CompuServe was still alive! It’s dead now.

I thought CompuServe was long dead.

Turns out, it was still running until a few days ago! It’s just been officially shut down. There are still people with CompuServe email addresses, apparently they’ll continue to function.

I’m sure I have my old CompuServe user ID around. I think I was one of a very small number of people who actually used an OS/2 CompuServe client!

In honor of the passing of an era, some threads from a web discussion I came across. The last is the most amazing …

CompuServe Requiem » Basex Blog »

…The CIS addresses were octal - digits ranged only from 0 to 7. Mine was 70014,2316…

… they were properly “programmer/project numbers” (PPNs), intended to identify who was working on what software project.

the idea of having ever assigned such an arcane nomenclature to ordinary, frequently non-technical users was an absurdity from the beginning. and it caused no end of difficulty when the time came (1987) to gateway CServe email to The Greater Out Here — that damnable embedded comma was a huge source of confusion for users…

.. Yes, the origin of CompuServe user IDs were TOPS-10* PPNs. A pair of octal half-word (18 bit) unsigned integers. The CompuServe Information Service started as a way to sell excess computer time on the timesharing systems that were used by businesses during the day. The Information Service eventually took over the company…

… The PC software was originally developed by a user to make interfacing to the DECsystem-10* command line a little easier. While they (and their partners) developed some great ideas, they failed to sufficiently invest in both marketing and user interface development which allowed AOL to come from nowhere, flood the marketplace with free floppies, and dominate the market in very short order. Being owned by H&R Block at that crucial juncture didn’t help, either…

*TOPS-10 was the operating system, DECsystem-10 was the hardware (36-bit word with a settable byte-size)…

… Up until they did this, I was still paying a legacy $2.50/mth fee for Compuserve and my old account could still log in to the service at gateway.compuserve.com via telnet.

You could not do much in there of course anymore, but I was also once a sysop, and I still knew how to get into the PRO area, do directory listings of their hard drives (and see files with dates dating back to the 70’s), and with that knowledge run some of the old apps from the command line (like biorythms, and some adventure games), and even things like TE2TRN.EXE (the program that allowed the TI-99/4A TE2 cartridge to transfer files from Compuserve…

… It is true that you can no longer use the PPNs to access the forums on Compuserve, but there are still quite a few of them there. A few even have rather large numbers of messages per day still, though most are pretty small now. But anyone can access the forums, using any browser, and can participate in the forums as much as he/she wishes. You are required to have a ’screen name’ which can be an AIM name, an AOL name, or a Netscape name….

BUT - many of the old forums continue to exist and to serve the small number of people who come. I’m still in the Genealogy Forum and the Vintage Computers Forum. Many of the sysops you all knew are still there…

So until recently, there were still people posting on the CompuServe forums. There's a good eulogy here as well. I wonder if Facebook will last as long as CompuServe.