CompuServe Forums Are Still A Thing, But Not For Long

Status
Not open for further replies.
WHOA WHOA WHOA! Whomever wrote that goodby note fails to realize how many decades CompuServe has really been around. The Forums have been there for around 40+ years.... And this was before the general public knew about the Internet.... and you paid a premium for faster dialup connections.
 

plateLunch

Honorable
Mar 31, 2017
89
29
10,560
Wow. The forums are still around? I used to spend my entire evenings on them, using a special program to download topics and postings to minimize my connect time. Still have my Compuserve email address.
 

bit_user

Polypheme
Ambassador
First, I thought CompuServe was (like AoL) a sort of walled-garden alternative to the Internet. Towards the end, like AoL (but earlier, I think), they provided internet access. But once you had usenet, the web, and proper email, who needed any CompuServe or AoL stuff. By the mid-90's it was already regarded as being like the internet for noobs.


Yeah, wow. I seriously had no idea.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CompuServe
 
I didn't get online until 1995 and Mindspring was my first ISP. It was about the same time the company I was working for at the time also got web access for workstations. I had a room mate at the time as starving college grads, and he used to see the guys developing Mindspring in Georgia Tech's computer labs. It was an awesome time to experience a new frontier being developed which would change the world forever (giving every household affordable internet access).
 


Before AOL, there was also Delphi. I think it hung on a little longer than some of the original CompuServe competition.
 

gangrel

Distinguished
Jun 4, 2012
553
0
19,060
I remember Delphi, barely. Used to spend quite a bit of time on AOL, but yeah, its days were fundamentally numbered when the web really started to come online.

It's not all that surprising that it hung on forever, in some ways, as the cost to maintain just that, probably isn't very high. For example, my old ISP shut its doors a long time ago, but the web site is still there, and that email address still works. It's almost 100% junk mail, but it's still there.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.

TRENDING THREADS