Rescuing the Compuserve Collection | Hacker News Reader

Rescuing the Compuserve Collection

computerhistory.org

119 pointsgeephroh33 comments

Ooohh, neato. CompuServe was the way we first got online at my house, in 1992. I still have a copy of CompuServe Magazine from July 1992 [0], which describes their online shopping portal - quite impressive for the time! Funny bit on page 8: "My best advice for people thinking of entering game programming is --don't! If you're a good programmer, you'll take a pay cut of at least 25% to work in the games field".

[0] http://www.vtda.org/pubs/CompuServe_Magazine/CompuServe_Maga...

These days lots of people would love to work on games for a 25% pay cut, or even a much larger one. Surely this was the case back then too :)

I like how one of the reader letters is about "Classic Computing", already a thing in '92:

>I enjoyed reminiscing with your article "Gone But Not Forgotten" in the May issue (p.18). I don't use my old machines regularly, but I periodically pull out my Franklin Ace 100 (Apple II compatible) that sits in my basement. It was a powerful machine at the time with a huge 64K. At one time, I hooked up six 5 1/4" floppy drives to run a computer bulletin board from my home. Today I can fit all of that on a single 3 1/2" disk and still have room for my System 7 software. Thanks for the memories.

>Jeffrey I. Algazy >New Haven, Conn.

I wonder how Jeffrey I. Algazy feels about his 128G micro SD card.

Well, it can hold more than 88 888 floppies' worth of data!

In 2021 I was doing work for a client and noticed an email address of @cs.com. Two letter domains are pretty rare, and I wasn't familiar with this one.

To my great surprise, it was an original CompuServe email address. There are still some (original?) CompuServe users with intact email addresses.

My @compuserve.com and @csi.com addresses still work!

The Computer History Museum is such an amazing place and I try to visit it every single time I'm in the Valley and I always see something new.

This might be the first time there's just a tiny, tiny piece of my online history there. Bought my first computer with a modem just so I could join CompuServe in 1984. My phone bill in the tiny town I lived in at the time was the only thing limiting me from spending every waking moment on CompuServe.

Back when I first signed up for CompuServe (1979?) I ordered a bunch of manuals from them. They were for things like "FILGE" (File Generator and Editor) and their FORTRAN compiler. I am always battling my hoarding instincts so knowing that I would NEVER EVER have any need for them in the future, I tossed them about 15 years ago. I probably should have offered them to CHM or Jason Scott first.

I regret the tons of Dr Dobbs, Byte, and the like I dumpstered in the late 80s.

When I visited my late uncle some 30 years ago, he loved to gather everyone around the fireplace. (Not my thing, but you know, it's family.)

I saw a basket next to the fireplace with a 1936 Popular Mechanics in it!

I asked if I could have it, and if there were any more like it.

He said, "Sure, take it. It's the last one. I used the rest of them for kindling."

I kept all of my DDJ magazines until they released a CD-ROM collection sometime in the 90's. IIRC they are now all online somewhere anyway.

This page weirdly freezes my browser every 30 seconds or so. But reloading it you can then move to another section quickly. Strange. But very interesting how these treasure troves keep turning up, some day well into the future people will be ecstatic that someone took the time and made the effort to preserve all of this.

Same problem, I figure it's some promo hidden by adblock. If you turn on reader mode it's fine

Separately, is there any possibility this documentation will end up online at some point? The inner workings of early Compuserve sounds like several years worth of well spent winter nights

I did notice after some duration it popped up some dumb newsletter signup modal, so maybe that's causing some issues from an adblock... sadness. Why do otherwise-good sites use this dark pattern crap? :(

I sometimes amuse myself by signing up for their newsletter using the foulest, most obscene email address I can make up on short notice. CHM just got one of those "subscriptions" from an email address which I shall not utter here.

Those stupid popups are way, way beneath a classy organization like CHM. Sad to see.

Especially TCHM because I really had them at a higher level in my opinion and to spend 10 minutes trying to figure out what's wrong here only to find out afterwards that it was a stupid dark pattern drops them right out of the bracket of 'benign' into 'hostile'. This is the sort of thing that you break exactly once, and I really wonder which 2 bit marketeer thought that destroying the reputation of TCHM was ok.

Interesting facts from Wikipedia[0]:

CompuServe was founded in 1969 as Compu-Serv Network (as a subsidiary of an insurance company), a commercial time-sharing service with focus on business customers. It did so by renting time on its PDP-10 midrange computers during business hours.

In 1977, they changed their name to CompuServe Incorporated.

In 1979, it began offering a dial-up online information service to consumers. Radio Shack marketed the residential information service MicroNET, in which home users accessed the computers during evening hours, when the CompuServe computers were otherwise idle. Its success prompted CompuServe to drop the MicroNET name in favor of its own.

By the mid-1980s, CompuServe was one of the largest information and networking services companies, and it was the largest consumer information service.

CompuServe was the first online service to offer Internet connectivity, albeit with limited access, as early as 1989 when it connected its proprietary e-mail service to allow incoming and outgoing messages to be exchanged with Internet-based e-mail addresses.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CompuServe

The colleague who forwarded this to me also sent the blog article from Internet Archive's Jason Scott about the project[1]. Can't wait for those "operations manuals" to show up in the IA!

1. https://blog.archive.org/2022/03/29/mission-impossible-the-c...

I remember asking for "the internet" one Christmas growing up and we ended up getting Compuserve. I recall learning the various local numbers you could dial into and our email address which was a randomly assigned number @compuserve.com.

Glad they took the time to preserve some of this stuff!

I still have wonderful memories of paying $6.25 an hour ($16.18 an hour according to the official inflation rate) to play British Legends in 1986 at 300 baud (plus huge land line phone fees). Not sarcasm - it was good times!

I wonder if the Prodigy archives are floating around out there too?

More than archives it would be so amazing if it could be resurrected in some meaningful way. Maybe not totally interactive, but a read-only mode. Even old AOL. Would be great to relive that time.

That would actually be extremely interesting. I remember there are some peaks under the hood of the AOL and Prodigy backend and it was fascinating.

Both Prodigy and AOL I think have fallen into Yahoo's hands now. I wonder if there is a "Department of Ancient Online Services" space at Yahoo.

See the links on the reply above - I hope to have an accessible Prodigy service by late this Summer!

Wowowowowowow. That’s so amazing! Good luck with this project. I’m impressed with what you’ve done so far and can’t wait to see how it turns out!

If it could work with the Mac client I remember it looking a bit different. I’m guessing that was all in the client itself.

It should work with the very oldest Mac client, which I'll test just as soon as I find a 68k emulator with serial/modem emulation.

I’ve spent about 3 years looking for it as part of the Prodigy Preservation Project, and I have found a substantial amount of archived corporate email and documentation surrounding the development of the service. Not even close to the volume they have here, though!

If you’re interested to read about it, I have been working on reverse engineering Prodigy. More detail at the following two links…

https://www.vintagecomputing.com/index.php/archives/2921/rev...

https://www.vintagecomputing.com/index.php/archives/3064/rev...

CompuServe was the first system I accessed when I got a modem, back in 1988. I dialed in at 1200 baud! The "CB simulator" (multi-user chat) was amazing for the time. I still remember my login... which was a bunch of random numbers separated by a comma.

Before CompuServe, I dialed in to The Source[1 via Telenet[2] using a Novation Apple-CAT II[3] at 300 bps. The Source was eventually acquired by CompuServe.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Source_(online_service)

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telenet

3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novation_CAT#The_Apple-CAT_II

Heh, classic. I think I was using a C64, back in 82 for the same thing. Was just a young kid, I think my nick was DeMoN or some such.

I used to have to telnet in via 'datapac', a Bell Canada telnet gateway. Compuserve was $6/hr I think, and datapac $8. Crazy expensive. And boy did I get in trouble.

Why?

Well, compuserve sent a 'free 20 hours offer' or something like that. One catch. You needed a credit card. I thought, hey, I can just borrow my Dad's card, he'll never know, I'll sign up then cancel! Free 20 hours!

I ended up using 100 hours in 2 months... without even thinking about it. That is, until I heard my Dad scream WHAT!!!! from downstairs, in his den. I immediately knew, the time, the location, he was paying bills.

Fear. Confronted by my Dad "Do you know anything about this", I panicked of course. Told him, sure, I borrowed his card, but it was just to use the 20 free hours! 85 hours billed?! How could that be?!

My Dad was quite upset, called them, and luck saved my ass. Literally. Turns out that datapac was so terrible, I'd had to hang up and dial back in about 5 times a night. It just kept dropping.

But datapac kept the connection alive for hours sometimes. Poor disconnect handling. So Compuserve logs showed me often logged in 3 or 4 times simultaneously. They relented, thinking someone was hacking my account.

I remember, at the time, they had an encyclopedia online. And some text games. But I was most fascinated with the real time chat, from people all over the place!

The strange user ID format came from the TOPS-10 operating system running on PDP-10 machines

I'm truly thankful there are people out there rescuing this type of history.

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