CompuServe OurWorld

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

~ the last words ~

In 1996 CompuServe let its members claim an alias for their email address and use the same name for a personal web page. The pages lived at ourworld.compuserve.com with a directory each, and CompuServe shipped a tool called Home Page Wizard so you did not have to touch the HTML. The oldest copy of the front door in the Wayback Machine is from 20 October 1996.

This was free hosting with a condition attached. GeoCities and Angelfire asked nothing of you beyond an account. OurWorld required a CompuServe subscription, billed monthly, which in 1996 meant a Western credit card and a local dial-up number that existed. I came online in Turkey two years later on a 33.6k modem through a Turkish ISP, and CompuServe was simply not something you could reach from there. The free hosts were. That difference is most of why one of these is a cultural memory and the other is a hostname.

CompuServe's independence ended in 1998. WorldCom bought the company and sold the consumer service to AOL, so from then on OurWorld was an AOL property running under an older brand. It kept going anyway, for another eleven years.

~ the record ~

~ the notice ~

On 15 April 2009 AOL told CompuServe Classic members that the service would stop operating as an internet provider on 30 June. The notice spelled out what was going with it. The CompuServe Classic OurWorld homepage service at ourworld.compuserve.com would also close on 30 June, and after that date members could no longer access or retrieve anything stored there. They were told to save a copy to a new location first.

Email was the one piece that survived. AOL said it was building a new system so members could keep using their existing CompuServe addresses at no charge, as long as they brought their own internet connection.

~ the date everyone gets wrong ~

Archive Team's register files CompuServe OurWorld under 31 October 2008 and says it slipped into history that day. That is the day [[aol-hometown]] was deleted, and AOL Hometown had absorbed member sites from services AOL bought, CompuServe among them. The example URL the register cites is on ourworld.cs.com, the cs.com side of the house, and the Wayback Machine shows that page's content changing in the first week of November 2008, immediately after Hometown went.

The compuserve.com side did not change then. It served the same page, identical by digest, through 27 March 2009, changed once on 7 July 2009, and was answering 404 by 20 September. That is the shape of a service that closed on 30 June, which is what CompuServe's own notice to its members said it would do.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »