Long before the advent of the Internet and the World Wide Web, there were other ways to go online, with Ohio-based CompuServe being the first to offer a consumer-oriented service on September 24, 1979. In an article by [Michael De Bonis] a listener-submitted question to WOSU’s Curious Cbus is answered, interspersed with recollections of former users of the service. So what was CompuServe’s contribution to society that was so important that the state of Ohio gave historical status to the building that once housed this company?
The history of CompuServe and the consumer-facing services which it would develop started in 1969, when it was a timesharing and remote access service for businesses who wanted to buy some time on the PDP-10s that Golden United Life Insurance as the company’s subsidiary used. CompuServe divested in 1975 to become its own, NASDAQ-listed company. As noted in the article, while selling timeshares to businesses went well, after business hours they would have these big computer systems sitting mostly idly. This was developed by 1979 into a plan to give consumers with their newfangled microcomputers like the TRS-80 access.
Originally called MicroNet and marketed by Radio Shack, the service offered the CompuServe menu to users when they logged in, giving access to features like email, weather, stock quotes, online shipping and booking of airline tickets, as well as online forums and interactive text games.
Later renamed to CompuServe Information Service (CIS), it remained competitive with competitors like AOL and Prodigy until the mid-90s, even buying one competitor called The Source. Ultimately it was the rise of Internet and the WWW that would close the door on this chapter of computing history, even as for CompuServe users this new Internet age would have felt very familiar, indeed.
I wish they would open source the software
I remember using a Radio Shack Color Computer with a dialup modem … originally when all that was available was a Hayes 300 baud unit … to access phone based bulletin boards (information files and text-based games) even before CompuServe, but eventually I subscribed to CompuServe because I could access international sites and information by dialing a local number, whereas to do the same via the bulletin boards often required an international phone call.
I subscribed to my first internet service in early 1987 via a local guy in Scottsdale who started with a couple of servers out of his garage and was eventually bought out by Primenet. I still remember with amazement accessing my first website … it was hosted by an individual located in Russia (with a Russian URL) and described what really happened at Chernobyl. I was staggered by what I was seeing on my screen.
Speaking of TRS CoCo computers, there’s an interactive CompuServe demo diskette.
It contains a demo tour of text-based CompuServe of the mid-80s.
Here you can read a bit about things like the then-new Ghostbusters movie and other stuff! ;)
Btw, CompuServe had used the hires image format in the TRS-80 Color Computer days.
That was before it moved to using CompuServe GIF in the late 80s.
There are a few hires (RLE) pictures that have survived, though.
https://planetcalc.com/8626/
I started on Q-Link with my C64 and 300 bps modem. For comparison, Ubuntu takes me about 15 minutes to download over my 50Mbit DSL. If I were to download the same thing over my C64 (and assuming I do have the overpriced hard drive with enough space), it would have taken my C64 and 300 bps modem about 5.25 years to download the same copy of Ubuntu.
FWIW Q-Link reformed and became AOL in late 90s. It was also part of Game Link modem for Atari 2600, you downloaded game ROM to play in early 80s
There’s a reason 300 Baud modems were so popular back then.
The Commodore C64 was doing ASCII in software and had issues with handling 1200 Baud reliably.
When using C64 Kernal, it ran out of buffers at 1200 Baud, causing lost characters.
There’s a workaround by setting manual baud rate, but it’s extra work.
See https://tinyurl.com/323ahd34
That’s why manuals of other serial port devices of the day, such as amateur radio TNCs (PK-64, PK-232 etc) did recommend setting baud rate to 300 Baud for C64, even if VHF Packet Radio at 1200 Baud was used (TNC has to heavily buffer data here).
To give an idea, the slowest connection speed used by BTX service in my country was 1200/75 Baud (down, up) using official DBT-03 modem.
That modem was a little beige box housing a first generation microcontroller. No data compression whatsoever. It was made in early 80s.
Acoustic couplers with both 300 and 1200 Baud setting were common in the 80s.
Some had an 2400 Baud setting, even (Dataphon 2400 B etc). These were the more advanced models.
300 Baud (or 110 Baud, yikes!) acoustic couplers were the bulky, simple ones using a wooden box, for example.
*it was doing RS-232 protocol in software, I mean.
The user port had some pins left that could be used for RS-232.
It was using TTL, though. A few transistors or a MAX232 were needed to interface RS-232 level devices.
That being said, the timings for 1200 Baud stored in C64 Kernal were off. They did match 1198 Baud, rather.
1488’s and 1489’s, baby! we’d have to wait ’till the late 80’s for the max232 to come out.
There was a software serial port option for the TRS-80 Model I where you plugged it into the cassette port; also 300 bps limited. Don’t know how reliable it was since I had the hardware serial port.
Thanks, man! I’ve found an article about the MAX232.
https://www.edn.com/max232-the-classic-ic-lives-on-since-1988/
Why would you want to do that? Ubuntu wouldn’t run on your Commodore 64 anyway.
My main memory of CIS was that it charged by time online. Not sure of the cost, but near the end of CIS it was frightfully expensive. To address this we used software that we would configure for what we had an interest for (various discussion groups (BBS/Forums ish) and email. The software would connect, download new updates to those groups and disconnect. We could then read the content offline, write any replies or posts. It would then connect and upload our new content and then disconnect. The actual online billed time could be reduced to a fraction of what it would have costs to read messages while connected. Don’t miss RS-232 protocol and slow modems.
I think I remember paying $6/hour for CIS, solely to use its “chatrooms” to arrange local dates. Fittingly, I (much) later, in 1999, met my wife on Match.com.
Great, two posts here today that brings back memories, and reminds me of my mortality. Thanks a lot.
My Dad allowed me use of his credit card for CIS and GEnie, but had issues with time spent tying up the line and Ma Bell’s bill. Later found a way around the latter.
As a former user, this was a fond memory. Thanks.
Fun times at 300 bps! It got expensive, though, using, say Tymnet, so I didn’t develop a habit. That would have to wait for BBSs.
I love that the ad depicts a TRS-80 Model I displaying a graphic that it natively had no capability of showing.
BBS could be expensive with the long distance calls.
I remember the days of 110 baud through my acoustic coupled modem on my model 1. Later I went in to run my own BBS using TBBS (The Bread Board System by Phil Becker) with 3 phone lines. I also was a heavy CompuServe user as well. I guess us “oldsters” will have to update the “walk to school uphill in the snow both ways story”… to…” when I was your age I had to press numbers on a keyboard to get to parts on the Internet because there were no mice or touchscreens….and there were no videos or music….oh and in school we wrote in cursive !”
This article was great to read about the past….now excuse me I still have time left on my 100 hours free AOL CD.
I still remember by CompuServe ID: 75576,1500
Spent hours on the fiction writing forums, especially.
And amazed my family when my uncle and I were exchanging electronic mail before most of the general public had even heard of it.
72706,614 here. CompuServe’s CB Simulator, Special Interest Groups, classified ads, SABRE allowing airline reservations, DJIA stock ticker, etc delivered an end-user experience that the Internet would take a decade to recreate.
+1 on SaBRE. Once I discovered that, there was no going back to brick&mortar travel agencies.
Sigh I completely forgot about the CompuServe ID system and what I was assigned but I believe it had to have been a 76xxx series ID based on when my dad first showed me how to go online. It was so awesome to me that I could talk to other people through this box that I also played games on. Fond memories of Super Solvers and Math blaster and SimAnt because my computer was a 286 clone and couldn’t handle stuff like duke or doom; not to mention my parents would’ve probably freaked out at seeing me getting headshots at a young age! 😆
+1
CompuServe was also very popular as an e-mail provider.
Not only in the US, but also overseas. Too many of the foreign users it was the most appealing aspect of CompuServe, maybe.
Many readme files from 80s/early 90s era software had an numeric CompuServe e-mail adress being included.
I remember seeing them when I was using Norton Commander as a text viewer on my PC back in the day.
My first job post BS degree was working at Compuserve in a small R&D center they set up in Tucson Az. It was run by the two technical founders Doug Chinook and John Golz. They were brilliant Ph.D.s from the UofA (advisor G. Korn). It was such a great learning environment where I was pushed to design a sort of high speed serial card (but it was 8-bit parallel) to network their PDP-11s in the datacenter, refactor their assembly language network code (printout thickness about 8in), and design a floating-point add-subtract unit (they were trying to build their own PDP-10 clone). Doug and John wrote their own custom OS and the commercial customers developed their apps in it (locking themselves in!).
Great anecdote. Doug was going through the assembly language code for their login process. He noticed a line without a comment (which was against their code practices). What did that one line of added code do? It was “branch on -1”. It turned out that if you entered the password “<<<<<” that triggered this branch and logged you in !! They modified the code to catch whoever inserted this SINGLE ASSEMBLY INSTRUCTION into the code and fired a guy. If he had only put in a comment….
Wow CompuServe. “Internet” access anyway in the world.
On Supra 28.8k external modem.
Ah, yes, Compuserve. Memories of monthly connect time charges that were more than my apartment rent at the time! 1987-ish.
I’m glad we’ve moved on from those days. Sure it was fun at the time, but I have no nostalgia whatsoever for then.
The thing is that being online back then was an adventure, something special. An escape from reality. It was a hideout, a place to meet others with similar interests.
Nowadays, being online is being expected, it’s almost an requirement.
It’s a dystopia, almost. Many of us who escaped into cyber space back then are now wishing to go back to the analog world.
So it’s at least questionable if nowadays situation is really so great.
The balance between offline/online life seems off, at least.
I seem to recall their chat service included a lot of CBisms that also bled over to IRC, like “handles”, “channels”, etc. I was only on it for a month or so, though. I ended up mostly spending my time on AOL, though, I think mostly because they were cheaper where I was, until finally switching over to a dial-up ISP once the web started to really take off.
CompuServe and CompuServe WOW!, AOL, AT&T WorldNet… I managed IT in a call center that did tech support for all 4 of these back in the day. Could get free accounts to any of them them just by bribing the appropriate project manager. And, with the proper persuasion, you could convince WIn95’s Dial-Up-Networking to use any of them as dial-up SLIP or PPP interfaces to the Internet.
I had both AOL and Compuserve accounts in 1993-4 to expand my world beyond the various MacOS-centric BBSes I haunted. After moving to another city, I realized about all I was using them for was as a WWW proxy, and ditched them for an ISP.
71156,1354 here, about 40 years ago…
The building is still there.
Ohio gives historical status to building that once housed internet service pioneer CompuServe
https://www.news-herald.com/2023/12/24/ohio-gives-historical-status-to-building-that-once-housed-internet-service-pioneer-compuserve/
Off of Henderson Road in Columbus. (One street over from the Microcenter on Bethel Rd.)
PS
“It’s pronounced JIF.” ;)