Comments on: RIP CompuServe, at Least Sort of

By: Ariana Coleman

Ariana Coleman — Tue, 25 May 2010 19:14:51 +0000

My grandpa is also a Baby Boomer and we love him a lot.,:.

By: charlie whitcomb

charlie whitcomb — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 16:27:19 +0000

Harry,

your coverage of Compuserve and the history of laptops and “everything becomes obsolete”, origins of Clippy, “golden age of games” makes me wonder if you work for the Computer History Museum?

This baby boomer loves your stuff.. I’m 65 and find technologizer just the right mix of new and old. keep writing about old stuff – i love it. I’m old to.. but not obsolete (pun was intended)

tip… you should do a story on old error messages

By: G Whiz PC Repair Blog » Blog Archive » CompuServe: A Ground Breaking Online Fades Out After 40 Years

Mon, 06 Jul 2009 12:01:18 +0000

[...] early powerhouse of connecting people online before the era of the web. And at the end of June AOL killed off CompuServe Classic which was the last surviving bit of that service, the only thing now left is a tombstone “web [...]

By: allan

allan — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 09:32:31 +0000

hmm . . .apparently compuserve’s FTP site is still going strong at http://ftp.compuserve.com

it looks like it hasn’t been updated since 2007 but there’s still some cool stuff on there. check out the cindy margolis file in the “communities” folder

By: Bill Sodeman

Bill Sodeman — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 03:49:21 +0000

I was on CIS a lot between 1987 and 1993. After that, I migrated to the Internet – but I missed the people that I met on CompuServe.

I’m on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and other social networks if anyone is looking to reconnect.

By: Hoechstetter Interiors

Hoechstetter Interiors — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 23:57:20 +0000

RIP Compuserve.

I got my online start there in the early 90s, and made a lot of friends I’m still in touch with and close with to this day. Sadly, it’s been largely dead for those of us who were around since early on for a long time, no one is really surprised by this, and I gave up my own account 76300,363 long ago, but it’s sad that the demise is finally this official. There’s really no other substitute for it, and I still miss the closeness and cameraderie we had there.

It’s good to see more familiar names here, though, and gradually popping up here, there, and the other place. I’d invite anyone who isn’t already there to join LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter, as I’ve connected with a lot of the old crowd there. If we knew each other on CIS, please say hello and invite me to join your network!

Wendy Hoechstetter

By: John Alessi

John Alessi — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 22:50:55 +0000

We used to have a CompuServe area for our company support. It was all that before the Internet took off. I can not remember our id.

By: riflessioniquotidiane

riflessioniquotidiane — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 16:00:13 +0000

YES i remember it.
http://riflessioniquotidiane.wordpress.com

By: no

no — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 10:31:27 +0000

I guess I never saw the need for these services. I was always content to access the actual internet. You know.. directly. Then again, I was only about 14 when I first started accessing the internet (and the web, usenet, etc) in 1992-ish.

By: George Brickner

George Brickner — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 03:33:31 +0000

I joined CompuServe as a beta tester about May, ’79.
They opened the doors to paying customers on July 1st, ’79. That’s when I got my PPN 70040,104. The initial service was called MicroNET and was primarily a command line time sharing environment.
About a year later, they launched the CompuServe Information Service with a simplified menu. This was all in ASCII, there were no graphics.

As time passed and they lost market share, they out-sourced the forums to Prospero in 2004. The web UI was a rehash of the DelphiForums UI and not as good.

Once access to the forums were open to the Internet at large, a CIS account was unnecessary and I terminated my 25 year-old Classic account.