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!

Oblig

[Anonymous Coward]

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

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

[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.

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: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: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.

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: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:Available in download form

[foradoxium]

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

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.

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"

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: /

I still can remember my compuserv ID

[Revek]

Now what did I eat for breakfast this morning.

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.

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.

Took me a few minutes to remember my old ID

[oh-dark-thirty]

76057,2411 signing off forever...

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.