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45 years ago CompuServe connected the world before the World Wide Web
- mattw2121 2y agoI spent a lot of time, and a lot of my parent's money, on Compuserve in the mid to the late eighties. For me and my best friend all our time was spent in two places. First, and absolute foremost, was Island of Kesmai. This game, and its graphical successor Legends of Kesmai, was the stuff dreams were made of for me as a kid. I still play variants of this game today. The second big draw of Compuserve was "You Guessed It!". This was a wacky multi-player trivia game show. My friend and I (both around 13) posed as young navy fighter pilots (top gun was a thing at this time). We wrote down all the questions and answers and frantically looked them up in the next games. Compuserve was a huge part of my life at that point in time and I'm so glad it existed. I'm really glad we got away from hourly charges though.
- foobarian 2y agoAny time I get the urge to complain about my kids Roblox usage I remember this ^ and bite my tongue :-)
- SoftTalker 2y ago> The second big draw of Compuserve was "You Guessed It!" LOL until I read the next sentence I thought this was a reference to porn.
- DavidAdams 2y agoFor me, the interesting takeaway from this article is that CompuServe started as a way for a big insurance company to monetize its idle computing capacity in the off hours.
- kragen 2y ago56 years ago tymshare connected the world before compuserve: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xIWMvtM02NA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xIWMvtM02NA (oral history interview with my friend ann hardy, who wrote the operating system that ran tymshare for many years) but the more interesting systems, to my mind, were usenet (born 01980) and fidonet (born 01983), because those were bottom-up, federated, peer-to-peer, grassroots systems
- sillywalk 2y agoThanks for the link. For those who prefer to read, there is a transcript[0]. [0] https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/2017/06/102717169-05-01-acc.pdf https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/20...
- kragen 2y agothank you! i should have posted that
- Animats 2y agoOh, Norm Hardy's wife. Tymnet was interesting. It was a virtual circuit-switched system for keyboard terminals. There was a central control machine, and a bunch of dumb switching nodes. The central control machine (an SDS-945 originally) would set up a route and send out "route channel 24 to channel 57" commands to each node. The nodes just forwarded packets per the set route. If the control machine went down, all routes stayed working, but new ones could not be set up. There was a second control machine that could take over if needed. Nodes had a queue for each virtual circuit, and flow control. It wasn't end to end raw packets. In the days of expensive long haul bandwidth, this was essential. Pure datagram networks only work because our long-haul connections today have huge bandwidth. Datagram networks can't really handle congestion in the middle of the network. Virtual circuit networks can. Which is why, in the early 1970s, it looked like virtual circuit networks were the future. Even the original ARPANET had node to node flow control. The Tymnet "backbone" was originally only 2400 to 4800 baud, so they had major lag problems. To help with this, they used local echo when possible, so local typing didn't lag. You'd type in a line, and at the end of the line, the whole line went across the network. The connection could shift from local to remote echo seamlessly. (Telnet, for the Internet, can do local echo, too, but Berkeley didn't put that in their BSD Telnet, so it fell out of use as network bandwidth increased. That worked in pre-BSD UNET, and echo would be local until you used some program, such as "vi", which enabled "raw mode".) Here's a summary of the Tymnet technology.[1] [1] http://cap-lore.com/Tymnet/TOCN.html http://cap-lore.com/Tymnet/TOCN.html
- stonethrowaway 2y agoIs there a pack of AOL, CompuServe, Prodigy, Shaw etc CDs as coasters one can buy nowadays? There must be an Atari E.T.-scale landfill of them somewhere. Asking for a friend.
- NegativeLatency 2y agoI liked when they’d come on floppies. You could rewrite it after taping the hole and get a free disk.
- op00to 2y agoWhen I was a kid, I called up AOL and asked them for 1,000 floppy kits. For Reasons. They never questioned me, and they were fairly reliable and I never really had to buy disks again.
- acheron 2y agoSimilar story here.. At one point Intuit would send you a demo of Quickbooks on 7 or so floppies, so a friend called up and requested X demos and we split up the resulting disks. I was still saving college papers and projects on old Quickbooks disks many years later.
- jll29 2y agoFor 5 1/4" disks, you could double capacity by using a punch to cut a whole into one border and then use the back side - et viola, from 140 kB to 2x 140 kB. But you had better not punch into the actual magnetic floppy disk inside its plastic enclosure, or you may have killed the whole thing.
- fecal_henge 2y agoI remember (AOL I think) you could request trial CDs delivered to any address. No checks were made on either the name of the recipient or about the quantity of disks ordered. I'm guessing I was about 14.
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- illwrks 2y agoThere's a great TV show called "Halt And Catch Fire" that parallels the development of the tech industry, including what I think may be a nod to CompuServe mentioned in the article. It's only four seasons, it has some fantastic characters, excellent writing and is thoroughly enjoyable. It's fresh in my mind as I've only just rewatched it! https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2543312/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2543312/
- Clubber 2y agoI've seen it and it's good. Thanks for reminding me, I'll watch it again.
- EvanAnderson 2y agoI'd say "Mutiny" is a nod to Habitat, too. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habitat_(video_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habitat_(video_game)
- EarlKing 2y agoKinda. It's sort of a mix of Habitat and PlayNET/QuantumLink... more the latter than the former.
- EvanAnderson 2y agoTotally forgot about QuantumLink but I agree completely. The whole being tied to/hamstrung by the C64 platform fits.
- jll29 2y agoI fully second that, this is a must-see for any geek, much more so than e.g. War Games. "Halt and Catch Fire" (HCF) often is jargon that refers to documented or undocumented opcodes or code sequences that leads the CPU to crash: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halt_and_Catch_Fire_(computing) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halt_and_Catch_Fire_(computing... With a hat tip to all Commodore C64/MOS650 enthusiasts, I shall end this post with my favourite HCF sequence: 4C 10 7E. _Happy watching!_
- albeebe1 2y agoThe first $5 i ever made online was on Compuserve. I was walking home from school (i think 1994) and i found a used Boston Bruins ticket stub on the ground. I put it on the classifieds section and sold it. The buyer sent me a $5 bill in the mail.
- meow_catrix 2y agoCheap alibi
- op00to 2y agoI can still remember my CompuServe ID. I wonder why they had the curious pattern of xxxxx,xxx. I miss Prodigy as well. Both excellent services in different ways.
- mattw2121 2y agoAs far as I know, the ID was reflective of the user ID format for the PDP-10's it ran on.
- JonAtkinson 2y agoMy Compuserve username is permanently burned into my brain: 100131,756. And my password was the wonderfully evocative "spite:ambush".
- howard941 2y agoUsername, yes, 75006,702. But not the password. It was a decent password though. I didn't pick it.
- TheOtherHobbes 2y agoCompuserve ran on DEC PDP-10s. The login ID format on TOPS-10 was programmer#,project# (octal).
- op00to 2y agoVery cool! Thank you.
- kmoser 2y agoStill have this info kicking around on my computer: COMPUSERVE: Modem: (800) FINDCIS [host name = "phone"] Phone: (800) 848-8990 [tech support] (800) 848-8199 Sales (toll-free) 8am-10pm M-F (617) 457-0802 Sales (direct) BBS: (212) 608-6021 [local NYC access number]
- rmason 2y agoBought my first PC and ordered it with a brand new 'high speed' 1200 baud modem specifically so I could join CompuServe. It was my introduction to a new online world and I never regretted it.
- timr 2y agoFor years, there was a Commodore 64 in COSI (the science museum) in Columbus, OH, connected to CompuServe. I was fascinated with that thing as a kid -- it was this window into a parallel world that I didn't really understand, but immediately understood in a sort of a Snow Crash way. Looking back, it's quaint, but such a harbinger of the future!
- supportengineer 2y agoI feel like that was better than what we have now.
- icedchai 2y agoCompuServe was the first system I called when I got a modem, back in 1987. I remember being amazed by their multi-user CB chat. Eventually, I found some local BBSes and stopped calling...
- sandymcmurray 2y agoYou paid by the minute to connect to CompuServe. I eventually found free software - shared in the CompuServe forums - that would dial up, collect messages from threads you had marked offline, then hang up your modem so you could read and reply at your leisure. This was my first exposure to shareware and a huge $$ saving. I contacted the developer and offered to pay him for this and he replied with, "No thanks. Just pay it forward." A couple of great lessons there.
- SpaceNoodled 2y agoDo you recall who that was? Name & fame?
- rqtwteye 2y agoI think I had a software called wigwam.
- cdchn 2y agoA lot of BBSes especially those that had FidoNet or similar distributed message boards let you download all the message boards as QWK packets and software like Blue Link and others. It was a great feature. Reading/replying to boards offline was a much nicer experience, in addition to the cost savings. EDIT: and as another bit of random trivia the guy who invented QWK format died of a heart attack after being swatted by an 18 year old who was after his @Tennessee twitter username.
- cbozeman 2y ago> DIT: and as another bit of random trivia the guy who invented QWK format died of a heart attack after being swatted by an 18 year old who was after his @Tennessee twitter username. That username should be permanently retired and the 18 year old prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law for crimes which the law would or could hold him or her accountable.
- cdchn 2y ago
- genericacct 2y agothey can be credited with inventing e-commerce imho...
- jasonjayr 2y agoIt is mindblowing just how much Prodigy ( Sears, IBM, CBS) fumbled before Amazon (and others) climbed it's way to the ecommerce throne: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prodigy_(online_service) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prodigy_(online_service) Sears had the logistics, the mail-order catalog, the retail partnerships, IBM had the tech stack, and they put this all together in the 80s.
- mopenstein 2y agoI thought about Sears and Montgomery Wards catalog business and how they shuttered it in favor of storefronts in malls and shopping centers. Had they held out another decade or so, they'd have been in the perfect position to dominate online commerce.
- kragen 2y agothat was probably tymshare too
- fractallyte 2y agoMy CompuServe email address is still working!
- miki123211 2y agoCompulserve was the first Walled garden. I find it very interesting that we went from people mostly being on Compulserve, to AOL, to Yahoo and the concept of integrated portals, to a bunch of small websites strewn around the internet, and then back to a few social networks. All that happened organically, with no antitrust scrutiny or regulatory changes (beyond the commercialization of the internet) that I know of.
- hollerith 2y agoMy guess is that a big part of why the social networks took over as much as they have is that the average non-technical person did not like the thousands of small web sites: every web site is a snowflake, and if you make web sites for a living, then the differences between them tend to be interesting, but to the average non-technical person, the differences tend to be confusing or at least a little distracting or annoying, is my guess.
- EarlKing 2y agoIt's a combination of things really. Part of it was not being able to discover new content (Google notwithstanding, since Google is good for finding things when you know what you want, while social media feeds you things you didn't even know you wanted). The other part was not being able to talk back or otherwise iterate on what people had published in a way that others could see it easily. Finally, it comes down to money... people wanted to make money and social media (and yes, I count Youtube among social media in its earliest incarnation) made it a lot easier to do that. Despite this, people are departing existing aggregators and social media for SIGs to get around the spam, the screeching, and general annoyance... so we're probably going to see a more balanced network over the next decade... because making money isn't everything.
- hollerith 2y agoGood point about making money. But we're using a service that lets people discover stuff on thousands of small sites in the way you describe. (Before this site existed, I used Slashdot to discover stuff, and before that Usenet newsgroups.)
- jalk 2y agoWas it connecting the world 45 years ago, or was it just the US and perhaps Canada?
- dctoedt 2y agoI hadn't thought about my CompuServe ID in many years and wasn't sure I remembered it, but Google-searching it revealed exactly one hit, with three mentions, the first being from January 1990, when I uploaded something: "EMACS keyboard mapping for Word Perfect 5.x. Not complete implementation; please pass along any enhancements you make. Freeware - no warranties, no royalties, enjoy." http://annex.retroarchive.org/cdrom/640_studio_ii/INFO/IBMAPCAT/IBMAPCAT.TXT http://annex.retroarchive.org/cdrom/640_studio_ii/INFO/IBMAP...
- jghn 2y agoMy Compuserve ID & ICQ ID are burned into my brain. Yet I can barely remember my childhood phone number!
- harrisonpage 2y ago76424,1020
- bongothrowaway 2y agoMy father used the CB simulator, but I was more inclined to use the chat features they added to the popular forums. I met my partner of more than 25 years in one of those. Good memories.
- mannyv 2y ago70365,1426
- ncrtower 2y ago75160,3375 was my ID. It was like magic, connecting over POTS through a burbling modem to a massively powerful mainframe.
- whyenot 2y agoIt used to be $6/hour (adjust for inflation, would now be about $18/hr). How do I know this? Because as a teenager, my dad let me use his account to play a multiplayer game called Island of Kesmai that was available through CompuServe, and I ended up putting hundreds of dollars on his credit card (and got in a lot of trouble). I worked as a page at my local public library in order to make enough money that I could pay him back, which itself led to a life-long love of books and reading. In the end, it was an important life lesson about moderation and personal responsibility. Competitors to CompuServe were even more expensive. GEnie was $9/hr, and Byte Information Exchange (BIX) was $12, and I think at the start was even higher.
- SapporoChris 2y agoIf I recall correctly it was $6/hour during their off times. Which was after hours on weekdays, weekends and holidays. During the work day I think it was $30 dollars.
- ryanstewart 2y agoThanks for sharing this story. Similar situation, but I think Compuserve had moved to monthly billing at that point, so this was about dial-up access. We lived in Wyoming and there wasn't a local Compuserve number for us to dial into, so we had to use a 1-800 number that charged by the time you used it. The first month we had access, I would sneak downstairs most nights and dial in to play around. I don't remember what I had to do to work off the bill, but my parents were not happy. It helped start me on a path to a tech career, though.
- jghn 2y ago
- asdefghyk 2y agoCompuserve Magazine - only 19 issues at https://archive.org/details/compuservemagazine https://archive.org/details/compuservemagazine Seems very low number - I thought it was published for much longer .....?
- neallindsay 2y agoEven though CompuServe was mostly gone by the time I moved here, its influence on the Columbus tech scene is still felt. You can draw lots of fuzzy cause-and-effect lines from Compuserve to the huge data center boom we are having right now.
- wkat4242 2y agoWell, America mostly. It was available in Holland but nobody used it because it was too expensive and American-centric. And we didn't like big companies here back then (I wish we still didn't but Holland has become very neoliberal) They used to stick free installer CDs in every computer magazine but the takeup was really low. Fidonet was way more popular here. And in France minitel but it was a bit of an outlier in Europe.
- jimmar 2y agoCompuServe was my first experience connecting to the online world. I remember the "free parts" and the "per minute charge" parts. Young me thought that if I stayed in the "per minute charge" areas less than 60 seconds, it was free. It was not, and dad raised his eyebrows at the bill I generated that month.
- EMM_386 2y agoBritish Legends I was obsessed with that MUD on CompuServe. My father had a second phone line at home for work and I'd log in on that line. Then the bill came in. Something ridiculous for at the time. Hundreds of dollars. He walks in and says "do you use ... CompuServe?". "Yes, I like this game that it has" "Ok, sorry but you can't play that game anymore" Oh well. So later I went on to run a dual-node BBS and I could play TradeWars. Not quite the same. Still was cool.
- homarp 2y agoFor example Fractint was first developed on compuserve by the "stone soup group" https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg13117834-200-review-fractint-brought-to-book/ https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg13117834-200-review-f...
- dividuum 2y agoAfter recently reading about Fracint somewhere and now seeing this, it very likely confirms that this was the program my dad downloaded from CompuServe and used to render images over night on our 286. Thanks for the link :)
- ergonaught 2y agoI first got online with CompuServe, on a Vic 20 (22 column screen), in the early 80s. Still have quite positive memories of my time there, before I discovered the local BBS scene and all that came out of that.
- gandalfian 2y agoAlways find it weird that we rejected compuserve and AOL yet ended up all using Facebook....
- threeio 2y agogod explaining how much I racked up with CompuServe to my parents was hard as a kid... and then long distance later on when I found a free unix shell I could connect into.. ahhhh those were the days :)
- Jemm 2y agoDamn CompuServe took so much of my income.
- wrs 2y agoI used to make my own plane reservations using the CompuServe SABRE gateway. Normal people just couldn’t comprehend this. (At that time, youngsters, the normal thing was to use a travel agent because the only other way to compare fares was to call each airline individually on the phone. The agent did this using their very expensive SABRE terminal.)
- doublerabbit 2y agoI never had internet until I was 13, 2000, but CompuServ was always bundled with the Windows 95 companion disc with the game Hover! While I could never connect to; however you could launch the browser GUI of buttons upon buttons which always left me excited. The days where you were excited to get a 512mb memory stick for xmas or a new graphics card are long gone, it's sad now that technology nowadays are just a rehash. There was always something special about AGP but maybe because i'm an adult rather than an edgy teen it's just not the same. Surprised my boss at work today when I told him I wanted to work on the Solaris boxes.
- flynumber 2y agoand the https://www.compuserve.com/ https://www.compuserve.com/ site is still up, stuck in the 90's.
- DaoVeles 2y agoI have been trying to find an article I saw years ago that I have not been able to find since. It was about the folks who are trying to grab as much of the stored CompuServe data from peoples computers. It cached some of its stuff on the HDD and they are hoping that get as much of it as possible before it hits the rubbish tip or the drives die.
- endemic 2y agoMaybe https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/07/where-online-services-go-when-they-die/374099/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/07/where...? Though this article is about Prodigy.
- daemonhorn 2y ago70004,562, and 70006,621, and 72375,1271. Bonus points if you remember the types of the first two.
- HumblyTossed 2y agoI used it until my parents realized how expensive it could get. Back to BBSs.
- pjmlp 2y agoMemories of all those magazine articles with compuserve notes on where to further discuss the article contents, or get erratas.