“CompuServe, the first commercially successful online and email provider in America, has been shut down by AOL after 30 years of service. The original CompuServe ^aEUR” later renamed CompuServe Classic ^aEUR” was laid to rest July 1, 2009. In a message sent to its remaining subscribers, AOL urged customers sticking with cheap dial-up to move on to the company’s surviving sub-brand ISP, CompuServe 2000.”
Compuserve reminds me of the days when nothing was standard. Remember e-mail addresses like phone numbers, and the British e-mail system that used an exclamation mark. I’m not sure what that system was called so can’t bring up the specifics.
At least that’s one more walled-garden dead. If only AOL would follow suit.
Oh you’re too harsh. CompuServe is from that era of computing that was actually exciting and unknown, when writing in Visual Basic for DOS was awesome, Captain Comic was considered cutting edge and browsing through the shareware catalogs felt like being a kid in a candy shop.
Long live CompuServe, in our memories!
I believe you are thinking of UUCP, Kroc. Unix-to-Unix Copy. It was used worldwide, not just in europe, and used bangs to separate machines in paths. You had to actually give routing information to get something sent to a specific user on a specific machine. like someserver!anothermachine!helf.
quite fun…
Compuserve was decent before AOL took it over. Stupid AOL.