I found this little epilog for CompuServe today.It was a big deal back in the 1980's, though. It was before the internet could be used for personal business, and well before the World Wide Web. There was only direct dialup into widely scattered servers.
But the list of servers you could dial into on a local number, even here in Worcester, was almost endless. One of this area's most heavily trafficked sites was in Millbury. It was called "Davey Jones Locker" and people uploaded just about everything that you could possibly want. In the end, the FBI shut down DJL on a plea deal for copyright infringement, and according the guy who ran it, never gave him back his hardware.
When I bought my Commodore-64, it came with a 90 day free trial for CompuServe.CompuServe was the first place you could dial into and find a national repository of user written software for the Commodore computers. Everything was written in BASIC, and it was how a lot of people first got into programming.
It was also the first server system I ended up paying a monthly fee for. Everything else was free, all you had to do was find the telephone number and dial in. No user accounts, no log-ins, no fees. It was total anarchy back then. I kept my CompuServe account for about two years before I finally had no reason to continue using it. Why pay a monthly fee when the internet began to open up and dialup access was free?
I'm surprised that CompuServe lasted as long as it did.
2 comments:
LOL I didn't have Compuserve in the 80's, but I remember having one of their numeric e-mail addresses in the early 90's. Remember those? 145345.2453245@compuserve.com
Yup, and it didn't even seem weird at all... just cumbersome.
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