CompuServe Classic laid to rest

CompuServe Classic, the initial on-ramp to the information superhighway for a generation of Americans, has died. It was 30 years old.

AOL, the current owner of CompuServe, confirmed the passing of CompuServe Classic in a message sent to subscribers last week. The company had announced plans to shut down the service in April, urging customers still dependent on cheap dial-up services to move to a surviving version, CompuServe 2000.

Back in the early days of the PC, CompuServe was the Google of its day. Introduced in 1979, it was the premier service for a small number of geeks in the 1980s looking to share files and conversation as well as corporate customers looking for ways to connect their offices. And by the early 1990s, before the dawn of the World Wide Web and browsers, CompuServe's forums were the place to be on the Internet.

Other Internet service providers, such as America Online and Prodigy, chipped away at CompuServe's lead with lower-priced services. AOL eventually purchased CompuServe in a complicated deal with Worldcom, which took over CompuServe's networking assets. Development of the service stagnated compared to AOL's primary service, and both brands fell prone to the gradual movement of Internet subscribers to much faster broadband connections provided by cable or telephone companies.

CompuServe is survived by thousands of 9 and 10-digit usernames assigned to e-mail subscribers, an astonishing number of whom can still remember their numbers to this day and who left their remembrances on a CompuServe discussion forum. Only 7 percent of U.S. residents still use a dial-up service to access the Internet, according to a recent survey by the Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project.

[Orion Blastar]

CompuServe was good for Computer Tech Support forums. I remember such commands as "Go Compaq" to go to the Compaq Tech Support forums and file downloads. This was before the Internet using Modems.

It also had chat areas to chat with people from different parts of the country and then later different parts of the world. Plus email, that was only available in the modem terminal screen.

Later on they added a GUI interface to it for Macs and Windows PCs, and then Internet access later.

[darthgerber]

Ahh, the good olde days of Compuserve running on an 80x25 character monitor in the early 80's. I remember my 300-baud acoustic coupler modem well. The end of an era. /sniff Oh well, time marches on...

[diver-1]

RIP Remember you well, many hours with an acoustic coupler at 300 baud with a big jump to 1200 baud thanks to Hayes. The "good" old days.

[Maarek Stele]

ding dong the witch is dead....

I know many AOL users and it confused 90% of the them about the difference between the internet and the World Wide Web with that "Internet" button.

[badasscat]

This is about CompuServe, not AOL.

[darkdennis]

Compuserve: Good. AOL: Bad

[ChukchansiDan]

CB Simulator, anyone?

[JCPayne]

Wow.... there's a flash from the past. The Internet / email addresses that were nothing by numbers and commas... Anyone remember those days? Internet downloads took like 3 days to a week to complete. And you literally cursed if someone in the house lifted the telephone receiver and it caused the Internet connection to drop in the middle of downloading... :-D Or how about downloading using X-Link, Y-Link, and Z-Link....

Speaking of CompUserve just the other day something caused me to check and see if http://www.world.std.com/ was still around... Surprise, surprise they sure are!

[JoeF2]

Coincidentally, I canceled my CompuServe account on the day AOL bought them...
At that time, I was only getting spam there, anyway. So, it had outlived its usefulness at that time already.
You could eventually go through their service to the Net, similar to what AOL did, but they stayed in their little niche for too long and never really warmed up to the Internet.

[scottthesculptor]

Back then we always wondered why people would pay the outrages compuserv fees when you could get a SLIP account and just telnet in to read USENET.
Or just gopher around for info.

Yup, been through it all.
The dumbing down of the internet with thw World Wide Web.
The commercial sellout and the beginning of the end of the net of intellectuals.
The "Green Card" Spam.
The massive IQ drop accompanying the arrival of AOL.
The clogging of the 'net with porn, warez, and illegally traded media supported wholly by advertising . . .

though it's now much more diverse - use to be able to find any computer science, mathematics, physics info you wanted - but absolutely nothing on flonking vampires.

[MagiMamoru]

Being a chat monitor on INDEX (at one time, one of the southeast largest bbs chat board, long gone) getting AOL rejects.

[Seaspray0]

I didn't go the compuserve route. I ended up doing the BBS route. At one point, I even ran a BBS with an Atari ST and a hayes 1200 baud modem. Yep, those were the days of the modem.

[monoparadox]

I'd love to have half the money back I spent on phone bills and compuserve services in the 80's.

[cchanote]

I missed to BBS model dial up, it was fun back then sending the firmware corrupter to crash the modem firmware.

[fafafooey]

I started my software business back in the early 90's on Compuserve using their SWREG service. People could buy my software and get billed on their Compuserve account. Every month they would send a check for what you sold, minus a commission.

Towards the end, they started having problems accounting for the orders properly, but for a while it was a great way for a small software author to make some money without a credit card merchant account.

[SteadyFwd]

Though I never knew you, I knew of you. RIP CompuServe.

[darkdennis]

Compuserve and my Osborne Executive. C/PM and BBs. These things made me so happy then. I

[aawindoze2]

Wow, what a bummer. I remember Compuserve well. Rest in Peace ole friend, RIP!

RT
www.anonymize.tk

[queticomn]

And of course there was good old q`link or quantum link which was proprietary to the c-64,128 until it was reversed engineered. AOL owes its roots to qLink and at the same time AOL ruined qLink when they bought the company.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_Link

[RobWilmot]

I have fond memories of using this service to make the first e-mail transaction for my first company in 1995. I used Compuserve to connect our internal Novell message handling service to the outside world. This is what sparked my passion for the Internet.

Thank you Compuserve

Rob Wilmot co/founder Freeserve

[pharaoh_boi]

Wow! Compuserve... that's a blast from the past alright. I remember using the ole 300 baud modem... I didn't even realise that Compuserve was still going until I read this article... rest in peace...you certainly were a pioneer, who served all of us well in the early days.

[Mike Edholm]

RIP, Compuserve

100072,[e-mail]

[gggg sssss]

Agreed. Oh for the days when you needed a jpeg viewer to see porn. The start of the internet as a business model.