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.
Tom Krazit writes about the ever-expanding world of Internet search, including Google, Yahoo, online advertising, and portals, as well as the evolution of mobile computing. He has written about traditional PC companies, chip manufacturers, and mobile computers, spending the last three years covering Apple. E-mail Tom. 
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
RT
www.anonymize.tk
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_Link
Thank you Compuserve
Rob Wilmot co/founder Freeserve
100072,1213@compuserve.com
- by gggg sssss July 7, 2009 6:06 PM PDT
- Agreed. Oh for the days when you needed a jpeg viewer to see porn. The start of the internet as a business model.
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