TapCIS

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

~ the obit ~

A CompuServe bill is not a thing I ever paid. The instinct behind this program is familiar anyway, because dial-up in turkey was metered on the phone line, and every minute connected was a number somebody in the house was going to read off the bill later. The habit was to get on and get off fast. TapCIS is that habit compiled into a DOS program, running ten years before my first modem.

Howard Benner was a marketing executive in Wilmington, Delaware who got onto CompuServe in 1981 and got tired of paying to read. He wrote his answer in Borland's Turbo Pascal and called it TAPCIS, The Access Program for the CompuServe Information Service. It was shareware at seventy nine dollars, which in the middle 1980s was a real amount of money to ask for a utility, and people paid it because the arithmetic was obvious.

The way it worked was one keystroke. You composed everything offline, in your own time, with the modem silent. Then you hit the key and the program dialed CompuServe and pushed up the outgoing mail and forum posts. On the same connection it pulled down every new message in every forum you were subscribed to along with any files you had flagged, then dropped the line. Reading and replying happened afterward, off the clock.

PC Magazine called it archaic-looking in February 1993 and said in the same sentence that it remained a powerful way into the forums. The same review was rougher on WinCIM, CompuServe's own graphical client, pointing out that it saved no money at all and could easily take longer to get through your messages than doing it without any client.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the math ~

Early on CompuServe charged more than ten dollars an hour. By the early 1990s that had come down to $1.95, and in late 1997 the company finally moved to a flat $24.95 a month, years after AOL had forced the question. For most of TapCIS's life, every second of reading was billed, and international users were paying long-distance charges on top of it.

Under those conditions an offline reader is not a convenience, it is the difference between a hobby and an expense you cannot justify. A person reading three busy forums a day could spend an hour online doing it by hand. TapCIS turned that into two connections of a couple of minutes each. The program cost about the same as eight hours of connect time in the good years, so it paid for itself inside a month for anybody who used CompuServe seriously.

It was not alone in the category. NavCIS did the same job behind a Windows front end, and OzCIS with its successor OzWIN undercut both of them while AutoSIG went out free. The whole family existed for one reason, which CompuServe could have removed at any point by changing how it billed and chose not to for fifteen years.

~ what got buried with it ~

TapCIS had one thing the others lacked. It could send administrative commands, which meant a sysop could move and delete messages, run the file libraries and hand out or withdraw permissions without leaving the program. Dozens of CompuServe forum operators ran it for exactly that, so a good part of the moderation of the largest commercial online service in America was being done through a DOS shareware tool written by a marketing guy in Delaware.

The ending was quiet. CompuServe had already begun converting its forums to HTML in 1997, and in 2004 it dropped the HMI protocol that the offline readers drove. Nothing was announced against TapCIS specifically. Its transport simply stopped answering. In May 2005 CompuServe closed the TapCIS and OzCIS support forums on the service, which retired the place where its users had talked to each other for two decades.

The domain outlived the program by more than a decade. The users kept tapcis.com up themselves with a farewell page and a tribute to Benner on it, and it stayed that way into the late 2010s before the address turned over to somebody selling ads. That is the ordinary shape of this kind of death. A company changes a protocol, the program goes dark, and the people who used it hold the page open until they cannot.

@}-->--

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

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »