45 years ago CompuServe connected the world before the World Wide Web

https://www.wosu.org/2024-09-24/45-years-ago-compuserve-connected-the-world-before-the-world-wide-web

by ohjeez • 2 years ago

150 124 2 years ago

mattw21212• 2 years ago

I spent a lot of time, and a lot of my parent's money, on Compuserve in the mid to the late eighties. For me and my best friend all our time was spent in two places. First, and absolute foremost, was Island of Kesmai. This game, and its graphical successor Legends of Kesmai, was the stuff dreams were made of for me as a kid. I still play variants of this game today. The second big draw of Compuserve was "You Guessed It!". This was a wacky multi-player trivia game show. My friend and I (both around 13) posed as young navy fighter pilots (top gun was a thing at this time). We wrote down all the questions and answers and frantically looked them up in the next games.

Compuserve was a huge part of my life at that point in time and I'm so glad it existed. I'm really glad we got away from hourly charges though.

foobarian• 2 years ago

Any time I get the urge to complain about my kids Roblox usage I remember this ^ and bite my tongue :-)

SoftTalker• 2 years ago

The second big draw of Compuserve was "You Guessed It!"

LOL until I read the next sentence I thought this was a reference to porn.

DavidAdams• 2 years ago

For me, the interesting takeaway from this article is that CompuServe started as a way for a big insurance company to monetize its idle computing capacity in the off hours.

tptacek• 2 years ago

Famous enough to be one of the thru-lines for season 3 of Halt and Catch Fire.

sillywalk4• 2 years ago

I believe the same is also true for GEnie.

kragen14• 2 years ago

56 years ago tymshare connected the world before compuserve: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xIWMvtM02NA (oral history interview with my friend ann hardy, who wrote the operating system that ran tymshare for many years)

but the more interesting systems, to my mind, were usenet (born 01980) and fidonet (born 01983), because those were bottom-up, federated, peer-to-peer, grassroots systems

sillywalk4• 2 years ago

Thanks for the link. For those who prefer to read, there is a transcript[0].

[0] https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/20...

kragen14• 2 years ago

thank you! i should have posted that

Animats• 2 years ago

Oh, Norm Hardy's wife.

Tymnet was interesting. It was a virtual circuit-switched system for keyboard terminals. There was a central control machine, and a bunch of dumb switching nodes. The central control machine (an SDS-945 originally) would set up a route and send out "route channel 24 to channel 57" commands to each node. The nodes just forwarded packets per the set route. If the control machine went down, all routes stayed working, but new ones could not be set up. There was a second control machine that could take over if needed.

Nodes had a queue for each virtual circuit, and flow control. It wasn't end to end raw packets. In the days of expensive long haul bandwidth, this was essential. Pure datagram networks only work because our long-haul connections today have huge bandwidth. Datagram networks can't really handle congestion in the middle of the network. Virtual circuit networks can. Which is why, in the early 1970s, it looked like virtual circuit networks were the future. Even the original ARPANET had node to node flow control.

The Tymnet "backbone" was originally only 2400 to 4800 baud, so they had major lag problems. To help with this, they used local echo when possible, so local typing didn't lag. You'd type in a line, and at the end of the line, the whole line went across the network. The connection could shift from local to remote echo seamlessly.

(Telnet, for the Internet, can do local echo, too, but Berkeley didn't put that in their BSD Telnet, so it fell out of use as network bandwidth increased. That worked in pre-BSD UNET, and echo would be local until you used some program, such as "vi", which enabled "raw mode".)

Here's a summary of the Tymnet technology.[1]

[1] http://cap-lore.com/Tymnet/TOCN.html

howard9413• 2 years ago

Telenet as you'll recall was a competitor. I used it to get into NJIT's EIES system, another terrific mulituser platform. Telenet seemed to perform better than Tymnet, with less jitter.

Both Telenet and IIRC Tymnet were portals into The Source which preceded CIS.

kragen14• 2 years ago

eventually there were telenet and the source, yes

newobj• 2 years ago

clicked into the thread just to see if ppl mentioned tymnet and telenet

what up fellow olds

worstspotgain• 2 years ago

Telenet and Tymnet were the main US X.25 networks. [1] X.25 was the global standard packet-switched network that preceded the Internet. It was mostly B2B, as it was pay-by-the-minute plus pay-by-the-packet, plus of course the cost of the modem phone call if any.

Access to some of the X.25 networks was easily hacked, as there was almost no cybercrime back then outside of teenagers. In some cases, there was only a logon code - no password at all. I remember a network where the code was just a short-ish number, so it could be easily mined via brute-force search. The modem bank would disconnect you after X failed attempts, but you could just dial back in right away (there was no caller ID either.)

X.25 had hosts called Outdials in most area codes that would let you make a local modem call back out for no extra charge, as long as it was toll-free. [2] This was a way to avoid expensive long-distance BBS calls, particularly if you were using a mined X.25 logon. The latency was pretty bad but the connection could be much more reliable than a modem on a noisy long-distance line.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X.25

[2] https://github.com/maestron/hacking-tutorials/blob/master/Ba...

stonethrowaway• 2 years ago

Is there a pack of AOL, CompuServe, Prodigy, Shaw etc CDs as coasters one can buy nowadays? There must be an Atari E.T.-scale landfill of them somewhere. Asking for a friend.

NegativeLatency• 2 years ago

I liked when they’d come on floppies. You could rewrite it after taping the hole and get a free disk.

op00to3• 2 years ago

When I was a kid, I called up AOL and asked them for 1,000 floppy kits. For Reasons. They never questioned me, and they were fairly reliable and I never really had to buy disks again.

jll292• 2 years ago

For 5 1/4" disks, you could double capacity by using a punch to cut a whole into one border and then use the back side - et viola, from 140 kB to 2x 140 kB.

But you had better not punch into the actual magnetic floppy disk inside its plastic enclosure, or you may have killed the whole thing.

fecal_henge2• 2 years ago

I remember (AOL I think) you could request trial CDs delivered to any address. No checks were made on either the name of the recipient or about the quantity of disks ordered. I'm guessing I was about 14.

devmor• 2 years ago

Yep! I did the same thing - ordered enough of them to keep my relatively destitute family online without paying an internet bill.

Dad had to pay for a phone bill, but we got internet on top of that free of charge thanks to AOL. And of course, whenever we were done with one of the CDs it got taped to my bedroom ceiling, reflective side down.

illwrks• 2 years ago

There's a great TV show called "Halt And Catch Fire" that parallels the development of the tech industry, including what I think may be a nod to CompuServe mentioned in the article. It's only four seasons, it has some fantastic characters, excellent writing and is thoroughly enjoyable. It's fresh in my mind as I've only just rewatched it!

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2543312/

Clubber• 2 years ago

I've seen it and it's good. Thanks for reminding me, I'll watch it again.

EvanAnderson2• 2 years ago

I'd say "Mutiny" is a nod to Habitat, too.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habitat_(video_game)

EarlKing4• 2 years ago

Kinda. It's sort of a mix of Habitat and PlayNET/QuantumLink... more the latter than the former.

jll292• 2 years ago

I fully second that, this is a must-see for any geek, much more so than e.g. War Games.

"Halt and Catch Fire" (HCF) often is jargon that refers to documented or undocumented opcodes or code sequences that leads the CPU to crash:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halt_and_Catch_Fire_(computing...

With a hat tip to all Commodore C64/MOS650 enthusiasts, I shall end this post with my favourite HCF sequence: 4C 10 7E.

_Happy watching!_

sillywalk4• 2 years ago

I recall BeOS had is_computer_on_fire()

double is_computer_on_fire();

Returns the temperature of the motherboard if the computer is currently on fire. Smoldering doesn't count. If the computer isn't on fire, the function returns some other value.

( https://www.haiku-os.org/legacy-docs/bebook/TheKernelKit_Sys...)

kragen14• 2 years ago

not 'crash', which for computers refers to a temporary halt to operations which can be resumed by rebooting. an hcf is more like a car crash: something that physically damages the processor. like, if you have a microcontroller with four pins wired together to give you more drive current, if you drive two of them low and two high, you are likely to have an hcf

albeebe1• 2 years ago

The first $5 i ever made online was on Compuserve. I was walking home from school (i think 1994) and i found a used Boston Bruins ticket stub on the ground. I put it on the classifieds section and sold it. The buyer sent me a $5 bill in the mail.

meow_catrix• 2 years ago

Cheap alibi

op00to3• 2 years ago

I can still remember my CompuServe ID. I wonder why they had the curious pattern of xxxxx,xxx.

I miss Prodigy as well. Both excellent services in different ways.

mattw21212• 2 years ago

As far as I know, the ID was reflective of the user ID format for the PDP-10's it ran on.

JonAtkinson• 2 years ago

My Compuserve username is permanently burned into my brain: 100131,756. And my password was the wonderfully evocative "spite:ambush".

howard9413• 2 years ago

Username, yes, 75006,702. But not the password. It was a decent password though. I didn't pick it.

TheOtherHobbes• 2 years ago

Compuserve ran on DEC PDP-10s. The login ID format on TOPS-10 was programmer#,project# (octal).

op00to3• 2 years ago

Very cool! Thank you.

kmoser2• 2 years ago

Still have this info kicking around on my computer:

  COMPUSERVE:
  Modem: (800) FINDCIS  [host name = "phone"]
  Phone: (800) 848-8990  [tech support]
         (800) 848-8199  Sales (toll-free) 8am-10pm M-F
         (617) 457-0802  Sales (direct)
    BBS: (212) 608-6021  [local NYC access number]

rmason• 2 years ago

Bought my first PC and ordered it with a brand new 'high speed' 1200 baud modem specifically so I could join CompuServe. It was my introduction to a new online world and I never regretted it.

timr• 2 years ago

For years, there was a Commodore 64 in COSI (the science museum) in Columbus, OH, connected to CompuServe. I was fascinated with that thing as a kid -- it was this window into a parallel world that I didn't really understand, but immediately understood in a sort of a Snow Crash way. Looking back, it's quaint, but such a harbinger of the future!

supportengineer• 2 years ago

I feel like that was better than what we have now.

icedchai2• 2 years ago

CompuServe was the first system I called when I got a modem, back in 1987. I remember being amazed by their multi-user CB chat. Eventually, I found some local BBSes and stopped calling...

sandymcmurray• 2 years ago

You paid by the minute to connect to CompuServe. I eventually found free software - shared in the CompuServe forums - that would dial up, collect messages from threads you had marked offline, then hang up your modem so you could read and reply at your leisure. This was my first exposure to shareware and a huge $$ saving. I contacted the developer and offered to pay him for this and he replied with, "No thanks. Just pay it forward." A couple of great lessons there.

SpaceNoodled• 2 years ago

Do you recall who that was? Name & fame?

rqtwteye• 2 years ago

I think I had a software called wigwam.

cdchn3• 2 years ago

A lot of BBSes especially those that had FidoNet or similar distributed message boards let you download all the message boards as QWK packets and software like Blue Link and others. It was a great feature. Reading/replying to boards offline was a much nicer experience, in addition to the cost savings.

EDIT: and as another bit of random trivia the guy who invented QWK format died of a heart attack after being swatted by an 18 year old who was after his @Tennessee twitter username.

cbozeman• 2 years ago

DIT: and as another bit of random trivia the guy who invented QWK format died of a heart attack after being swatted by an 18 year old who was after his @Tennessee twitter username.

That username should be permanently retired and the 18 year old prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law for crimes which the law would or could hold him or her accountable.

loloquwowndueo• 2 years ago

Was it Blue link or Blue Wave?

A lot of us used SLMR (silly little mail reader) instead as it was cheaper than blue wave.

ghaff3• 2 years ago

Even free/subscription BBSs often involved pretty expensive per-minute phone charges. Intrastate in the US could actually cost more than interstate. Phone calls were expensive historically. Maybe more than $1/minute except for very local in today's currency.

Compuserve also had different rates depending on the baud rate you connected at.

Having a computer and getting online was a pretty expensive hobby in the 80s and early 90s.

kragen14• 2 years ago

also fidonet itself worked like this; at mail hour, or when you asked it to, your node would dial up other nodes to exchange mail with them. you could set up a 'point' that was like a mini-node, not listed in the node list, that only talked to one full-fledged node.

andrelaszlo• 2 years ago

the guy who invented QWK format died of a heart attack after being swatted by an 18 year old who was after his @Tennessee twitter username.

Very sad story. https://krebsonsecurity.com/2021/07/serial-swatter-who-cause...

chgs• 2 years ago

In the U.K. you paid by the minute for phone calls too. That’s on top of tue per minute compuserve charge and the monthly charge.

While the extra charges ok top of the phone we’re slowly removed, the genral per monute phone costs remained well into the late 90s and the gradual rollout of broadband (512k adsl)

onemoresoop• 2 years ago

I remember those times as well, I remember using Listserv quite a bit, sending the Listserv commands while offline, composing emails/replying to emails and then connecting briefly to the mail server. And yes, the phone was paid by the minute, it wasn't very cheap so I'd try to lower the usage as much as I could. And then there were the BBS-es where I'd spend the time limit (I think it was 30 minutes) when I could find a line that wasn't busy...

kmoser2• 2 years ago

I discovered that if you were still connected when your account expired, you wouldn't get kicked off. I remember connecting just before the end of a trial period and staying up into the wee hours (well past the 12 midnight expiration time) downloading tons of Commodore 64 sound files.

ohjeez• 2 years ago

Initially called Zapcis, Howard Benner released the new shareware version as TAPCIS, which IIRC cost $35 to register. Worth every penny because I was paying long distance rates to access CompuServe, with phone bills regularly exceeding $250/month. (There were a few competitors, such as OZCIS.)

Far beyond automation, TAPCIS had messaging features that I wish I had today, particularly as sysop/moderator. For instance, if a message thread unraveled (as they do), and the conversation wandered from "snow tires two or four?" to "favorite radio stations"... the sysop could type Ctrl-S and snip into a new thread with a more suitable title. I WANT THIS EVERY SINGLE DAY.

genericacct• 2 years ago

they can be credited with inventing e-commerce imho...

jasonjayr• 2 years ago

It is mindblowing just how much Prodigy ( Sears, IBM, CBS) fumbled before Amazon (and others) climbed it's way to the ecommerce throne:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prodigy_(online_service)

Sears had the logistics, the mail-order catalog, the retail partnerships, IBM had the tech stack, and they put this all together in the 80s.

mopenstein• 2 years ago

I thought about Sears and Montgomery Wards catalog business and how they shuttered it in favor of storefronts in malls and shopping centers. Had they held out another decade or so, they'd have been in the perfect position to dominate online commerce.

kragen14• 2 years ago

that was probably tymshare too

fractallyte• 2 years ago

My CompuServe email address is still working!

miki123211• 2 years ago

Compulserve was the first Walled garden.

I find it very interesting that we went from people mostly being on Compulserve, to AOL, to Yahoo and the concept of integrated portals, to a bunch of small websites strewn around the internet, and then back to a few social networks. All that happened organically, with no antitrust scrutiny or regulatory changes (beyond the commercialization of the internet) that I know of.

hollerith2• 2 years ago

My guess is that a big part of why the social networks took over as much as they have is that the average non-technical person did not like the thousands of small web sites: every web site is a snowflake, and if you make web sites for a living, then the differences between them tend to be interesting, but to the average non-technical person, the differences tend to be confusing or at least a little distracting or annoying, is my guess.

EarlKing4• 2 years ago

It's a combination of things really. Part of it was not being able to discover new content (Google notwithstanding, since Google is good for finding things when you know what you want, while social media feeds you things you didn't even know you wanted). The other part was not being able to talk back or otherwise iterate on what people had published in a way that others could see it easily. Finally, it comes down to money... people wanted to make money and social media (and yes, I count Youtube among social media in its earliest incarnation) made it a lot easier to do that.

Despite this, people are departing existing aggregators and social media for SIGs to get around the spam, the screeching, and general annoyance... so we're probably going to see a more balanced network over the next decade... because making money isn't everything.

dredmorbius• 2 years ago

That narrative entirely omits that small niggling detail that the extant FAANG monopolies (and precursors and successors) haven't fought like hell to achieve that domination.

AOL in the 1990s was the single largest consumer of CDROMs, which it mailed out by the billions. I recall walking into a US post office sometime in that period to find every level surface stacked a foot or more deep in the things.

<https://www.vox.com/2015/5/12/8594049/aol-free-trial-cds>

<https://www.internethistorypodcast.com/2014/08/she-gave-the-...>

MySpace was killed, though less by Facebook than Google, according to Tim Vanderhook, CEO of Viant, which bought MySpace in 2011:

<https://petapixel.com/2024/08/30/myspace-ceo-facebook-didnt-...>

Facebook itself has spent tens of billions of dollars buying up competition, most notoriously Whatsapp:

<https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/charliewarzel/why-faceb...>

Amazon crushed its own competition, including Diapers.com and Zappos, either driving them out of business or acquiring them, or both.

Diapers.com: <https://slate.com/technology/2013/10/amazon-book-how-jeff-be...>

Zappos: <https://www.fastcompany.com/1314670/amazon-buys-zappos-847-m...>

If your point is that antitrust regulators were asleep at the switch (or worse), yes.

If your point is that this growth was somehow "organic" ... well, I'd like a look at your dictionary, because this was absolutely engineered.

dctoedt• 2 years ago

I hadn't thought about my CompuServe ID in many years and wasn't sure I remembered it, but Google-searching it revealed exactly one hit, with three mentions, the first being from January 1990, when I uploaded something: "EMACS keyboard mapping for Word Perfect 5.x. Not complete implementation; please pass along any enhancements you make. Freeware - no warranties, no royalties, enjoy."

http://annex.retroarchive.org/cdrom/640_studio_ii/INFO/IBMAP...

jghn4• 2 years ago

My Compuserve ID & ICQ ID are burned into my brain. Yet I can barely remember my childhood phone number!

jalk• 2 years ago

Was it connecting the world 45 years ago, or was it just the US and perhaps Canada?

harrisonpage• 2 years ago

76424,1020

bongothrowaway• 2 years ago

My father used the CB simulator, but I was more inclined to use the chat features they added to the popular forums. I met my partner of more than 25 years in one of those. Good memories.

mannyv• 2 years ago

70365,1426

ncrtower• 2 years ago

75160,3375 was my ID. It was like magic, connecting over POTS through a burbling modem to a massively powerful mainframe.

whyenot2• 2 years ago

It used to be $6/hour (adjust for inflation, would now be about $18/hr). How do I know this? Because as a teenager, my dad let me use his account to play a multiplayer game called Island of Kesmai that was available through CompuServe, and I ended up putting hundreds of dollars on his credit card (and got in a lot of trouble). I worked as a page at my local public library in order to make enough money that I could pay him back, which itself led to a life-long love of books and reading. In the end, it was an important life lesson about moderation and personal responsibility.

Competitors to CompuServe were even more expensive. GEnie was $9/hr, and Byte Information Exchange (BIX) was $12, and I think at the start was even higher.

SapporoChris• 2 years ago

If I recall correctly it was $6/hour during their off times. Which was after hours on weekdays, weekends and holidays. During the work day I think it was $30 dollars.

whyenot2• 2 years ago

I don't remember that part, but I guess it was a good thing I was in school during work hours.

jghn4• 2 years ago

It also depended on baud rate. I remember2400 was cheaper than 9600

ryanstewart• 2 years ago

Thanks for sharing this story. Similar situation, but I think Compuserve had moved to monthly billing at that point, so this was about dial-up access. We lived in Wyoming and there wasn't a local Compuserve number for us to dial into, so we had to use a 1-800 number that charged by the time you used it. The first month we had access, I would sneak downstairs most nights and dial in to play around. I don't remember what I had to do to work off the bill, but my parents were not happy. It helped start me on a path to a tech career, though.

jghn4• 2 years ago

It was possible to get a free account in that time period. However most of those games were blocked for free accounts.

asdefghyk• 2 years ago

Compuserve Magazine - only 19 issues at https://archive.org/details/compuservemagazine Seems very low number - I thought it was published for much longer .....?

neallindsay• 2 years ago

Even though CompuServe was mostly gone by the time I moved here, its influence on the Columbus tech scene is still felt. You can draw lots of fuzzy cause-and-effect lines from Compuserve to the huge data center boom we are having right now.

wkat4242• 2 years ago

Well, America mostly. It was available in Holland but nobody used it because it was too expensive and American-centric. And we didn't like big companies here back then (I wish we still didn't but Holland has become very neoliberal)

They used to stick free installer CDs in every computer magazine but the takeup was really low.

Fidonet was way more popular here. And in France minitel but it was a bit of an outlier in Europe.

jimmar• 2 years ago

CompuServe was my first experience connecting to the online world. I remember the "free parts" and the "per minute charge" parts. Young me thought that if I stayed in the "per minute charge" areas less than 60 seconds, it was free. It was not, and dad raised his eyebrows at the bill I generated that month.

EMM_386• 2 years ago

British Legends

I was obsessed with that MUD on CompuServe.

My father had a second phone line at home for work and I'd log in on that line.

Then the bill came in. Something ridiculous for at the time. Hundreds of dollars.

He walks in and says "do you use ... CompuServe?".

"Yes, I like this game that it has"

"Ok, sorry but you can't play that game anymore"

Oh well.

So later I went on to run a dual-node BBS and I could play TradeWars. Not quite the same. Still was cool.

homarp• 2 years ago

For example Fractint was first developed on compuserve by the "stone soup group" https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg13117834-200-review-f...

dividuum• 2 years ago

After recently reading about Fracint somewhere and now seeing this, it very likely confirms that this was the program my dad downloaded from CompuServe and used to render images over night on our 286. Thanks for the link :)

ergonaught• 2 years ago

I first got online with CompuServe, on a Vic 20 (22 column screen), in the early 80s. Still have quite positive memories of my time there, before I discovered the local BBS scene and all that came out of that.

gandalfian• 2 years ago

Always find it weird that we rejected compuserve and AOL yet ended up all using Facebook....

threeio• 2 years ago

god explaining how much I racked up with CompuServe to my parents was hard as a kid... and then long distance later on when I found a free unix shell I could connect into.. ahhhh those were the days :)

Jemm• 2 years ago

Damn CompuServe took so much of my income.

wrs• 2 years ago

I used to make my own plane reservations using the CompuServe SABRE gateway. Normal people just couldn’t comprehend this.

(At that time, youngsters, the normal thing was to use a travel agent because the only other way to compare fares was to call each airline individually on the phone. The agent did this using their very expensive SABRE terminal.)

doublerabbit• 2 years ago

I never had internet until I was 13, 2000, but CompuServ was always bundled with the Windows 95 companion disc with the game Hover!

While I could never connect to; however you could launch the browser GUI of buttons upon buttons which always left me excited.

The days where you were excited to get a 512mb memory stick for xmas or a new graphics card are long gone, it's sad now that technology nowadays are just a rehash.

There was always something special about AGP but maybe because i'm an adult rather than an edgy teen it's just not the same.

Surprised my boss at work today when I told him I wanted to work on the Solaris boxes.

flynumber• 2 years ago

and the https://www.compuserve.com/ site is still up, stuck in the 90's.

DaoVeles• 2 years ago

I have been trying to find an article I saw years ago that I have not been able to find since. It was about the folks who are trying to grab as much of the stored CompuServe data from peoples computers. It cached some of its stuff on the HDD and they are hoping that get as much of it as possible before it hits the rubbish tip or the drives die.

endemic• 2 years ago

Maybe https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/07/where...? Though this article is about Prodigy.

daemonhorn• 2 years ago

70004,562, and 70006,621, and 72375,1271. Bonus points if you remember the types of the first two.

HumblyTossed• 2 years ago

I used it until my parents realized how expensive it could get.

Back to BBSs.

pjmlp• 2 years ago

Memories of all those magazine articles with compuserve notes on where to further discuss the article contents, or get erratas.

45 years ago CompuServe connected the world before the World Wide Web

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