CompuServe CB Simulator

» see compuserve.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

cb simulator predates me by four years. when sandy trevor wrote it at compuserve in early 1980 i was minus four, the household landline was rotary, and the idea that ankara would one day have residential dial-up was thirteen years off. this is one of those graves where the product was already history before i had a chance to type a word at it. the museum-piece feeling is honest, i never logged a single hour.

the launch was 21 february 1980. trevor built it on the cb radio metaphor because that was the only model for "people talking to strangers in channels" the average american adult understood that year. citizens-band radio had peaked the year before in actual road use and compuserve borrowed the whole vocabulary, channels and tune and squelch and handles. you typed a slash command, you joined a numbered channel, you read text scrolling up the screen and you sent a line by pressing return. the interface was simple enough that it described itself.

the product grew faster than anyone at the company expected. within a few years cb was the largest single product on compuserve by usage hours, despite essentially no marketing spend. by the late 80s the original forty channels were not enough and the company added bands, including the famous adult band that hosted the chat compuserve did not want on the public channels. the first online wedding happened on it in may 1991, the mick jagger multimedia conference came through in december 1995. it kept running on the classic service until aol pulled the plug on the whole thing in july 2009.

~ the record ~

~ how it landed ~

the technical context is easy to forget. in 1980 a commercial dial-up account cost roughly five dollars an hour off-peak. you connected over a 300 baud modem and the text came across at a speed slower than reading aloud. cb simulator made a virtue of that. the chat scrolled, you watched the channel for a few minutes to learn the rhythm before you spoke, you tuned away when the conversation drifted. the slow line was part of the social shape, not a bug.

the handles were the persistent identity. compuserve accounts had numeric ids like 71234,567 and cb users added a chat handle on top, sometimes ironic, sometimes a real name, sometimes a single word that meant something only inside the channel. the early online identity literature that became the howard rheingold era of writing has cb running through the middle of it. the "strange case of the electronic lover" ethnographic case study came out of behavior people observed on cb in the mid 80s.

~ the long middle ~

through the late 80s and most of the 90s cb was the durable hangout product on compuserve. forums had the readership but cb had the regulars, the channels people checked into every evening, the relationships that crossed from text into phone calls and visits and weddings. the may 1991 wedding between two regulars on the network is the one the trade press wrote about, two people who had never met in physical space exchanging vows over typed lines in front of a guestlist of channel members.

the chat got more crowded when the web arrived. by 1995 the audience for "strangers in a text channel" was splitting between the existing dial-up services and the new irc networks plus aol chat plus eventually web chat in the browser. compuserve kept cb running through every reorganization, including the move to compuserve interactive in 1997 and the aol acquisition in 1998. the regulars who had been there since the mid-80s mostly stayed because the channel they checked into was where the people were, not because the technology was the best on offer.

~ the day it died ~

aol announced the shutdown of compuserve classic on 8 april 2009 and the actual service ended 1 july 2009. cb simulator went out with it. the modern compuserve.com that the brand still pointed at was a webmail and news portal by then, no chat. the original product, the perl-on-flat-file feel of it, the numbered channel commands, the regulars who had been there for two decades, all of that came offline in the same shutdown wave that took the rest of the dial-up service.

the cultural inheritance is in places people do not always trace back. the channel metaphor that irc borrowed in 1988, the handle culture that became aol screen names, the regulars-make-a-place idea that runs through every long-lived chat community since, all of these grew out of what trevor put live in february 1980. cb did not invent text chat in the lab sense but it was the first time the public could buy access to one for an hourly rate, and that was the line that opened the door.

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