low number - I thought it was published for much longer .....?

I first got online with CompuServe, on a Vic 20 (22 column screen), in the early 80s. Still have quite positive memories of my time there, before I discovered the local BBS scene and all that came out of that.

CompuServe was the first system I called when I got a modem, back in 1987. I remember being amazed by their multi-user CB chat. Eventually, I found some local BBSes and stopped calling...

Is there a pack of AOL, CompuServe, Prodigy, Shaw etc CDs as coasters one can buy nowadays? There must be an Atari E.T.-scale landfill of them somewhere. Asking for a friend.

Memories of all those magazine articles with compuserve notes on where to further discuss the article contents, or get erratas.

75160,3375 was my ID. It was like magic, connecting over POTS through a burbling modem to a massively powerful mainframe.

70004,562, and 70006,621, and 72375,1271. Bonus points if you remember the types of the first two.

god explaining how much I racked up with CompuServe to my parents was hard as a kid... and then long distance later on when I found a free unix shell I could connect into.. ahhhh those were the days :)

76424,1020

Well, America mostly. It was available in Holland but nobody used it because it was too expensive and American-centric. And we didn't like big companies here back then (I wish we still didn't but Holland has become very neoliberal)

They used to stick free installer CDs in every computer magazine but the takeup was really low.

Fidonet was way more popular here. And in France minitel but it was a bit of an outlier in Europe.

I used it until my parents realized how expensive it could get.

Back to BBSs.

they can be credited with inventing e-commerce imho...

Damn CompuServe took so much of my income.

70365,1426