Trying to make sense of CompuServe server hard disk images

https://medium.com/@mpnet/trying-to-make-sense-of-compuserve-server-hard-disk-images-posted-on-archive-org-b1c62ce6012b

by harel • 7 years ago

133 59 7 years ago

pronoiac• 7 years ago

They find some accounting details, rather than something more interesting.

bahmboo2• 7 years ago

I don't understand the downvotes, it's an accurate summation of the [edit result of his work]. The journey [edit: up to and including that result] was an interesting read.

chx2• 7 years ago

Wait a minute there's a public archive of Compuserve data noone has any clue what it is? What if it's PII? It wasn't that long ago to make this a non-issue.

jboy552• 7 years ago

Completely scary, what a massive security breach just casually thought of as a digital challenge.

shawnz3• 7 years ago

I wonder, who is responsible in a case like this? Is it the current owners of CompuServe for not clearing the PII before trashing the machines?

icedchai2• 7 years ago

This is very common. I've bought machines at auction with databases on them.

gowld• 7 years ago

The no longer existent corporate person is responsible. Same as if a real person copied all your info, published it, and died.

rkagerer• 7 years ago

As much as I'm fascinated by this work and the author's tenacity, as a past user of CompuServe I'm quite alarmed at the prospect of my data falling into the hands of a random tech junkie blogging on the internet.

Verizon, if you're out there - please get a handle on this breach before my lawyers call you.

icedchai2• 7 years ago

Yes, I was a CompuServe user back in 1988. I'm very concerned about my teenage "CB" chat logs falling into the wrong hands.

neilv2• 7 years ago

Perhaps the CompuServe PII wasn't covered by modern 'privacy' policies that have users 'consent' to the company doing whatever it wants.

A big company might be vulnerable to class action from a bunch of people who are tech-savvy and affluent enough to have been using Compu$erve.

reaperducer• 7 years ago

What if it's PII?

If anyone finds data for 72167,7570, send a copy back to me.

ramses0• 7 years ago

...but seriously... I think I still remember my "license plate" number for prodigy.net, which I think was 7 digits alpahnumeric. I've very occasionally searched for it thinking there was maybe an archive or footprints from "those days" but nothing has ever come up.

Quite literally the transition of physical paper => digital forums => internet (pre-crawlers/pre-archive) => where the data could have been lost before it had a chance to be "modernized".

threeio• 7 years ago

I dropped so much cash on compuserve as a kid... ugh the pain and realization when my folks figured out what it was..

DanBC• 7 years ago

For people who don't know what the costs were like, here's this page from a 1988 Whole Earth catalogue giving some pricing information.

http://tinypic.com/view.php?pic=2janfrd&s=7

Compuserve $11 per hour, had "more than 250,000 subscribers".

The Source $8 per hour.

Delphi $6 per hour had a loyal but small (less than 10,000 users) following.

BIX $9 per hour.

ceautery• 7 years ago

CompuServe charged more if you connected at a higher baud rate, like $12.80 per hour for 14.4k... I think - I haven't worked there for 22 years, so my memory is hazy.

There was also an ecosystem of apps to script connections to minimize time you spent online. You'd pick the forums you wanted to scrape new messages from, fetch them in one session, compose replies offline, and post the replies in a second session.

KC8ZKF• 7 years ago

Long distance charges may apply.

I grew up in Ashtabula, Ohio, and the closest access numbers made the toll charges the greatest cost.

dillutedfixer• 7 years ago

Ugh. Yeah I had a few $400 bills in the late 90's. CS charges plus local long distance to the POP. Being addicted to Worlds Away didn't help either.

odorousrex• 7 years ago

I spent nearly $400 on CompuServe playing "Island of Kesmai" as a kid.

It was the first and only time I ever saw my dad visibly tremble with rage and turn red. ($400 80's bucks is a lot of 2019 bucks to spend on a video game.)

jboy552• 7 years ago

I wonder if twenty years from now, someone will be archiving one of the big email providers.

"In the early 21st century, there existed large cloud 'email' organizations. Here I found a trove of 'hard disks' images from one of the companies, HotMail. I've been digging around and look at these email addresses, it appears this image contains all the 'email' for around 10k users. Here is one where a couple users with the usernames 'joesmith' and 'andreasanchez', engaged in playful romantic flirting. Although by digging further in the emails it appears one of them, 'joesmith' is newly married to 'andreasmith'. Here is thier wedding invitation. Fascinating digital archeology"

behringer• 7 years ago

Of course that's exactly what will happen. If you put your data in the cloud, it's one day going to be publicly available. If you don't like that, you should consider running private servers for your data.

C14L• 7 years ago

Or encrypt your data before uploading it to "the cloud" (aka, somebody else's computer).

shawnz3• 7 years ago

That's assuming they do not properly destroy their data, which they are legally obligated to do as far as I understand. You could also just encrypt your data before uploading.

johannes1234321• 7 years ago

This is what is happening with old letters as well. If you look carefully through antics markets you can often find old letters.

Random example: https://www.ebay.com/itm/1683-Old-Historical-Handwritten-Let...

dalore• 7 years ago

Something like a recent episode of The Orville perhaps? Where they find someones phone from the 21st, download all the messages, calls, etc and uses the holodeck to recreate what it might be like.

blattimwind• 7 years ago

Imagine trying to find or even implement exploits against such a system:

The CompuServe system used non-standard PDP-10-based hardware along with a custom version of TOPS-10. As a result, booting it in one of the available emulators is next to impossible. But I hoped the disk images could be attached to a standard TOPS-10 system as secondary disks somehow.

Especially when all those manuals weren't freely available...

dmix2• 7 years ago

GEnie seems to be another online service lost to time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEnie

ghaff4• 7 years ago

There were a lot of them although Compuserve was at least one of the biggest. (It's the one I used.) There were also BIX, AOL, DELPHI, and Prodigy, and others that aren't popping to mind.

There were also a vast number of small BBSs ranging from a system in someone's bedroom to commercial--though still relatively small--operations, some of which became early local ISPs. At the time, one mostly preferred to make local calls because of the expense of long distance.

zepearl• 7 years ago

Out of core context:

the article mentions "The Digital Antiquarian" ( https://www.filfre.net ) which in turn has an article about the game "Wing Commander" ( https://www.filfre.net/2017/04/from-wingleader-to-wing-comma... ) => this is funny:

At the beginning of August, Snell unceremoniously booted Chris Roberts, the project’s founder, from his role as co-producer, leaving him with only the title of director. Manifesting a tendency anyone familiar with his more recent projects will immediately recognize, Roberts had been causing chaos on the team by approving seemingly every suggested addition or enhancement that crossed his desk. Snell, the brutal pragmatist in this company full of dreamers, appointed himself as Warren Spector’s new co-producer. His first action was to place a freeze on new features in favor of getting the game that currently existed finished and out the door.

(Chris Roberts is the one creating the game "Star Citizen" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Citizen - I was one of the first buying/financing the game in 2012, but I admit of having lost interest while waiting for the "final" version to be released...)

DEADBEEFC0FFEE• 7 years ago

I too am a founding backer, also totally lost interest.

the_fonz• 7 years ago

"Digital archeology" isn't the right term, "digital preservation" falls under archival science, whether formally or informally.

bahmboo2• 7 years ago

Except preservation on its own is not very useful. You need some sort of understanding of the data on many levels hence "archeology" (that may not be the best term but I think it gets the point across).

andrewf• 7 years ago

I saw one of the CompuServe PDP-10 clones running at VCF West last year in Mountain View! It's this one on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1CvBwt5nfg

Trying to make sense of CompuServe server hard disk images

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