CompuServe's Forums Are Closing On December 15 (fastcompany.com)

harrymcc writes: In the era before the web, the forums on CompuServe were indispensable for everything from getting tech questions answered to chatting about movies. They still exist, albeit in diminished form. But Oath, which owns AOL, which owns what's left of CompuServe, is about to finally shut them down. I wrote about the sad news for Fast Company.

Comments

The memories...

[Anonymous Coward]

Downloading ASCII porn on an actual 1200 bps dial-up modem!

Re: The memories...

[Anonymous Coward]

Was thinking dot matrix, same mind!

Re: The memories...

[Anonymous Coward]

Aside from acedemica, the modern internet was driven by pr0n , so flame me all you techies ;)

Re:The memories...

[Anonymous Coward]

1200? You rich SOB, I had 300 (TRS80 Model 1 with acoustic coupler, then Model 100). 1200 required a special equalized line from the phone company - we only had one at the office, on a printer, with all the CRTs on 300.

Re:The memories...

[Ungrounded Lightning]

1200? You rich SOB, I had 300 (TRS80 Model 1 with acoustic coupler, then Model 100).

I had a 300 baud hard-wired modem board (from Carterphone, intended to be mounted in a Teletype machine - and switch a 20 mA current loop.)

Converting the 20 mA loop to TTL was easy because the modem was mostly a switch and a sampling resistor, so a few components did the trick.

300 and 1200 baud were both FSK and used the same frequencies. But 1200 baud switched between them faster. This meant the sidebands (with the information in them) went out farther from the two frequencies, and the high-Q tuned circuits wiped off the modulation on the receiver side. So I modified the modem, reducing the Q of the two tuned circuits by changing the values of the swamping resistors.

I used this thing to get on the UUCP mailnet - from Ann Arbor MI to ihnp4 - a VAX at AT&T's Indian Hill (Napierville Illinois), one of the three original "backbone sites".

Of course I had to pay the long distance bill - which was huge. Fortunately there wasn't a lot of mail back then. (Pre-Spam)

1200 required a special equalized line from the phone company

Actually, if you were within about 3 miles of the switch an ordinary line was fine.

Copper phone lines were designed for voice-only audio, which was only contracted carry up to something under 4 kHz. The stray resistance and capacitance of the phone lines caused the higher frequencies to be selectively attenuated as the lines got longer, causing the frequency response to "roll off", while the stray inductance wasn't enough to compensate. So phone audio got more muffled as you got farther from the switch.

To compensate, the phone company added inductors in series with the lines. These were 88 millihenry double-winding toroids, a "lump" inductance inserted periodically. They flattened the frequence response below their resonance with the line and caused it to fall off sharply, with extreme phase shifting, above the resonance. (They didn't actually amplify, of course. But the DC phone line voltage also dropped with resistive losses. So the phone instruments had some non-linear resistors that adjusted the attenuation (think "volume control"), quieting phones that were nearer the switch, so it all averaged out.)

They had to be inserted starting a quarter-wave of the highest frequency used, every half-wavelength thereafter, and the last one within a quarter wavelength of the far phone. So the first pot of loading coils was inserted about 3 miles from the switch.

Now modems could handle the high-frequency attenuation of the UNloaded lines. But the loading coils fouled things up too badly for them. So for data farther out than the first loading coil you had to pay for a "conditioned" line. This meant that the phone company had to send a lineman out to:
  - Find a line that was in good shape (no leakage, bad connections, little noise coupled from other sources, etc.)
  - Disconnect any loading coils - so the line was a direct connection from your place to wherever it was going, and
  - Put little red rings or caps on the various terminals it connected to on its way (so future linemen wouldn't poke around and screw up your signal when they were working on other phone lines.)

If you happened to be located closer to the central office than the first loading coil, your ordinary line would usually be as good as a "conditioned" one. Get a conditinoed line and you'd be paying the extra bucks just for the pretty red terminal caps and priority on repairs.

Re:The memories...

[Ungrounded Lightning]

300 and 1200 baud were both FSK and used the same frequencies. But 1200 baud switched between them faster.

Oops! No, 1200 was something different.

What I had a 110 baud modem that I converted to 300 baud as described. (110 and 300 WERE just fast and slow FSK between the same pair of frequencies.)

It was intended for direct connection. (So I mounted an earphone jack in a Princess phone that I used for dialing, and plugged the modem in (and hung up, with the modem keeping the line "off hook") once the far modem had answered. That was VERY unofficial in those days, when the instruments were all rented and "foreign attachments" were just working their way through the FCC.)

My bits had to travel at 300 baud on toll lines between Ann Arbor and Indian Hill. (Uphill through the snow both ways.)

Eventually Telebit came out with the first OFDM DSP-based modems (PEP at 1200 baud) and the $1,000 for two modems deal for established network sites - which I was. (My site existed when the names of all the sites that exchanged email fit on three typeset pages.)

Re:The memories...

[lisnter]

I remember our Hayes 300 baud modem that I could tweak to 450(!!!) on compatible BBSs. I wish I could remember my CompuServ number. Long passed into oblivion. . .

Re: The memories...

[Anonymous Coward]

Ahh, so 24-bit, 4K porn images.

Any display that uses pixels is a dot matrix.

Those weren't the days

[ruddk]

When I had to pay an insane minute rate to download software updates. Compuserve had no number at that time in Denmark, so I had to place a call to Sweden(iirc). I remember having 2 CDs from Novell with a searchable knowledge base. :D

Re:Those weren't the days

[ColdWetDog]

Man, they're STILL around? Next thing you'll tell me is that the SCO-IBM case is still a going thing.

Re:Those weren't the days

[ruddk]

No I don't think they have existed for a long time.

Re:Those weren't the days

[barc0001]

Same. No direct dial in Canada so we had to pay to use the Datapac network at a crazy hourly rate on top of the Compuserve hourly rate. Datapac was priced so it was JUST cheaper than direct dialing LD to Compuserve in the US directly. Today's kids will never know the pain of calling someone 100km away and paying $1.25 a minute for the pleasure OR waiting until after 8pm to do it for *only* 25 cents a minute.

Re:Those weren't the days

[Anonymous Coward]

Just in case you weren't joking, here's the link from ten days ago: Appeals Court Rules SCO v IBM case can continue

Re:Those weren't the days

[Anonymous Coward]

While I had to call from Oshawa Ontario Canada and it costs a lot, CRS (Canada Remote Systems) opened in Toronto and I just need to call Toronto on weekends.

Then I could afford to be on the modem for hours over the weekend.

Re:Those weren't the days

[jwhyche]

I didn't do compuserve. I went with Genie instead when the did that $5 after hours deal. I remember the Aladdin software for the old Amiga. It would let you download all the messages from your roundtable, read and answer them off line.

While I haven't thought of compuserve in years, didn't even know they where still around. I guess that would be the last connection to the old BBS days from long ago for me.

Re:Those weren't the days

[jasenj1]

ex-GEnie user here, too.

Discussion boards, online games - with graphics! Eventually access to Usenet.

The graphics have gotten prettier, and UIs fancier, but it's basically all still people having conversations and yammering on about this and that.

Re:Those weren't the days

[BronsCon]

Today's kids will never know the pain of calling someone 100km away and paying $1.25 a minute for the pleasure OR waiting until after 8pm to do it for *only* 25 cents a minute.

Yes they will. Prices of unlimited plans will get jacked up to the point where per-minute plans for lighter users will begin to look attractive again; then they'll return.

Re:Those weren't the days

[barc0001]

Nah, that ship has sailed and is already over the horizon without a radio, no way to call it back. A lot of kids these days don't even use voice. And those that do are also using VOIP messenger apps that will work over wifi as well as the cell network.

Re:Those weren't the days

[jwhyche]

I was still online with Genie the night they turned off the lights. The system just became unresponsive a hour or so later. I expected the modem to drop but it didn't. I was even able to dial in the next day and get a connection but no login in. Sad way to go.

I kept my genie feed even after I hooked my amiga 500 into usenet. I was a news junky at the time, still am, and genie had that AP wirefeed.

Re:Those weren't the days

[sconeu]

Me three. No graphics for me because I had a 1200 baud modem at the time. I was stoked when I went to 9600.

Re:Those weren't the days

[Gr8Apes]

The internet has destroyed this model of billing completely. Until the internet itself is destroyed by regional segmentation and firewalling, there is no mechanism for enforcing even international per minute billing. I can "call" someone anywhere in the world that has a reasonable 1Mbps internet connection, and it's free.

Re:Those weren't the days

[Gavagai80]

Yes they will. Prices of unlimited plans will get jacked up to the point where per-minute plans for lighter users will begin to look attractive again; then they'll return.

I used a pay as you go cell plan a couple years ago. It was 10 cents a minute to call anywhere in the US and Canada, not $1.25.

Re:Those weren't the days

[BronsCon]

I can "call" someone anywhere in the world that has a reasonable 1Mbps internet connection

Assuming whoever you're "calling" uses the same service, which also assumes that service is allowed in their country. Can you Skype or Slack call someone in China?

Re:Those weren't the days

[nospam007]

Same. No direct dial in Canada so we had to pay to use the Datapac network at a crazy hourly rate

Same here, but that‘s why we used offline readers that downloaded everything we needed in a minute or so and then hung up.

Re:Those weren't the days

[nospam007]

Btw my handle was 73613,2257
Paid for by Ashton Tate and later Borland.

Re:Those weren't the days

[CohibaVancouver]

No direct dial in Canada

We did have it by the early 90s in Vancouver. I remember direct-dial to Compuserve to access EasySabre to look up flights.

Used to amaze my travel agent (yeah, we had those back then) by having all the possible routings and flight numbers to hand when I called them.

Re:Those weren't the days

[BronsCon]

Well, they have to remain competitive with the current price of unlimited plans. A lot of people use less than 400 minutes of talk time per month ($40 unlimited plan vs 10 cents per minute), while many fewer use less than 32. Back in the early 2000's when I was actively involved in this industry, the cutoff was about 2 hours and it's been trending downward ever since; if I had to guess it's around an hour now. For someone at or below that threshold, 67 cents per minute is still a deal.

Threshold usage is on the decline, plan prices are ever increasing. Getting back to a $1.25/min price point means the threshold usage dropping to 32min/mo at current plan pricing, unlimited plan pricing increasing $75, or some other combination of threshold usage dropping and plan pricing increasing that results in ( plan_price / threshold_usage = 1.25 ) and competition would have to be stifled; current pricing it about 1/6 of "market ideal" right now only due to competition. Under the above conditions, we might more realistically expect to see 20-25 cents per minute with current levels of competition.

We'll get there, though, don't you worry.

Re:Those weren't the days

[JonnyCalcutta]

But its not just unlimited or metered - those aren't the only choices. At the moment I get 500 minutes for £10 a month (more than enough for my personal and daily sales calls). So that is about 2p a minute - a long way from even 25p (or cents). Perhaps the US is less competitive though?

Re:Those weren't the days

[BronsCon]

Perhaps the US is less competitive though?

There's no "perhaps" about it. We have 4 national providers, everyone else you hear about either has a very limited footprint and buys access from the big 4, or are just off-brands of the big 4 themselves. Seriously.

Re:Those weren't the days

[b0bby]

It's a little less competitive, but there are plenty of cheap pay as you go plans in the US too - like $10 with cals & texts at 5c/minute or each, and good for 90 days - really cheap for a light user. But with facetime/skype etc, no one is going to be gouged like the old days again. My unlimited prepaid plan is $30/month with 5GB fast data which is enough for me.

Re:Those weren't the days

[jwhyche]

I moved up from a 2400 to a 14.400, skipping 9600. Downloads where not only faster but I could expand my sphere of bbs circles. I could finally download from porn sites that might as well been lightyears away.

Re:Those weren't the days

[boristdog]

I used to dream of owning an Amiga.

My Radio Shack Color Computer had a 300 baud modem. Enough to get into all sorts of text arguments that I had no right to be in on the BBSs.

I remember being told that Computers were a dead-end career in the early 80's.

Re:Those weren't the days

[BronsCon]

But with facetime/skype etc, no one is going to be gouged like the old days again.

You'd be surprised how many people would jump on $1.25/min with a $1/mo maintenance fee for a phone that will roam on any network. Not everyone wants a device they carry and use all day, every day; we're actually a minority, we just happen to form the majority here on Slashdot. A lot of the older crowd just want something they can throw in their glove box for emergencies and don't mind paying $20 for airtime if they have to use it to call for help once when the maintenance fee is $12/yr and the alternative costs more than that in a month after taxes.

Verizon used to offer something like that in the early 2000's and I wouldn't be surprised to find out they still do, or that many people I sold it to back then (because it's exactly what they came in asking for -- I hated selling that plan) are still on it. Of course, Verizon's offering lacked the "roam on any network" aspect back then, but it might not anymore.

Re:Those weren't the days

[Scarletdown]

Don't forget the penalty many services had for you having a faster modem as well. Oh my. You have a modem fast enough to cause you to spend less time on our system than those poor slobs with only 1200 or slower? We are going to charge you a higher per minute rate to make up for it.

I think one of the best things that ever happened to those walled garden standalone services was the advent of the Freenet system that was implemented by many libraries across the U.S. which finally gave the general public a taste of the actual Internet. Did they have those up north in Canada as well back then?

Re:Those weren't the days

[Bert64]

When you have unlimited, your more likely to make a casual call...
If there is a per minute cost, especially a high one, you're more likely to think about the cost and not make the call unless its absolutely necessary.
So if you switch from unlimited to per-minute, your usage is actually likely to decrease further.

Re:Those weren't the days

[Anonymous Coward]

I went from 300 to 14.4, then later to the high-speed one.

Interesting side note: one office I worked with had 20 ITT (IBM 3270 clone) terminals and a couple of printers hooked up to the mainframe over a 9600 bps (dedicated line) modem. They were nearly as quick responding as the ones in the main building that ran to the concentrators (and, for a while, the actual mainframe) over coax. The mainframe in the building, though, was secondhand and under-provisioned; when working in the afternoon, I kept an eye on the user count, and when it got to around 60 I'd save and log off - the thing got really squirelly after about 60, and usually crashed before hitting 70. Large compiles, model runs, and print jobs got scheduled for overnight.

Re:Those weren't the days

[Anonymous Coward]

73720,1644

Re:Those weren't the days

[Darinbob]

I did it for about a month. It was pointless when you had access to USENET, and Compuserve was very difficult to use and navigate in comparison to everything else.

Re:Those weren't the days

[BronsCon]

Indeed, which is precisely why I believe we'll see a resurgence of high-cost-per-minute phone plans. For a great many people it just makes sense to pay $1/mo just to maintain a number and agree to an insane rate per minute for the rare instances when they need to make a call away from home. Think phones kept in the glove box in case the car breaks down or given to a young child and configured to only be able to dial 911 and the child's parents. A year of service and 15 minutes of talk time (enough to handle one emergency) would cost less than a month on an unlimited plan, or even a cheaper metered plan, even at $1.25 per minute.

Since the phone will rarely be used, it will incur no notable network load and zero customer service cost beyond the initial sale, so it's basically a free $1/mo per customer on such a plan. And, if the phone does see enough use to incur any meaningful network load or require a call to customer service for any reason, well, at $1.25/min that's easily paid for. It's a win-win, the networks get $1/mo just to maintain a DID which costs them literally nothing and the customer gets relatively cheap security.

Verizon offered a similar plan in the early 2000's, I used to have people come in looking for exactly that and it was, indeed, a win-win. Immensely profitable for the provider and cheap as dirt for the type of user who would want it. I honestly wouldn't be surprised to learn that Verizon still offers it for new lines, or that many of the people who I sold it to a decade and a half ago are still using it. At $12/yr, that's $180 or less than 5 months of unlimited service from T-Mobile; plus usage, of course, which will be low for these users.

Re:Those weren't the days

[ebvwfbw]

That's nuts. Could someone shoot that lawsuit with a silver bullet or something already?

Re:Those weren't the days

[stoatwblr]

"The internet has destroyed this model of billing completely. "

Yup. Those were the days when the telcos decided how much bandwidth you wanted and dictated the terms of everything.

The FLAG cable project was where it changed. Up to that point all the long-haul cables were owned by Telcos and they mostly had cozy agreements based on monopoly control of communications gatewaying out of the country each one was based in. The model was already creaking as telcos struggled to contain demand but when FLAG went live is when the dam broke.

Re:Those weren't the days

[stoatwblr]

You're describing the USA mobile and landline markets, which are NOT competitive environments and are regarded internationally as some of the most restricted in the world.

US Telcos have managed to regain and maintain legislated local monopolies since the breakup of AT&T - in fact the whole thing has reassembled itself quite nicely and specifically to a size and structure where the FTC and FCC won't step in, minus that pesky universal service obligation that was imposed after the antitrust settlements back in the 1930s.

There are _no_ CLECs left in the USA. Landline companies argue that mobiles are an effective competitor, whilst mobile companies are well-cushioned from real competeition and as such have no incentive to reduce prices. On top of that, US mobile consumers still have that crazy setup where they have to pay to _receive_ calls, unlike almost the entire rest of the world.

The simplistic (and valid) explanation for this is "graft". The USA is one of the most bureaucratic environments to work under and large enough payments to the right people really does make things quickly happen the way large companies want - although they call it "lobbying", or "protecting local business"(*) to try and pretend it's something else.

(*) The USA is also one of the most protectionist markets on the planet. "Free trade" does not mean "you can't sell your stuff here, but we have the right to dump our stuff on you" - that's cartel behaviour.

Re:Those weren't the days

[BronsCon]

You're describing the USA mobile and landline markets

I know what I'm describing, thanks.

which are NOT competitive environments and are regarded internationally as some of the most restricted in the world.

Really? I wouldn't have guessed and I certainly didn't mention this elsewhere in the thread...

*sigh*

That said, your information is good and backs up my position, so... thanks, I guess?

Re:Those weren't the days

[grep -v '.*' *]

we had to pay to use the Datapac network at a crazy hourly rate

Then you should have used PC Pursuit , a (probably only US) based thing. For the low, low price of $20 monthly? they gave you nighttime access to their dial-up network. This let you dial into their network and get telnet access to an X.25 pad. There was a table mapping area codes to outgoing sites. You manually connected your local site to a remote site.

Then you were effectively sitting at a Hayes dial-up modem prompt. (Hell it might have BEEN an actual Hayes.) You issued ATD local phone number, waited for the CONNECT prompt (or BUSY, try try again.) and volah! You were magically connected to a remote BBS system. You could use it as much as you wanted over night hours (weekends and 9PM? to 6AM?) Any usage OUTSIDE of that and you'd be dinged for a standard hour charge, more than your monthly subscription.

A problem though was that BBSs were always busy and hard to get into. One guy figured out: connect to your target system and use it like normal. At 6AM, stop all traffic. Don't disconnect, but don't send ANYTHING. There were not keep-alive data prompts, the modems just sat there in their connected 300/1200 synced glory. At night he's use it again until the next sunrise period. Apparently kept a single line busy for two months that way.

And looking at the second link I pasted, if you had two lines you could "call yourself" and drop the real link while keeping the incoming call alive. You then finesse and start controlling the incoming pad as outgoing, upon where you could call most anyplace you wanted.

Learn something new every day.

Oblig

[Anonymous Coward]

I haven't used CompuServe in years. I switched to Prodigy and haven't looked back.

Re:Oblig

[wyHunter]

Better get a mySpace account, too.

Re:Oblig

[Anonymous Coward]

Listen old timer... AOL is where it's at... they got mail and erthing.

Re:Oblig

[sconeu]

Meh... GEnie is where it's at.

Re: Oblig

[fortfive]

Pfft. Younglings. I used âthe sourceâ(TM).

Re:Oblig

[Anonymous Coward]

Was tempted to try GEnie. Less expensive than Compuserve, and we used GEISCO at the office so I was familiar with their underlying system. But by then I had too many connections in Compuserve fora.

Those SC40's

[Miser]

What I wouldn't give to get a copy of the Compuserve software that ran on those SC40's into SIMH.

Compuserve could get resurrected at live again!! :)

Ancient news for nerds?

[sjbe]

In the era before the web, the forums on CompuServe were indispensable for everything from getting tech questions answered to chatting about movies.

Ok hands up if you even gave the briefest thought to CompuServe and their forums in the last 20 years. If you did you are the only one. Honestly I'm kind of shocked anyone was actually maintaining this stuff in any format.

Re:Ancient news for nerds?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok hands up if you even gave the briefest thought to CompuServe and their forums in the last 20 years. If you did you are the only one. Honestly I'm kind of shocked anyone was actually maintaining this stuff in any format.

Technically I had a brief remembrance to them when looking at a bunch of floppies from an old box of computer stuff I was looking at after an estate sale. It also had Windows on Floppy, and a back issue of Byte.

Re:Ancient news for nerds?

[Pseudonym]

I never used CompuServe (difficult in this country) but I thought of them recently when I debated how to pronounce "GIF".

Re:Ancient news for nerds?

[JoshuaZ]

There's a surprisingly large amount of early internet still being maintained, but a lot of it has gone through so many different owners that it isn't even always clear who is responsible for maintaining it. My father had a very old Prodigy.net email address that stopped working this summer (we had warned him that he should switch to something else well before this). He tried to get in touch but it turned out that multiple different companies had bought what remained of Prodigy and despite the fact that he was paying some of them for various other related services, every single one of them claimed that the email was not their responsibility. About 48 hours after this started the email was functioning again, resuming just as mysteriously as it had started. We did manage at that point to convince him to get a Gmail account.

Re:Ancient news for nerds?

[a9db0]

Actually, I have.

I made a group of friends there years ago, some of whom I'm still in touch with, albeit via other means now. Those forums, and some of the friends we had there came up in conversation just the other day.

Hmmm. Perhaps I'll go see if I can dig up an old copy of OzWin and see if it still works. I might even have some of the old forum message threads around...

Re:Ancient news for nerds?

[hackwrench]

I don't know how to get at that information. CompuServe has never turned up in any search results in Google and Bing. Or even back when I was using AltaVista and Lycos.

Re:Ancient news for nerds?

[Anonymous Coward]

Attempts to learn from previous mistakes: None.

Re:Ancient news for nerds?

[Anonymous Coward]

I never used CompuServe (difficult in this country) but I thought of them recently when I debated how to pronounce "GIF".

It's pronounced JIFF dammit. And it's D-ah-S, not D-oh-S for your operating system. Now excuse me while I get back to my WANG minicomputer.

Re:Ancient news for nerds?

[Anonymous Coward]

The robots.txt blocks all crawlers, so that is probably part of it.

Re:Ancient news for nerds?

[Anonymous Coward]

For reasons I can't explain, people who say JIFF annoy me to no end. It's like, I know it doesn't matter, but for effs sake, learn English. The G is for 'graphics', hence by the acronym rule, it's GIF as in 'gift'. And beyond that, just according to the rules of English, there's no trailing 'e' or 'y' to transmute it into a 'j' sound. There is literally no rule in English for it be pronounced in the bastardized way.

D-ah-S I agree with, again, no trailing 'e' to create a hard 'O' sound.

Re:Ancient news for nerds?

[Anonymous Coward]

Gofer

Re:Ancient news for nerds?

[Anonymous Coward]

For reasons I can't explain, people who say JIFF annoy me to no end. It's like, I know it doesn't matter, but for effs sake, learn English. The G is for 'graphics', hence by the acronym rule, it's GIF as in 'gift'. And beyond that, just according to the rules of English, there's no trailing 'e' or 'y' to transmute it into a 'j' sound. There is literally no rule in English for it be pronounced in the bastardized way.

D-ah-S I agree with, again, no trailing 'e' to create a hard 'O' sound.

The hard "G" folks always strike me as pedants who want to be technically correct, despite the fact that they are swimming against the tide. Like it or not, the war was lost decades ago. Now go back under your bridge and complain about the common pronunciation for gin and tonic.

Re:Ancient news for nerds?

[Anonymous Coward]

I prefer a ram and cock

Re: Ancient news for nerds?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yup, war is over, it's pronounced with a hard G.

Re:Ancient news for nerds?

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's not forget that there is actually a .JIF extension out there, even though it didn't gain the level of acceptance that .GIF files did. The only way to tell the two apart is to pronounce .GIF with a hard G, just like it is spelled and that goes along with Graphics Interchange Format, also pronounced with the hard G.

I've pronounced it with the hard G since I first saw the extension in the late 80's when it came out. Never even heard of the jiff pronunciation until fairly recently. Never even occurred to me to pronounce it with a J sound instead of a G sound, it just sounds stupid. It's certainly misleading if you know about the .JIF format, even though that did come along a few years later.
--
Steve (AC because I haven't bothered to register in all these years)

Re:Ancient news for nerds?

[Anonymous Coward]

When CompuServe announced the GIF format to replace RLE, the announcement covered the pronunciation and it was JIFF. Just like it a Jig-a-byte as in Gigantic. I still call it a JIFF and people think I'm talking about peanut butter.

Re:Ancient news for nerds?

[erice]

I was a poor student in Compuserve's heyday. I liked the idea but it was unconscionably expensive so I couldn't really get into it. By the time I had the means to pay for Compu$pend, I had Internet and Usenet so there didn't seem to be a point.

Re:Ancient news for nerds?

[ChrisMaple]

D-aw-S

Re:Ancient news for nerds?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, the "J" sound as in Jigaboo.

Re:Ancient news for nerds?

[Darinbob]

Haven't thought about for over 35 years.

Re:Ancient news for nerds?

[Pseudonym]

And it's D-ah-S, not D-oh-S for your operating system.

Not in an Australian accent, it isn't.

Re:Ancient news for nerds?

[Megane]

Nope. I think about GEnie and AOL from time to time (especially when I find a random AOL CD somewhere), but it's been years since I last thought of Compuserve and its silly octal user IDs. I think I had an account for a few months, but jumped ship to GEnie based on price, and this was the days when GEnie charged extra for 2400 baud.

Also a bit of trivia, (IIRC) GEnie ran on the GECOS operating system, which was responsible for one of the rarely used fields in the Unix passwd file.

Re:Ancient news for nerds?

[laie_techie]

For reasons I can't explain, people who say JIFF annoy me to no end. It's like, I know it doesn't matter, but for effs sake, learn English. The G is for 'graphics', hence by the acronym rule, it's GIF as in 'gift'. And beyond that, just according to the rules of English, there's no trailing 'e' or 'y' to transmute it into a 'j' sound. There is literally no rule in English for it be pronounced in the bastardized way.

D-ah-S I agree with, again, no trailing 'e' to create a hard 'O' sound.

The hard "G" folks always strike me as pedants who want to be technically correct, despite the fact that they are swimming against the tide. Like it or not, the war was lost decades ago. Now go back under your bridge and complain about the common pronunciation for gin and tonic.

I use the hard "G" sound in GIF to distinguish it from the JIFF format.

As a past user of CompuServe forums

[zuki]

Even though I haven't been on there for many years, I must say that it was a pretty incredible feeling when I first got connected to their user community with a 300 baud modem back in May 1984, even traveling around with an acoustic coupler; Generally being able to check in, getting information when I needed it, and participating in so many discussions would just be taken for granted today, but to people of all ages who started connecting back in those early days, it truly felt like the dawn of a new age.

A special mention to Dennis Brothers (70065,127) who had made a Terminal Emulation Program called MacTep available to the community, and without which we wouldn't have been able to get started at all.

I sure hope some of that early stuff stays archived somewhere...

Re:As a past user of CompuServe forums

[daver!west!fmc]

All that early stuff is gone and has been for some years. The "Compuserve Forums" that are today are a pale webby shadow of their ASCII glory.

You can look in on the forums as they are here. I don't think you need to be logged in to read.

I kept paying the $9.95/month to use it for dialup Internet when on the road, and so still have the numeric e-mail address (now approximately an AOL ID with e-mail).

Re:As a past user of CompuServe forums

[p0larity]

Oh neat! The WayBack Machine has a few archives of it starting in 1997: http://web.archive.org/web/201...

BIX in BYTE

[Anonymous Coward]

Reading BIX in printed BYTE was cheaper.

I miss BYTE..

Available in download form

[Anonymous Coward]

Where can I download the Forums? Maybe ship it to me on a 3.5 ?

Re:Available in download form

[foradoxium]

naw man, Compuserve modernized. They'll ship it to you on a Zipdrive.

Re:Available in download form

[Anonymous Coward]

*sigh* Thats the joke slugger.

Re:Available in download form

[Jason Levine]

Ah, Zipdrives. Iomega's attempt to "take over" from the floppy drive. I went to PC Expo back when these were out and there was a big crowd around their booth. All of the people were just rummaging through bins to get various buttons that they were giving away. I still have them hanging on my wall. ("Because I have the biggest light sabre" -- yes, spelled that way, "I gotta get a life", "I've got chills, they're multiplying", "It's my music, I promise", etc.)

Re:Available in download form

[networkBoy]

I had (still have) one of these beasts:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Tucked away in a machine that's almost never on is one of these drives (with a spare in a box).

Sad

[DaMattster]

This is indeed sad news. I first learned about Unix-like operating systems from the Compuserve forums. I had no idea that there was a whole ecosystem devoted to open source computing and tinkering beyond MS-DOS and Windows. Compuserve opened a wealth of information to me. RIP

Re:Sad

[mysidia]

Shutting down these forums in shameful; the cost of running the server aspect of a community-moderated forum site of this size is practically Nil, likely doable for less than $100 a year, otherwise they'd have been turned off long ago....
I can see from some samplings of the the Linux forum that this thing is actually still used, And it looks like a pretty decent Forum system -- likely better than PhpBB bloatware.

Clearly Oath are just being corporate b***trds, otherwise they'd find people in the community to take over the site.

In the era before the INTERNET

[Anonymous Coward]

Compuserve predates public access to the internet. After Compuserve and before the web, people communicated through USENET and IRC. Then there was a brief moment before the web turned into a brochure, but that's hardly significant.

Re:In the era before the INTERNET

[Anonymous Coward]

Compuserve predates public access to the internet. After Compuserve and before the web, people communicated through USENET and IRC. Then there was a brief moment before the web turned into a brochure, but that's hardly significant.

You young kiddies... Back in my day, we used FIDOnet BBS to communicate.

Re:In the era before the INTERNET

[Anonymous Coward]

BBSs did not succeed Compuserve. They were an alternative to Compuserve at the time. The same thing that killed Compuserve also killed BBSs.

Re:In the era before the INTERNET

[Anonymous Coward]

My job issued me a new TRS-80 Model 100 with a free hour of Compserve back the data. I quickly learned the importance of "A/S/L?"

Re:In the era before the INTERNET

[StormReaver]

After Compuserve and before the web, people communicated through USENET and IRC.

Then there was the very real reason why CompuServe was unaffectionately know as Compu$pend: The monthly bills that would be quickly racked up were mind-boggling. Fortunately, there was FidoNet for BBS's. It served as an adequate, almost always free, alternative. It wasn't perfect, but I vastly preferred it over CompuServe.

Frankly, I'm shocked that CompuServe lasted this long.

Re:In the era before the INTERNET

[Scarletdown]

We all know that it was Internet that killed them both (along with the video stars).

Re:In the era before the INTERNET

[Megane]

I knew it as Compu$lurp, but the main point is that it predated Microsoft with the changing the S to a dollar sign meme.

Re:In the era before the INTERNET

[RockDoctor]

(along with the video stars).

RADIO stars. It was video that killed the radio stars.

And AOL effectively killed the Compuserve forums within a couple of years of them buying the system. That would have been about 2005 - long enough ago that I struggle to remember when I cancelled my account.

Re:In the era before the INTERNET

[Scarletdown]

Watched the linked video. That explains why I posted the way I did.

Re:In the era before the INTERNET

[RockDoctor]

I assumed that you were linking to something original, not some imitation stealing the original work.

Re:In the era before the INTERNET

[Scarletdown]

You do understand the concept of tributes and parodies, yes?

Re:In the era before the INTERNET

[RockDoctor]

As a variant on "waste of time", yes.

Former 74020,3224

[CharlieG]

Met many a great person over on MSLangs, and the Crafts forums
Was a Section Leader on a few forms, but was never a "wizop"

Re:Former 74020,3224

[TheFakeTimCook]

Met many a great person over on MSLangs, and the Crafts forums
Was a Section Leader on a few forms, but was never a "wizop"

Man, that was my first exposure to C-Serve, too!

I still have my Model 100, athough by now the NiCd batteries are probably long-toast...

Re:Former 74020,3224

[CharlieG]

I was one of the developers on the "Lurker" project when VB1 first came out. We were writing a Windows version of Tapcis. I was responsible for reading TAPCIS compatible data files, and displaying them, and writing back TAPCIS compatible outbound files. I got MY part working. The folks who had to do the stuff that actually talked to the CI$ servers never did their part

They killed it long ago.

[whoever57]

The Compuserve forums don't seem to have a functioning search and all agents are blocked by their robots.txt.

What did the people running the site expect? Traffic when no one can discover the site?

Whoever made the boneheaded decision to put this in their robots.txt file killed the forums:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

Re:They killed it long ago.

[Anonymous Coward]

Right, because everyone knows that it is mandatory to follow the robots.txt file. Just like I'm sure to follow RFC 3514 with my port scanning. But in all seriousness, the Internet Archive reversed their long-standing policy of honoring the robots.txt and I'm pretty sure the "rogue archivists" will disregard it as well.

Re:They killed it long ago.

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry bub, but the Internet Archive continues to honor robots.txt to this day.

Re:They killed it long ago.

[Megane]

The sad part is that they honor it retroactively.

USENET

[Anonymous Coward]

I never used compuserve even back in the 80's and 90's. I was always a big user of usenet newsgroups on various BBS's including my own.

USENET is still going strong, it's just harder to find it for free. But you can if you look hard enough.

Compuserve gave us Jeff

[Anonymous Coward]

Compuserve's ingenious Jeff isn't even limited to 256 colors. By combining multiple 256 color palettes, you can use as many colors in a Jeff as you want.

Re:Compuserve gave us Jeff

[JonnyCalcutta]

Do you mean a Gof?

Re:Compuserve gave us Jeff

[Anonymous Coward]

Is that short for Geoffrey?

Re:Compuserve gave us Jeff

[Anonymous Coward]

Geoffrey only arrived after the Jeff patents expired in 2004.

I still can remember my compuserv ID

[Revek]

Now what did I eat for breakfast this morning.

Re:I still can remember my compuserv ID

[zuki]

Now what did I eat for breakfast this morning.

Ditto on the CompuServe ID, but I also remember what I had for breakfast... LOL

Re:I still can remember my compuserv ID

[Anonymous Coward]

I have the opposite problem: I remember what you ate for breakfast this morning but I still can't recall your Compuserv ID.
Sincerely,
The NSA

Re:I still can remember my compuserv ID

[Scarletdown]

That is nothing. I can still remember our phone number and street address from when I was 5 years old (reaching half a century in a little over 2 months).

None of the other students in my kindergarten class could recite theirs; and because I was able to do it, I was supposed to get to do something special for the police demonstration day that was coming up the next month. I was scared as fuck about that, due to stage fright. But I had a save due to being out of school that entire month with pneumonia.

Re:I still can remember my compuserv ID

[Anonymous Coward]

JUniper 7-9343. And I'm closing in on the 7th decade.

As for Compuserve, it was great when they started allowing internet email. Does anybody else remember the deal they had where send Real US Mail as email - printed out at a PO, then dropped in an envelope and delivered? Might have been a coop thing with Western Union, which did Mailgrams at the time too.

I switched to Real Internet (at 1200 baud! And later those magic 44K bps (usually netting around 25-30K) modems!) around the time Compuserve was bought by AOL. I would have nothing to do with AOL.

Re:I still can remember my compuserv ID

[laing]

[72175,1425] I haven't used it in over 35 years.

Re:I still can remember my compuserv ID

[Anonymous Coward]

[72310,272] here...

Re:I still can remember my compuserv ID

[Anonymous Coward]

My [i.e., my parents] phone number used to be 690.

To dial the next village, you had to use a (5-digit) area code, and then another 3 of 4 digit number depending on the size of the village.

Re:I still can remember my compuserv ID

[grep -v '.*' *]

*THIS*. Me too.

Oh wait, that was AOL.

I forgot I had compuserve account!

[k6mfw]

Better drag out my acoustic modem that takes the Model 500 handset (got it at kludge sale for $5). I could only afford the 300 baud, I was not rich like you 1200 baud guys. I enjoyed it immensely, even got to do electronic mail. I also was able to get detailed news of Shuttle flight 41C. Someone was kind enough to devote tons of time to get latest space news compiled in a single text file (decades before spaceref, NASAwatch, etc). Took some time to download but was very convenient since none of us had access to the UPI/AP wire and a Model 33 Teletype. Then the UPI found out and put a stop to it.

Actually last time I logged in was in 1996, there was a website that you can look up people that had compuserve accounts. Ah yes, them were the days.

oath, oauth, oats

[Anonymous Coward]

Oath is an actual company name. I swear on my oats.

Bye. ..off to watch some syfy channel.

Old Compuserve

[AlanObject]

Are they still running those PDP-10s? Would be amazing to see if they are.

Even if the whole lot of them could be replaced by a couple of smallish VMs running on a laptop somewhere.

Re:Old Compuserve

[Anne Thwacks]

My Christmas present to myself is going to be an old laptop set up to run Simh as a PDP10 with Tops10 - a real TOAD! I believe a Core2 will comfortably outperform a real PDP10, and ASR33s are not really all that convenient in the bedroom late at night. (LA120's are also not great if your OS wants some sleep- yes, I have tried).

Re:Old Compuserve

[Megane]

(LA120's are also not great if your OS wants some sleep- yes, I have tried)

It took me way too many seconds to imagine how a Decwriter could keep your operating system from sleeping. Perhaps you meant SO?

72545,1572

[zeke7237]

n/c

Blast from the past

[Anonymous Coward]

CompuServe Wow haven't heard that name for a while. Always a good option over AOL especially if you knew how to navigate the old web. Might say it was sort of the geek portal back then.

450 baud was the king.

[Anonymous Coward]

It was the same per-minute rate as 300 baud, but 50% faster. That's for the folks who couldn't afford 1200 baud, which of course was most people. They were rare modems, and hard to get as the mfr's didn't really see the need for them once 1200-4800-9600 baud modems came out.

I remember when...

[used2win32]

I remember when I worked for CompuServe as a support person. Odd software, LOTS of information in the forums, weird modem settings, etc... The thing I liked best, a free unlimited use account. I mostly used CompuServe as an ISP and went all over the Internet on their dime. Saved tons of money. Had access to those special areas in CIM that were extra cost. Some of those were hundreds of dollars to get in and use. Don't miss it at all.

Took me a few minutes to remember my old ID

[oh-dark-thirty]

76057,2411 signing off forever...

The other thing about CIS's forums...

[Maury Markowitz]

I used CIS forums for doing tech support for our users and doing update announcements and uploads. The thing that always made CIS the go-to place for this was NavCIS. It was like Blue Wave or QWK for CIS - you clicked a button and it went and got all your email and subscribed forums, downloaded any files you selected, uploaded any you had waiting, sent replies to email and forums, and logged off. It was fantastic, I did the daily support runs in maybe 2 minutes a day online time, often less.

No, this isn't the CIM, which was more like an AOL-ish interface that kept you online. This was a power-user tool sold separately.

Re:The other thing about CIS's forums...

[JonnyCalcutta]

That was pretty much how I used the Internet after I moved on from CIS. Dialed a national number (no local access) then waited for email upload/download and usenet sync. After my first £200 phone bill I decided to trim my Usenet newsgroups to a minimum.

The reason for Oath is what???

[DarkOx]

What is the reason for Oath?

I mean so far it seems to be a place for Verizon to stick all their under performing acquisitions or divisions of them anyway. Oath certainly isn't building brands like its mission statement would imply, it looks more like a place where good brands without many assets behind them go to die!

Is this anything other than an entity setup where the parent company Verizon can 'invest' in so it can show some losses to offset their other gains until they can find a sucker to pawn these properties off on?

Re:The reason for Oath is what???

[daver!west!fmc]

I think it's mostly a place for the webmail divisions of AOL and Yahoo to fight over whose users don't get to migrate to the other legacy code base. And maybe for Verizon to threaten AT&T with that sort of thing, given that AT&T is still using Yahoo Mail as its webmail provider.

Re:The reason for Oath is what???

[Megane]

More than that, AT&T is also using them for outbound SMTP. They used to have their own SMTP servers that relayed for customer IP addresses. Now you have to authenticate, and much more annoyingly, it requires you to go through a (Yahoo) web configuration page to allow other From: addresses in outbound mail.

MySpace? Is that like GeoCities?

[Anonymous Coward]

Lemme ask my pals on WBS chat if they've heard about it.

News for old geeks...

[sgage]

I was a member of CIS from 1981 to 1992, when one of those 'ISP' thingies set up shop in my neighborhood. In that time, I was also active in various BBSes, especially FidoNet (I was a point node).

Some of the forums were just fantastic, and you could find tech support for just about anything. Yes, it was stupid expensive, but as mentioned above you could use a program to swoop in, check your mail, and new msgs on the fora. I used a thing called Recon that worked very well - really kept costs down.

Anyway, it was a lot of fun for a long time, in a very exciting time for microcomputers. I rode it from 300 bps to 14400 bps. Wow.

So, good night CompuServe. I guess this is 70441,2660 signing out...

Sad to see it go, shutdown rather pointless

[Eravnrekaree]

I am surprised about how much Oath has been closing. It seems, mainly for show. I really doubt that AIM or Compuserve Forums were consuming many resources, given they could be/are moved onto a cloud server that is shared with other systems. Things could be set up so it costs near nothing to run them. It really is sad that they are shutting these things down, and pretty pointless.

I used compuserve for a few years. They had some interesting features, such as being able to login with PPP via the GO PPP command and then launch the online service over the internet to gateway.compuserve.com. This way you could use it as an actual ISP with your own dialer and PPP implementation. The WinCIM client had a very unique feel to it that I have fond memories of, it was quirky thing.

Remember that Compuserve Classic was closed down many years ago, this was Compuserves own protocols such as the Host Micro Interface protocol. Compuserve had a failed project called Red Dog which was an HTML based user interface used in Compuserve 3.0. Since it lacked some UI functionality, this was still pre web-2.0 and web browsers were pretty primative, they switched back to the traditional HMI based system . Compuserve tried to break into AOLs market with Wow. But it was too little, too late. At that time, broadband Internet was around the corner, which with cable company monopolies over distribution, the online services were locked out.

Compuserve, also did not remain competitive with other services, Prodigy had better pricing, as did AOL. It didnt make much difference in the long run as broadband did them all in.

Eternal September

[DivineKnight]

Eternal September is coming to an end? Might be time to break out the NNTP client, and check out Usenet.

Re:Eternal September

[stoatwblr]

You beat me to it. I was thinking the same thing.

12/15/2017.

[antdude]

AOL shuts down its AIM, Star Wars: The Last Jedi premieres in USA, and now this. What else?