Ohio gives historical status to building that once housed CompuServe | Hacker News Reader

Ohio gives historical status to building that once housed CompuServe

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157 pointsohjeez52 comments

A number of incarnations ago I needed to call Compuserve for some tech support. I don't remember why but I do remember being on hold forever. That was true of most tech companies back then including Microsoft.

When the support rep finally took the call he started by apologizing for the delay which I appreciated and told him I empathized with the volume of work and his day in general.

He told me they were short staffed because White Castle, also headquartered in Columbus, paid better, offered better benefits, and kept hiring Compuserve's support people away, making turnover an ongoing problem.

A few weeks later, after catching a favorite band whilst drinking a few beers, I told my friends this story standing in line at 1:30am waiting for 8 cheeseburgers, an order of onion rings, and a medium orange fountain drink.

The products each company offered couldn't have been more different yet there I was, a customer of both.

I wonder if that was before or after they outsourced pretty much all their phone support. I can see the outsourced people (I did that for a short time) being cheaper than White Castle employees (sigh) but I assumed the real CompuServe people made more.

given the nature and significance of the online world, it would have been more appropriate to retire the phone number. what percentage of people who used CompuServe had a clue where it was?

What does "retire the phone number" mean?

Prevent its reuse. Like when a sports team retires a player number or United never having a Flight 93 again.

But what phone number?

Maybe their directory-published "telephone number" - presumably they only had one of those.

It was a long, long time ago, but I seem to recall a 1-800 if you were on the road somewhere.

yeah, was just thinking how random this story is, as in all the things when I think about CompuServe, where it was physically located is not something that comes to mind or something that even matters haha.

But whatever, fun bit of trivia for....Upper Arlington.

Eh, I grant your point but it's probably higher than you might think. I was an early and devoted (and thus usually broke) Compuserve user, and visited the now-preserved building back in the mid-90s. The CIS user base skewed, I would say, heavily nerd, and heavily enthusiast, and it wouldn't surprise me to learn somehow that a large percentage of the people who used the service, at least in the early days, knew where it was headquartered. Certainly would not have been true after the AOL acquisition.

Everyone remembers Compuserve for pioneering the GIF, but I remember when they were one of the first companies to distribute compressed audio. In 1994, Aerosmith decided they wanted to be the first band to release a single as a digital download before it was available for retail sale. They chose their single “Head First” to release, and partnered with Compuserve for distribution. As this was several years before the invention of the mp3, it was available a wav file that used a proprietary compression codec that you had to download separately. This article says it was a 90 minute download for a 3 minute 5mb song. I had a 14.4k modem at the time, my unreliable memory says that it was closer to 15mb and took overnight, but 90 mins for 5mb on a 14k line appears to check out.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/6vapxr/go-aerosmith-how-head...

I used Compuserve a lot. I remember, on a forum for a Casio handheld with Basic, telling of my discovery of undocumented POKE and PEEK commands, which caused much excitement. I wrote a memory dump routine using these. Ahh, the good old days.

This may be the first historical marker about the internet

Surely that’s not the case?

It would make sense to me. Other significant places like room 3420 are not likely officially recognized historical markers.

Thanks. I'd not heard of that one. Great read for anyone interested. https://www.fastcompany.com/90423457/50-years-ago-today-the-...

The first word that comes to mind when I hear CompuServe is, 'gif'.

I did graphic art and software would always refer to the gif format as 'Compuserve GIF'.

The open-source community was pushing PNG because CompuServe was (right or wrong) being fussy about owning the gif patent and wanted more parties to pay for the pleasure of generating gifs.

It wasn’t CompuServe that had the patent. The gif format uses LZW, which was patented by Unisys. I remember having to get a special option on some vendor’s toolkit to unlock the GIF handling. Either an add on or you had to go license from Unisys.

Thanks. I knew I was fuzzy on it. That sounds right.

To this day I remember coming across something on Compuserve ~1990 explaining GIF and how it is pronounced. Like the peanut butter.

I got a tour of their headquarters when I was a third year medical student taking a computers in Medicine class at Ohio State in 1989. I had been using Compuserve since high school. I recall a lot of security measures were in place that prevented visitors from accessing any sensitive machines. It was sad to see their demise later on when AOL and Prodigy came along.

Is this in response to the demolition of the old AOL HQ?

https://www.nbcwashington.com/news/local/northern-virginia/d...

You can read the plaque in this link

https://www.10tv.com/article/news/local/ohio-historical-mark...

Ironically, some of us cannot without resorting to...the international effort to preserve the Web: https://web.archive.org/web/20231222144314/https://www.10tv....

not to be confused with the compuware building in the heart of downtown detroit - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Campus_Martius

I still remember my CompuServe user id 25+ years since I last used it.

This is just the cynic in me but they are most likely doing this for tax reasons or to not have to pay for demolition.

No they aren't; the building has been owned for nearly 20 years by a church and it's still got an active datacenter in it plus office space, etc. One of my companies had office space there and after we sold the business, the buyer expanded our footprint in the building which exists to this day as far as I have heard.

> owned for nearly 20 years by a church and it's still got an active datacenter in it

Is it Prayer as a Service?

The original PaaS!

No, it's some kind of church or religious group called Tree Of Life, they purchased the entire building and lease the data center portion to Expedient (a regional data center provider), do church service in the auditorium, and rent the offices out. Our offices were on the upper floor corner looking over the back parking lot along the road (near edge on the right of the building in the photo on the article)

Service as a Service was right there.

Yeah, I messed that up

See, this is why HN needs a sister site where we can safely make puns without being downvoted.

Ohio's historic marker program doesn't give any protected status to the property they are located on afaik. It's just a touristy thing.

I wouldn't expect so. My (non-professional) understanding was that having historical status raised the amount of upkeep and approval required for modifications.

I think it would be hard to tell in an Internet battle of uninformed takes whether "tax write off" beats "money laundering". Everything on the Internet gets this treatment. It's less cynicism and more just LLM-action.

70365,1426!

I won’t repeat my 101xxx,yyyy number but I do wonder if there was rhyme or reason I don’t recall any numbers which weren’t 7xxxx or 10xxxx before the comma

What was the comma for (and dot for email of course) - just to break it up? Was it a checksum or some sort?

https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/5086/what...

75300,XXXX

Mine started with 7... I still remember it, even though I signed up to CompuServe over 35 years ago. It was the first thing I was able to call with a modem, until I got numbers for local BBSes.

For whatever reason that and my ICQ number are burned into my soul

76760,1543

I find it so weird that I remember these things. I also remember the static IP address assigned to my freshman year dorm in 1999 (we all got static publicly-routable IPs). And I remember my ICQ number as well.

If our brains have a finite amount of space for memory, I really would not mind dumping some of these silly numbers in favor of something more useful and current.

Grandma phone number: 314-364-xxxx how I remember a number I haven't dialed in 20+ years.

72241,1417

Ziff Davis owned the 72241 set of IDs. Bill Machrone was 72241,10.

(I was lead sysop of the ZD Executives Online forum and backup sysop of the Computer Shopper forum.)

Also it took everybody forever to realize everything on CompuServe was octal.

I only ever used Compuserve at work, for community tech support for certain products. Was it really the hive of scum and villainy it has a reputation for?

In its heyday, it was apparently like the well, but for suits. It was extremely expensive per hour, but you could get financial feeds (news and stock tickers). There were forums and stuff too.

I've heard more along the lines of a proto-4chan.

There were many functions, I remember an encyclopedia, stock tickers, basically "apps" of a sort.

And there were message boards too, which were a free for all. But then, so was/is IRC, and newsgroups, and so on.

Reddit likely, even now, has far more questionable content.

Not really, at least not in the 80s/early 90s. People were paying ~$20/hr to be on it. This kept riffraff fairly low.

There were a lot of analogues to other internet things. There was a "CB simulator" that was like IRC. There were Special Interest Groups for all sorts of topics. Each one had its own message board, chat room, file share. Online games, including some multiplayer options. News feeds, stock information, more.

Outside of the cost, it was pretty sweet.

Of course the founder of CompuServe was the expert on GIF pronunciation.

Why do you think dial-up was useful in the early 1990s? GIF trading was the jam. I didn't much care for my experience at attempted skinhead recruitment via chatting, but hey, some things don't really change when it comes to impressionable young people and computers.

Ohio: Come see our misnamed Rock-n-Roll Hall of Fame, the abandoned CompuServe HQ, and wait for the Great Lakes to pull back on their own and give Ohio some extra room.

... why?

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