CompuServe is kaput. Wired’s brief obituary notice gets it slightly wrong in reporting that CompuServe user addresses were like
73402,3893
The addresses were in octal form so the one thing they never included was a 9.
I joined in the early 80s when a journalism professor friend of mine and I drove to Columbus to visit. CompuServe was booming at the time, enough for it to want to hire journalists who could do “videotex editing”.
There were excavators outside the windows and oil drum fires over which workers warmed their hands, the entire enterprise being funded by a torrent of money generated by something called the CB Simulator (that’s CB as in CB radio). What is now called a chat room was a novelty then, paid for by the hour and with anonymity assured by the numeric addresses. Free local calls, the growing availability of PCs and modems, and an expanding network of local access points around the country made it possible.
The business of online forums, software downloads and chat rooms got going originally as a way of generating extra revenue at night using idle computer resources of an insurance company.
Wikipedia doesn’t reveal anything about it but CompuServe had an interesting technology strategy. At one point, so I’ve read, more than 90% of the DEC System-10s ever made were running in Compuserve data centers in and around Columbus. These were obsolete computers, no longer in production and useless to anyone else, but like gold dust to CompuServe because they could be pressed into service to run its proprietary software and host ever larger numbers of users. (It later migrated to Windows NT servers).
For about 10 years from the mid 80s to mid 90s CompServe was where you went to get support information on IT. Every hardware and software company from Adobe to Zyxel had a forum where you could post questions, get answers and download software updates.
To minimise time online, and keep the hourly bills down, scripting programs were developed that could dial up and collect and post information as fast as one’s modem could send it.
Offline and in the dark in pre-Internet days in the 80s in Aberdeen I found away to connect with a scripting program and BP’s X.25 packetswitching network (it had taken over Sohio by then). Getting useful answers to questions overnight and from far away, long before Google, was quite a kick. More than that, I couldn’t have done my job without access to it. At that point I opened a corporate account — after all, why should I subsidize an oil company?
A few years later I got a new boss who ran her eye over that and said I don’t think we need this. It was a sign that it was time to move on.
By then Compuserve was setting up overseas. For quite a few years I set traveling colleagues up with Compuserve accounts as a way of getting affordable dial-up connectivity in thousands of places around the world in order for them to exchange email, and of course I did it myself.
Eventually I converted my account to one that cost me $1.50 a month to keep alive and I stopped using it. I did it just to keep my old Compuserve email address alive for a bit longer. It took me years to stop that charge once I decided to let it go, but that’s another story. When I finally got to speak to someone who could do the needful she said
Wow! I’ve never seen an account this old!
Was it 17 years? I’ve forgotten now. I’d had an earlier account too, for a few years. Both had 3 digit suffixes, which only older Compuserve addresses did.
It felt slightly like murder.
Email is still in its 30s but real Internet email, with domain names, dates from only 1985. You’d think a web search on world’s oldest email address would yield a result, but it doesn’t. More than a few of the early domains are dead or moribund.
I did find someone wishing his Compuserve email address a happy 22nd birthday a while back and wondering if anyone had an older address. Mine predated it but had been shut down by then.
Sic transit gloria…
(click the play button)
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