Compuserve

https://www.compuserve.com/

by bane • 3 years ago

160 132 3 years ago

Doesn’t look like it’s changed much in 20+ years, though I did find this quaint snapshot from 1996 of a team of engineers I presume with the caption “See you in the Spring!”: https://web.archive.org/web/19961220045225/https://www.compu...

anonu• 3 years ago

I think it was 1992 when my dad showed me how to dial into Compuserve. We might have had a 9600 baud modem that tied up the phone line and cost an astronomical amount per minute. I recall bringing up a weather map of the US. I had no clue what to do with that information. But I was hooked.

m4jor• 3 years ago

I used to live in Germany (dad was a military contractor).

We had a computer with dialup but it was insanely expensive to use there at the time and only my parents could use it.

Well one day they left me home alone and I got curious so I connected and stayed online for probably 8-9 hours before they got home. It was a blast. I too was also hooked immediately.

I sure got a shock when my parents came into my room a month later to ask if I had been on the computer without them because we had a huge bill haha.

chrisco255• 3 years ago

Yeah I ran up a multi hundred dollar internet bill when I was 9 and my parents cancelled AOL for a couple years until they came out with unlimited plans.

sneak• 3 years ago

They had free trial offers for 10 hours (at first) so I was sneak, then sneak{1,..,14} or something on there.

Eventually I managed to shoulder surf the login for the PPP connection to a local ISP used at my school, then I had unlimited. Thankfully I had enough sense at 13 or 14 to ATDT*67,,1xxxxxxxxxx so that they couldn't identify who it was without actually sending a subpoena/warrant to the telco (which they didn't do). In any case the school paid a flat rate for unlimited usage, so my being connected all night didn't cost anyone anything.

They yelled at me a lot though because it was pretty obvious who was using dozens of hours of dialin every month, given that the school's list of suspects was one item long.

kmoser• 3 years ago

I remember getting trial accounts that had a limited number of hours, but if they ran out while you were still connected you didn't get booted off; you just couldn't connect the next time you dialed in. So I would log on near the end of my time limit and spend all night downloading files, well past what would have been the normal account expiration time.

rojeee• 3 years ago

Oh gosh. I remember my parents hiding my keyboard and mouse after my Dad received a £500 phone bill one month. This was in 1999. We were on pay per minute dial-up in the UK and I was obsessed with playing a game called Team Fortress Classic, a mod for Half-Life. Even with ping times of 200ms it was still really playable! We only had one phone line and the downside of this for my parents was that no-one could call the house phone - engaged tone. Remember, this is before widespread mobile phones. The downside for me was that any time someone picked up a phone in the house - like my sister to call her stupid boyfriend - all they heard was modem noise and it sometimes ended up in the modem hanging up the connection mid game... Infuriating!

Luckily I had a spare keyboard and mouse in my cupboard, which I promptly set up to the bemusement of my parents. They were very patient...

yomlica82• 3 years ago

We only had one phone line and the downside of this for my parents was that no-one could call the house phone - engaged tone.

I bought this little box on ebay that monitored for the call waiting signal while dialup was connected and then let the call ring through. If I was quick I could get starcraft to reconnect when a telemarketer interrupted. It was a lot cheaper than a second phone line!

McGlockenshire• 3 years ago

What a delightful web design throwback. I hit the zoom a few notches so I could actually read it, and then felt right at home reading the news like I used to do decades ago.

I don't like this whole "getting old" thing.

lproven5• 3 years ago

Me neither... but it's better than the alternative.

jonnycomputer• 3 years ago

aside from all the nostalgia, what a nice clean no-bs news site.

DrThunder• 3 years ago

Yeah it's actually refreshing.

DrawTR• 3 years ago

A little jarring how clicking on any of the hyperlinked 'channels' on the left navigation bar will send you 20 years into the future in terms of web design. Quite a stark contrast.

ethbr1• 3 years ago

What framework are they using for the base pages? It's amazing how fast they load! /s

grav• 3 years ago

PrevJS

broodbucket• 3 years ago

http://vanilla-js.com/

whoopdedo• 3 years ago

Perhaps a larger legacy than being a communications platform is that Compuserve is the reason we have GIF.

And fittingly, many of the graphics on that page are GIF. I presume Compuserve never had to worry about Unisys litigation.

jghn5• 3 years ago

And how we know that it is pronounced like the peanut butter!

As a kid in the 80s on compuserve o still remember coming across that document explaining GIF, including the pronunciation

prometheus76• 3 years ago

Sorry, but you'll never convert me to that pronunciation, even if that's what the founder wants. "G" stands for "graphics", not "jraphics".

Trixter• 3 years ago

The original programmer specified "peanut butter" in the original docs, but being the author of a format does not make you a linguist. If each component of Graphics Interchange Format is pronounced properly, it is hard-g gif, and not the peanut butter.

itsagavin• 3 years ago

As a young man I spent lots of energy collecting and trading stolen credit cards on IRC. A large amount of what I was doing with them was carding local shell accounts so that I could avoid long distance charges by telnetting in to Compuserve and Genie. I of course carded my accounts there as well. I was hooked on an online airplane game and mechwarrior type arena game and still fondly look back on both those experiences. As you can imagine someone on that path without guidance life didn't go so hot and I still every now and then wish I could man a turret in a b17 on an airfield run and enjoy the simpler times.

pram2• 3 years ago

I remember a lot of (porn) sites early on would accept credit card numbers from a generator. Didn’t even need a real one! Of course they’d later close the account for fraud when it wouldn’t bill but it was a surprising amount of places that didn’t actually validate anything beyond the digits being Visa or Mastercard etc.

cobertos• 3 years ago

How interesting! I wonder what happened behind the scene to require this. Companies in spaces like that usually require specific merchant banks that are willing to deal with "high risk" (or so seemed to be the search term). I wonder if this had advantages in bank selection or how it looked to the banks? Or perhaps a technical limitation?

tspike• 3 years ago

Oh man.. I miss Air Warrior and Cyberstrike.

dustrider• 3 years ago

Airwarrior and Battletech Solaris. Man those were good times.

mh-• 3 years ago

Air Warrior was absolutely incredible for its time. I played it through AOL, if I recall.

disintegore• 3 years ago

Oh, the memories. There was a guy in my RuneScape clan who was known for doing exactly that. Walked me through setting up a vHost and bouncer on a shell account at one time so that I could be 1337 like him, or get us logins for obscure adult sites and say "use a SOCKS proxy, the other ones aren't any good".

He was like the cool older brother we never had. Hope he's alright now. Probably a major factor behind me choosing this career.

threeio• 3 years ago

I support and mirrored your actives as a youth.

papageek3• 3 years ago

#phreak by any chance? /MrPruple

icedchai5• 3 years ago

Compuserve was the first thing I dialed with my 1200 baud modem, back in 1988. I still have one of the original "sign up kits" at my parents' house!

rmason• 3 years ago

I literally added a 1200 baud modem to my first computer purchase so that I could dial in to CompuServe. Living in the countryside it was an expensive long distance call just to connect and that cost limited my usage but I sure enjoyed it.

DonHopkins2• 3 years ago

Modems used to cost a dollar a baud!

Introduction To Time Shared Systems (June 1972):

https://publications.gc.ca/collections/collection_2020/isde-...

Apparently, there's a rough rule-of-thumb formula that the cost of a modem is about a dollar per baud. This estimate accounts for the extras that are usually added as rated speed is increased to give the device its 1-m1*in-turn utility.

300bps• 3 years ago

I called almost exclusively local BBSes with my 300 bps modem starting in 1985. There was no local Compuserve dial-in number for me. Between the long distance and the per minute charges, Compuserve was out of reach.

By the way, your 1200 bps modem was actually 600 baud! People often use baud and bps interchangeably but they're different. The most common 1200 bps standard was v.22 which used 600 baud.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ITU-T_V-series_recomme...

icedchai5• 3 years ago

I mostly called local BBSes. I had to get on CompuServe first, to even find the numbers for local ones. I ran my own BBS for a while, also! Fun times. I still miss those days.

6stringmerc• 3 years ago

Ahhh GIF trading and the first time I met a skinhead. Still use my old handle. For DJ work now…charming_weasel

wlonkly• 3 years ago

Good skinhead or bad skinhead?

gharman• 3 years ago

My elderly father still uses this as his primary gateway to the internet and email. For all intents and purposes, this is the internet to him.

exogeny• 3 years ago

My compliments on one of the few times I've actually seen that phrase used and spelled correctly.

bombcar2• 3 years ago

Missed the chance to go with “for all internets and purposes” though.

Nursie3• 3 years ago

My mother and her husband still use AOL email, which I thought was bad enough, I managed to persuade them some years ago that they didn't need to use the AOL portal to get at the internet.

I still haven't managed to persuade them to change ISP though, even though AOL removed themselves from the broadband ISP business in the UK, what, 20 years ago? And their connection had been bought and sold by different providers multiple times over those years, my stepfather is concerned that if he changes ISP then the email will no longer know how to find his house.

In the face of this sort of argument, I crumble. They could be paying less for a faster service with better support than they get now, but I guess that's never going to happen.

canjobear• 3 years ago

If it works for them, why change?

lproven5• 3 years ago

My 85YO mother still uses the AOL email address I set up for her in 1996. It works perfectly on her iPad Pro with IpadOS $CURRENT.

I got the iPad-before-the-iPad-before-last. It maxes out at iOS 9. One of the only ways I've got to get ebooks on it is to email them to my 1996 Hotmail address, which is the only one my my half a dozen that iOS 9 Mail can handle.

ApolIllo• 3 years ago

Damn i thought this was Compuware. Loved the Compuware Corvette C5-R

tech234a• 3 years ago

See also https://isp.netscape.com/, which appears to be the same site but with a different logo and colors.

taftster• 3 years ago

Huh? You're right. Why is this the same site? What's going on here? Is there a relationship between these two (defunct) sites?

agildehaus• 3 years ago

Both CIS (CompuServe Information Service) and Netscape were purchased by AOL.

DavidSJ• 3 years ago

Indeed, netscape.com has been running a variant of this software for a long time: http://web.archive.org/web/20090604104519/http://netscape.ao...

joezydeco• 3 years ago

Now I kind of want a CIS email address just to be ironic, but it needs to be in the original PDP/TOPS format 12345,123.

Am I remembering it correctly? It was TOPS, right?

jghn5• 3 years ago

I’m now questioning how well I remember my id but but yes am pretty sure it was 5,4 structure

lproven5• 3 years ago

It is more specific than that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CompuServe#User_IDs_and_e-mail...

Octal digits, starting with a 7: `7xxxx,xxx`.

My work address was 70006,101.

StanislavPetrov• 3 years ago

I spent an absolute fortune playing British Legends in the mid 1980s on Compuserve. It was $6.25 an hour at 300 baud to watch the text slowly crawl across the screen - and that was dial up, when telephone charges were expensive even for local calls.

You can still play if you are interested! (for free and at a much higher speed)

http://www.british-legends.com/CMS/

VectorLock2• 3 years ago

Compuserve was too hard to get into, but Prodigy... that was my jam.

ilaksh• 3 years ago

Yeah we had Prodigy also. Accessed via 2400 baud modem if I recall.

CompuServe had its heyday much earlier I believe. I think I was on dialup to BBSs before Prodigy.

And then EarthLink.

VectorLock2• 3 years ago

I think I was on Prodigy a little bit before BBS' then after the BBS era began to wain it was dialup PPP (then a hacked PPP server at MIT), and shell systems.

fractallyte2• 3 years ago

My CompuServe email address is still active! It's hosted by AOL now, but the actual email address is the same as it was in 1997.

TMWNN• 3 years ago

I have a valid AOL email address despite never having subscribed to AOL. Did the same thing happen to your CompuServe address; that is, transition to the free email model?

fractallyte2• 3 years ago

Yes! It was free for a long time with CompuServe, and since the transition to AOL, it's remained free.

kristopolous2• 3 years ago

I get the strong feeling that Netscape 4 wouldn't have any issue with this page

gunapologist99• 3 years ago

Who knows how old this code is, but this page was developed with div's+css, which 4 didn't support (fully or not at all). It wasn't until later versions that divs replaced tables for layout.[0]

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape_Navigator#Decline

kristopolous2• 3 years ago

Netscape had support for both of those.

https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/old-software/web-browsers/ne...

It was lousy but your timeline is a little off.

Divs not only go back further than that but in those days you could just invent tags and Netscape 4 would treat it like some container

<Xyz> </xyz> would just default to some block of unknown type or purpose.

Regardless divs are from html 3.2 https://www.w3.org/TR/2018/SPSD-html32-20180315/#div

Let me be clear on the CSS support here, It was buggy partial and lousy. I was stuck on that browser for 5 years at the time on Linux before Mozilla became good enough

winrid• 3 years ago

Wonder how many servers somewhere are up just to run this :)

dtjohnnymonkey• 3 years ago

One of my first moments on the internet was chatting on Compuserve using the DOS client. Chats were sent character-by-character so everyone’s text was constantly stomping over everyone else’s. But it was amazing that those were people from all over the country you could chat with.

NoZebra120vClip5• 3 years ago

When I was first introduced to Unix (SVR3) all the students used 'write' to chit-chat, and somehow we adopted conventions so that our text would not stomp (it was line-by-line, though) so we would write something like "-o" for "over" when we were finished typing, and "-oo" or "o&o" when we wanted to end the convo.

When MUDs became a thing, it was soon a stigma to be "on raw telnet" as we'd say, because a client could easily handle incoming text while you're typing a line at the same time. And so I became utterly addicted to full-duplex conversations, hardly even caring if I stayed on topic.

swozey• 3 years ago

They put their news articles dates in tiny little text at the bottom of most articles.. interesting design choice. I didn't even see them until I looked at a few.

thepostman0• 3 years ago

https://isp.netscape.com/?guccounter=1

prozaix• 3 years ago

I like how upbeat and politically neutral the news headlines are. That's what truly makes it nostalgic, not the old css.

DonHopkins2• 3 years ago

When Kaleida Labs was shutting down in the mid 90's, somebody put a bunch of big labeled recycling bins out in the hall, for soon-to-be-ex-employees to throw different types of office junk into to be recycled.

But there were just so many AOL and Compuserve signup floppies and cds that I labeled two separate recycling bins AOL and Compuserve, one for each brand!

Angostura• 3 years ago

That's sad. Just visited the 'About us' page: "Support for the latest Windows operating system, Windows XP, for greater compatibility,"

bradley13• 3 years ago

TIL: Compuserve still exists. I haven't thought about them since dial-up days.

Do these shells never die?

imchillyb• 3 years ago

Compuserve was my gateway to: The Well.

The Well was my Internet before the Internet. What a fond trip down memory lane.

justin66• 3 years ago

rbanffy• 3 years ago

Should use green monospaced type on a black background.

jamesgill• 3 years ago

Compuserve was where I had my first email account in the early/mid 80s, dialing in on a C64 and a 300 baud modem. God, the amount of time I spent playing Megawars and cursing my slow modem.

LanceH• 3 years ago

Megawars and cursing the bill that just arrived.

taylodl• 3 years ago

CompuServe was pretty awesome back in the 80's! It was essentially email and Reddit, all in one service. You had scripts that would run to send/receive mail, download thread updates and upload responses - all batch, because you were charged by the minute for connect time.

There are some aspects of that environment I like better than what we have today.

icedchai5• 3 years ago

The online chat ("CB simulator") was neat, too. That was the first time I had seen something like that.

mattw2121• 3 years ago

I began my addiction to a particular game, Island of Kesmai, on Compuserve back in the 80's. It later became Legends of Kesmai (on Gamestorm and AOL) and has since been reborn with several remakes. The current, and best, is Stormhalter (http://www.stormhalter.com/wiki/Main_Page).

Lucent• 3 years ago

Curious if these old email addresses that became a tech embarrassment will see a rebound in cachet. "Ooh, a résumé with @compuserve.com. This guy was there at the beginning."

TheOtherHobbes• 3 years ago

I doubt many people under 40 know what Compuserve is/was.

loneboat• 3 years ago

My initial reaction to your comment was a smug "Hah! I know what CompuServe was!" followed by the realization that I'v been over 40 for a couple of years now.

FabHK• 3 years ago

I’d love to have my short compuserve.com email back. I’d even be prepared to pay a modest amount for it.

Nothing embarrassing about it, if you wanted to be online (particularly on the road internationally) that was the way. Compuserve had dial-up modems everywhere :-)

irongeek• 3 years ago

The site does not look fancy but it delivers. Everyone complaining about someone using that page, why? I have adblock on so maybe it looks far worse for others. But I just see straight up headlines for each topic and it looks current. I did not know this page still existed either, but honestly I like the simple look.

ngcazz• 3 years ago

First time a cookie modal actually enhanced my browsing experience. The background blur hid the retro design, making for a very nice surprise when I dismissed it!

glonq• 3 years ago

I missed the boat on those paid online services because my family was not in a position to pay $X per month for such a thing. Even scrounging up for my 8-bit Atari and 300bps modem was tough.

So I cut my teeth on people's little basement-hosted BBS's first, and didn't experience anything multi-user until some of the big multi-line BBS's popped up.

Thoreandan• 3 years ago

Same, MPP Express, and the 313 area code BBS Listing. ;)

carimura• 3 years ago

I recall getting hooked on some turn-based war simulator and played for days resulting in some crazy high bill that my parents had to pay.

Anyone remember that game?

ralphc• 3 years ago

Where can one download the improved Compuserve 7, compatible with XP? I'd like to try it.

DougN72• 3 years ago

It wasn’t all that great - too glitzy :)

lolive• 3 years ago

Funnily, I am in the middle of season 2 of Halt And Catch Fire. And beyond the references to AWS, Wolf3D and IRC/Usenet, I wonder which other parts are direct references to Compuserve. [i have never been on Compuserve]

NoZebra120vClip5• 3 years ago

Sometime around 1992, I was at a conference with booths from Compuserve and AOL and all the rest. I marched right up to the Compuserve lady, never having used the service, and I inquired "so when are you gonna get a clue and connect to the Internet?" Of course she answered with something rather clueless and diplomatic, but I got a thrill out of being right when all those walled-gardens hooked up to the walled garden to end all walled gardens.

Compuserve

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