What Happened to Compuserve? (dfarq.homeip.net)

15 pointsby jnorda day ago6 comments

FrankWilhoit 21 hours ago

I was there. What killed Compuserve was an attempt to build an entire back-end infrastructure, software and hardware, de novo, using immature consumer-grade technology. It was a shocking thing to witness from the inside. The pivot from proprietary to open-standard was not the problem. The problem was trying to build a software ecosystem in which no one knew what they were doing and the OS (Windows NT) didn't work yet, and to populate a data center with almost-but-not-quite redundant commmodity compute and networking. Came time for the big relaunch ("WOW!") and for every person who succeeded in signing up for the new service, ten others tried and failed. No one could come back from that.

imglorp 15 hours ago

I'm most curious what happened to the Compuserve server software, and could some of it be resurrected as an interactive exhibit?

Some paper was preserved by CHM: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30848845

FrankWilhoit 15 hours ago

There is a guy on YouTube playing with SC-40s who has part of the TOPS-10 based stack, which I guess is what you mean. The Internetty stuff went by the umbrella name of HMI (Host-Micro Interface) and was guarded like the recipe for Coca-Cola. The boundary between the server and client was...fractal. Everything was about saving/spoofing bandwidth. The "browser", WinCIM, contained a huge library of UI element templates.

imglorp 13 hours ago

Found some photos of the SC-40 deal at bitsavers.

https://bitsavers.org/pdf/compuserve/

Ooh, and these SC-40s have compuserve tags and a stack of disks! I hope someone preserved the data.

https://onlineonly.christies.com/s/firsts-history-computing-...

p_l 11 hours ago

AFAIK SC-40 were all made for CompuServe, and effectively by CompuServe

neverartful 18 hours ago

Good times! I was 75060,264 and I used software called Golden Compass on os/2 to connect, post my messages, and retrieve new messages.