About CompuServe
compuserve.com
About CompuServe
1–10 of 16 posts
Re: About CompuServe
#2I long for the days of yesteryear. So much simpler, so much more fun, and the Internet actually felt somewhat exclusive.
Re: About CompuServe
#3I 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.
Re: About CompuServe
#4I had forgotten that the remnants of AOL, Netscape, CompuServe and Yahoo are all one company.
Re: About CompuServe
#5I'm confused. The page is dated 2022, and it touts support for Windows XP???
Re: About CompuServe
#6Prodigy 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.
Re: About CompuServe
#7Does 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.
Re: About CompuServe
#8I'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.
Re: About CompuServe
#9CompuServe 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.
Re: About CompuServe
#10Does 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.