Originally published at: Retrospective about Compuserve and the pre-web Internet - Boing Boing
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I spent so much money on Compuserve in the 80s
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I was on CS from about 1995 (76630.2012, IIRC) and what I remember most about it was how much more civil it was, and how much more… I dunno, “intelligent” is probably the wrong word. Maybe it was just the communities I was involved in, but I’ve never seen the like of it since. Everyone’s voice was respected, and even when ideologies clashed, there was no ‘shouting down’ as we see so much today.
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I liked CS. I used a program called TAPCIS or something like that. It automated my downloads and let me read and respond offline, since this was still the day of 1200 baud dial-up and ISP charging by the hour.
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CompuServe was our ISP but then like a year or two later, we had a different local ISP and installed Trumpet Winsock for TCP/IP. CompuServe let you log in via your local ISP connection. And then, here is the kicker, you could launch into a CompuServe exclusive online product through CompuServe and then log out of CompuServe and stay connected to the cool online product and CompuServe couldn’t charge you by the hour for your time anymore cause they didn’t know you were using it.
Saved my parents buckets of money.
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I’m always a little bummed I missed this era of the internet (I was old enough to have taken part, but lived in the middle of nowhere and didn’t have access).
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I used one I made using a ‘super Procomm’ (forget the name)’ and I still spent over 200$ monthly. I tried Tapcis but didn’t like it.
I used to hack my way into Compuserve back in the 80s. I had ways of extending starter packs.
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I think I missed out on compuserve. Not sure why… but my parents got us access to “prodigy” and somehow I stumbled upon BBS’s prior to college when the internet became available to me.
that was the entire internet in the early 90’s. All college students, nerds, and scientists.
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Yeah I think that is what happens to all communities when they get too big. Twitter was amazing in the early years when it was also college students, nerds, and scientists. A certain kind of curious person seeks out new things, and those curious people tend to be smart, decent human beings. But then eventually racist uncle Jim finds his way to the thing, too.
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In about 1985 my boss needed a program that would compute an chart both Least Squares and Demings Regressions. The platform given to me to work on was Lotus Symphony. CompuServe had a forum for coding and I was able to write the whole thing in @Functions. The app survived my RIF and was still in use a few years later. Fast forward into the mid 90’s and I recreated the same app in Lotus 123 for windows using the same language but had the advantage of regression being a built in function. I think that time around I was using ListServs for help. Good times. Good. Times.
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I really enjoyed CompuServe groups at the time. For me, they were much better than a random BBS. Towards the end of its heyday, I remember getting annoyed that so many people were leaving for this dumb Internet thing that had no structure to it and made it impossible to find anything.
Compuserve was available pre-Internet, but that was through local dial-up portals to X.25 networks like Datapac and Tymnet, and … you know what, it was horrible, best forgotten.
Compuserve did eat a competitor before it, in turn, was eaten.
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Oh man there was a period in my life I used to abuse Tymnet and explore the X.25 network. One of my hangouts was 208057040540 (qsd) I was also on Lutz but I can’t quite remember the NUI for that.
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X.25 was such a pain to run a system on. Each connection was basically a collect call billed to the service provider, and it wasn’t really possible to find how much each connection was costing to bill the user accordingly.
We were running a “Canada-wide” multi-user BBS system on it, and then one of our users logged in on New Years to wish everyone the best, from his sailboat, in the Caribbean, using his TRS Model 100 with modem, via ship-to-shore telephone, to a X.25 provider there.
After the nerdgasm of how cool that was, someone (probably me) said “Um, how much more did that connection cost us compared to a local connection, and how do we bill it?” I forget the details, but we had to block international connections to protect against uncontrolled cost spikes.
The Internet is much better.
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Hm…I think it’s highly likely that the sort of issues we see on the net today was the same back then… just that less people were online (meaning lots of less diversity than today’s net), people online probably weren’t chronically online as so many people are today (meaning that even if they had a lot of socialization happening online, it was not the majority of the social interactions), and that people often stayed in their niche communities that skewed their experiences about things like harassment and bigotry online.
I also suspect that the histories written about the era of BBS and the early days of the WWW tend to be written by a very narrow group of people, with specific experiences that they hold in a generally positive light. So, the popular histories tend to down play the social/cultural aspects and prioritize technological development (told in a very teleological way). I don’t think there are many social histories of the early web, and what kind of tensions and problems that arose out of those spaces, how actually egalitarian they were, and how women, LGBQT+ people, and POC experienced those spaces when they were presenting as themselves…
I don’t know, but I think it’s an untold story at this point, given how computing history tends to be told. 
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I fondly remember the thrill of my first chat interactions with strangers in the mid 90s on CompuServe forums. I was really into a paranormal one because of The X-Files. I want to say it was the Encounters forum? I was a punk little kid at the time, and so calling some stranger a fartface who was 1,000 miles away was good fun. So cringe.
The people in the chat had a really interesting reaction to that! They didn’t take the bait, and they didn’t gang up on me. Instead, they were just kinda like, “let me guess, first time on the internet? you’re not going to get very far acting that way. we don’t really do that here. you want to talk about UFOs?”
It really made an impact on me. I remember a few months later some other (presumably) punk kid was calling people fartfaces, and I reacted the same way to them, and the chat went on to being about ghosts again.
Some of the people on that forum were ALWAYS online, and it led to me staying up until 4-5am sometimes, much to my parents’ horror. I remember some forum members who would be pretty open about their story of being disabled and how CompuServe was this sudden new way to get social interaction they had previously not been getting.
I also participated in some of the early graphical chats / virtual worlds. There were huge numbers of users there who were quite expressively Queer (as we might call it today) – avatars that broadcast things well outside of 90s gender norms and lots of avatars engaging in (PG) versions of gay/poly cybersex. Definitely a prototypical Furry-esque culture, too.
Wow, this doesn’t sound entirely appropriate for me at that age in retrospect, LOL.
After a couple-few years, maybe by 1998, I did start to see folks communicating their experiences with harassment around gender/sexuality/etc. in those spaces. Something had changed a bit. It wasn’t really tolerated by the admins or the community, though. Wasn’t cool to be judgmental.
I didn’t participate in ZZT, but folks looking for a different kind of perspective on the past era of these virtual spaces might enjoy the ZZT book by Anna Anthropy.
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As far as I know, there are very few histories of the BBS era. (Which means that there usually won’t be any Wikipedia articles, due to lack of references.)
(My copy is in a box somewhere in the living room, sigh.)
As well, online communities in the 70s are probably lost history, if they weren’t part of the mainline ARPANET/Internet history. They were usually covert use of someone else’s large computer, so when that computer disappeared, poof!
All the English-speaking high schools in Montreal had teletypes connected to a HP2000 minicomputer, and an underground community gradually developed of message boards, chat programs and multiplayer games. We were mostly the whitest nerdboys you ever saw, and our social activities were organizing trips to all go see Wrath of Khan, or The Empire Strikes Back in a group, but it was fun.
When the school board pulled the plug, gone. I imagine that happened elsewhere too.
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That’s what I was thinking… there needs to be, for sure. As I said, probably much of internet history focuses on what is easier to get at, which is institutional aspects, from the most high profile people working within governments or universities from that era, and that deals with the technological end of things rather than the social/cultural.
I’ve not seen that, but should probably see if I can dig up a copy one day in the future.
That’s a real shame. Probably the main way people will be able to access that history is via oral histories, magazines, and whatever people managed to find a way to save from those communities.
The common wisdom that the internetz are 4-evah is really proving to be not very accurate.
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