[HN Gopher] 45 years ago CompuServe connected the world before t...
___________________________________________________________________
45 years ago CompuServe connected the world before the World Wide
Web
Author : ohjeez
Score : 112 points
Date : 2024-09-24 17:27 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.wosu.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.wosu.org)
| mattw2121 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Any time I get the urge to complain about my kids Roblox usage
| I remember this ^ and bite my tongue :-)
| SoftTalker wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Famous enough to be one of the thru-lines for season 3 of Halt
| and Catch Fire.
| sillywalk wrote:
| I believe the same is also true for GEnie.
| kragen wrote:
| 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
| sillywalk wrote:
| Thanks for the link. For those who prefer to read, there is a
| transcript[0].
|
| [0]
| https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/20...
| kragen wrote:
| thank you! i should have posted that
| Animats wrote:
| 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
| kragen wrote:
| > _Oh, Norm Hardy 's wife._
|
| she has some funny stories in that interview about people
| saying things like that :)
|
| but in this interview she's not talking about his work
| except briefly; she's talking about her own
|
| she goes into some detail on the history of the evolution
| of the tymshare systems you're describing in that
| interview, though not as much as i had hoped. they
| continued evolving after la roy's article. thanks for
| posting a link to it!
| howard941 wrote:
| 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.
| kragen wrote:
| eventually there were telenet and the source, yes
| newobj wrote:
| clicked into the thread just to see if ppl mentioned tymnet
| and telenet
|
| what up fellow olds
| kragen wrote:
| today? i've been watching the sun rise, benchmarking
| fibonacci in tcl, designing analog electronics, trying out
| zulip, helping ukrainians build rf jammers, listening to
| 80s music, building a database of historical bar data from
| financial markets, and watching an episode of skibidi
| toilet. how about you?
| howard941 wrote:
| hey there graybeard. we made it to 2024! thought I'd die
| before I got old.
| worstspotgain wrote:
| 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...
| icedchai wrote:
| I got involved near the tail end of the x.25 era, over 30
| years ago now. I remember connecting to QSD, Lutzifer, and
| some other less well known systems. I also wrote my own
| Telenet "war dialing" tools that would scan for other stuff
| to connect to. Exciting times for a teenager!
| stonethrowaway wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I liked when they'd come on floppies. You could rewrite it
| after taping the hole and get a free disk.
| op00to wrote:
| 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.
| acheron wrote:
| Similar story here.. At one point Intuit would send you a
| demo of Quickbooks on 7 or so floppies, so a friend called
| up and requested X demos and we split up the resulting
| disks. I was still saving college papers and projects on
| old Quickbooks disks many years later.
| jll29 wrote:
| 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_henge wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| fecal_henge wrote:
| Thats a productive use but we ordered hundreds of cds to
| people we knew with profanities in the name fields.
| illwrks wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I've seen it and it's good. Thanks for reminding me, I'll watch
| it again.
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| I'd say "Mutiny" is a nod to Habitat, too.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habitat_(video_game)
| EarlKing wrote:
| Kinda. It's sort of a mix of Habitat and
| PlayNET/QuantumLink... more the latter than the former.
| jll29 wrote:
| 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!_
| sillywalk wrote:
| 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...)
| kragen wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Cheap alibi
| op00to wrote:
| 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.
| mattw2121 wrote:
| As far as I know, the ID was reflective of the user ID format
| for the PDP-10's it ran on.
| JonAtkinson wrote:
| My Compuserve username is permanently burned into my brain:
| 100131,756. And my password was the wonderfully evocative
| "spite:ambush".
| howard941 wrote:
| Username, yes, 75006,702. But not the password. It was a
| decent password though. I didn't pick it.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| Compuserve ran on DEC PDP-10s. The login ID format on TOPS-10
| was programmer#,project# (octal).
| kmoser wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I feel like that was better than what we have now.
| icedchai wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Do you recall who that was? Name & fame?
| rqtwteye wrote:
| I think I had a software called wigwam.
| cdchn wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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.
| cdchn wrote:
| The swatter got 5 years in prison. The maximum allowed by
| law. https://krebsonsecurity.com/2021/07/serial-swatter-
| who-cause...
| mmmlinux wrote:
| Only got 5 years for that and a number of other similar
| harassment related incidents.
| loloquwowndueo wrote:
| 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.
| cdchn wrote:
| Blue Wave it was. There was another one I think it was
| QWKlink or something, too.
| ghaff wrote:
| 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.
| kragen wrote:
| intracity was usually free though in the us
| ghaff wrote:
| It was not in the period I'm talking about. Your local
| calling area--maybe some adjacent exchanges/towns--was
| free but for me to call Boston from about an hour west
| was decidedly not free in the late 80s. Mileage may have
| varied of course.
|
| And when cellular came in, I deliberately picked an area
| code based on the people I was most likely to call.
| kragen wrote:
| right, late 80s. where i lived at the time (albuquerque
| or socorro) the local calling area was a whole city or
| group of nearby towns, but if you were to drive in any
| direction for an hour you'd be out in the middle of the
| wilderness, so it doesn't sound like your situation was
| actually different
| ghaff wrote:
| At the time I was in a reasonably far out suburb and
| there really weren't local BBSs of note. Certainly not
| wilderness but close to an hour out of Boston. May have
| been a couple of local BBSs but they'd have been one or
| two line operations.
| kragen wrote:
| yeah, almost all were in albuquerque
| EarlKing wrote:
| It really depended on the era and what area you were in.
| After the breakup of the Bell System, flat-rate areas
| (Zone 1 calling) spread across the RBOCs, but ultimately
| that still meant that metropolitan areas tended to
| benefit more than rural areas. The SF Bay Area was a
| prime example of this where the East Bay arguably had one
| of the best LATAs around that could reach dozens of
| bulletin boards.
|
| Hopefully more Fidonet archives turn up in the coming
| years so people can understand what things were like back
| then. Ditto Compuserve... which, if I understand
| correctly, a large collection of documents relating
| thereto was acquired by the Internet Archive and awaits
| processing.
| kragen wrote:
| even in albuquerque i could reach dozens of bbses though
| kragen wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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...
| buildsjets wrote:
| Sounds like the criminal was due to be released recently.
|
| https://x.com/textfiles/status/1782588930535150067
| chgs wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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...
| kmoser wrote:
| 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.
| genericacct wrote:
| they can be credited with inventing e-commerce imho...
| jasonjayr wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| kragen wrote:
| that was probably tymshare too
| fractallyte wrote:
| My CompuServe email address is still working!
| miki123211 wrote:
| 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.
| hollerith wrote:
| 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.
| EarlKing wrote:
| 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.
| dctoedt wrote:
| 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...
| jalk wrote:
| Was it connecting the world 45 years ago, or was it just the US
| and perhaps Canada?
| harrisonpage wrote:
| 76424,1020
| bongothrowaway wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 70365,1426
| ncrtower wrote:
| 75160,3375 was my ID. It was like magic, connecting over POTS
| through a burbling modem to a massively powerful mainframe.
| whyenot wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| whyenot wrote:
| I don't remember that part, but I guess it was a good thing I
| was in school during work hours.
| ryanstewart wrote:
| 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.
| asdefghyk wrote:
| Compuserve Magazine - only 19 issues at
| https://archive.org/details/compuservemagazine Seems very low
| number - I thought it was published for much longer .....?
| neallindsay wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| For example Fractint was first developed on compuserve by the
| "stone soup group"
| https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg13117834-200-review-f...
| ergonaught wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Always find it weird that we rejected compuserve and AOL yet
| ended up all using Facebook....
| threeio wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Damn CompuServe took so much of my income.
| wrs wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| DaoVeles wrote:
| 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.
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