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

Posted by msmash on from the thanks-for-all-the-fish dept.

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.

8 of 142 comments (clear)

  1. Oblig by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

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

  2. Re:Those weren't the days by ColdWetDog · · Score: 5, Funny

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

    --
    Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
  3. Re:Those weren't the days by barc0001 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  4. As a past user of CompuServe forums by zuki · · Score: 4, Informative

    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...

  5. Re:Those weren't the days by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

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

  6. Sad by DaMattster · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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

  7. In the era before the INTERNET by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

  8. They killed it long ago. by whoever57 · · Score: 3

    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: /

    --
    The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!