CompuServe

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

~ the obit ~

CompuServe started in 1969 as a time-sharing computer service. People with a terminal and a modem would dial in to a central mainframe and use it to run programs they could not afford to own. It was not really a consumer product yet. It was a thing for engineers and small businesses.

In 1979 they opened up a consumer service. By the 1980s they had message boards, file libraries, email, news, and stock quotes. By the early 1990s they had about 3 million users in the US. CompuServe was the default if you were technically inclined and wanted to be online before there was a public internet.

I never used CompuServe. By the time i got online in turkey in 1997 it was not relevant here. Turkey skipped that whole walled-garden phase and went straight to dial-up isps and the open web. So this one is mostly knowledge i have from old articles, old usenet posts, and from US tech writers reminiscing about how they first got online.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the user IDs ~

The most distinctive thing about CompuServe was the user ID format. Your username was a string that looked like 71234,5678 or 73140,3514. With the comma. You had to remember it as two numbers, separated by a comma. There was no choice in this. The system assigned it to you when you signed up.

This format was a leftover from the original mainframe time-sharing days. It had nothing to do with making it human friendly. People wrote their CompuServe IDs on business cards. People put them in magazine articles. There was a small subculture of people who could just remember dozens of these numeric IDs the way other people remember phone numbers.

When the open internet showed up and email addresses were things like alice@hostname.edu, the CompuServe format started to look ridiculous. They patched this in 1996 by letting users have actual names like alice.smith@compuserve.com. By then the damage was done. The numeric IDs were what people associated CompuServe with.

~ what it actually had ~

CompuServe was mostly text. You logged in through a terminal program. You typed commands. You navigated menus. There were thousands of message boards, called forums, organized by topic. There was a forum for almost every hobby. Astronomy. Photography. Cooking. Tax law. Specific computer manufacturers. The forums were curated and many were moderated by experts. The signal-to-noise ratio was high in a way that the open web has never managed since.

There were also file libraries. You could download software, mostly shareware, by issuing commands. Downloads were billed per minute of connect time, which made them expensive. People would prepare a list of files to download in advance, then connect, run a quick batch download, and disconnect to save money.

The other useful thing was email. CompuServe email worked across to other services and to internet email addresses by the early 1990s. For a few years, CompuServe was actually one of the main ways professional people in the US sent business email.

~ how it died ~

The open web killed CompuServe slowly. Once people could get to any website over a regular dial-up account, the curated forums of CompuServe started to feel limited. Why pay for a closed garden when there were a million sites outside?

AOL bought CompuServe in 1998. The deal was complicated. AOL wanted CompuServe's enterprise customers and the brand. WorldCom got the network infrastructure. The actual consumer service kept running under AOL ownership but was clearly being managed for decline rather than growth. Investments stopped. New users went to AOL instead.

The CompuServe Classic service was officially shut down on 30 june 2009. By that point it had maybe 100,000 users left, almost all of them long-time customers who had been on it since the 1980s and never moved. The brand kept limping along as an internet provider, then as an email service, but the actual culture of CompuServe had been gone for a decade by then.

~ what we lost ~

The forum quality. CompuServe forums were small, curated, and focused. Real experts hung out there. You could ask a question about your specific tax situation or your specific camera lens and a person who actually knew the answer would write you a paragraph. The open web has more reach but less of this kind of focus. Reddit is the closest thing now, and reddit is much noisier.

The other thing we lost is the idea of paying a subscription for a curated online service. CompuServe charged real money. People paid it. The product was good. We have mostly accepted advertising as the way to fund online things now, which has trade-offs that CompuServe users in 1990 did not have to deal with.