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About CompuServe

compuserve.com

15 pointsenvy214 comments

Prodigy and CompuServe were such weird and unique walled gardens early on. Totally different visions of “the internet” and sadly all that stuff is lost forever.

Later CompuServe became a reskinned AOL (seriously) and Prodigy devolved into a generic dialup service.

I only ever used AOL to SLIP (Serial Line Internet Protocol) onto the net. You had to do some arcane incantations to get it to work, but their connection was solid.

CompuServe of course used the XXXXX,XXXX octal usernames, and you could append @compuserve.com for a valid email address, but later we could choose a vanity email (first come, first served), e.g., something@compuserve.com. Then later they offered @csi.com addresses. POP3 access to your CS mailbox was eventually an option, as well.

For a long time (maybe still?) you could access a terminal version of the CS interface over telnet. Basically all the same features as the GUI application, just in text.

There was also the original Microsoft Network (later shortened to MSN), which included a bunch of communities and boards. It was a Windows 95 application, and went through a semi-public beta then eventual release in parallel with the OS. You could connect through dial up or over the Internet, if I recall. I remember being impressed I could open two boards at the same time, unlike CS.

I could be misremembering, I think the , had to be converted to a . in the email address. I still recall my ID, the box the binder for the manual came in, and the joy of exploring, wishing I could try out SABRE. That was out of my childhood budget though.

I long for the days of yesteryear. So much simpler, so much more fun, and the Internet actually felt somewhat exclusive.

And CompuServe wasn't even the Internet. It, like AOL, was a glorified bulletin-board system. AOL tacked Internet access on as an afterthought.

I remember getting personal developer support from Microsoft on CompuServe in the early '90s. MS engineers would actually send us some of their internal tools to investigate bugs. We helped them fix stuff in ODBC, and they gave us good support while we built what was, at the time, the biggest Visual C++ project they were aware of.

Obviously this kind of interaction is impractical today, but there must be some middle ground between it and what we currently see: companies shamefully abusing and hiding from their customers.

Brings back memories. I was a MS support engineer on CompuServe around 1989. I supported Windows/286 and 386, Excel, and Word for Windows. I posted around 25 to 30 messages a day. I had a partner named Bassam, if I recall correctly. It was just the two of us, and there was a period of time when it was only me.

Many times I wondered "if they only knew MS Windows support on CompuServe relies on one intern working out of a frat house (at the UW)." I used a US Robotics modem running at 300 or 1500 baud without error correction. I had to write my responses in notepad and paste it in due to line noise.

Helping so many people every day was very satisfying and I am still proud of that work.

You should be! As you can see, people are probably still talking about it 20 years later.

Does no one remember The Source? I could swear it predated and competed with CompuServe, but all memory of it appears to have been wiped off the web.

CompuServe's consumer dialup service started in 1979, their non-consumer services go back to the 1960's, at basically the same time as The Source. CompuServe bought The Source sometime in the late 1980's which means it was dead before dialup online services hit the mainstream in the early 1990's. This is why you likely don't see much mention of it. Another service I used back in the day which you don't see much about is the BYTE Information Exchange, BiX, which was started by BYTE magazine.

Did you have you have any experience with Genie, Prodigy, Delphi, or Q-Link (prior to becoming AOL)?

I had forgotten that the remnants of AOL, Netscape, CompuServe and Yahoo are all one company.

I'm confused. The page is dated 2022, and it touts support for Windows XP???

I believe they maintain the whole thing only for very elderly customers who don't know how to switch to anything else.

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