2 ms·

Did any of the computing magazines of the era feature a free DEC-20 on the cover? Just wondering!

• VLM 11y ago
  Sort of. About 30+ years ago the world was absolutely awash in Compuserve free/demo accounts, included in software boxes and probably magazines. Wish I could find an old 80micro magazine cover on archive.org to document this aspect of the past. People who lived thru it could verify that free compuserve accounts were the AOL floppy/CD of an older era. Compuserve in say 1983 was a DEC service bureau moonlighting at night as a very expensive per hour super BBS system. Like $5/hr at 300 baud. And yes it was a network of PDP-10s as per the linked article (although I seem to remember KI processors not KL's)
  • salgernon 11y ago
    75460,1375 Why did you make me remember that! We used compuserve to support our (retail, boxed Mac) software. Then we had to expand to AOL to cover "the outsiders". And then... Eternal September. (Some day, "like us on Facebook" will be as obsolete as "AOL keyword BLAH", which you can still see at the ending credits of movies from the 90s. I don't recall a similar push for compuserve.)