CompuServe begins offering a dial-up online information service to consumers.
The company opened in 1969, providing dial-up computer timesharing to businesses. It grew into a solid business that supplied online data to corporations. Offering the service to consumers was a bit risky in 1979, when personal computers still seemed like a wild and crazy idea to most people. Launched as MicroNET in 1979 and sold through Radio Shack, the service became surprisingly popular, thanks perhaps to Radio Shack’s Tandy Model 100 computers, which were portable, rugged writing machines that dovetailed nicely with the 300-baud information service.
MicroNET was renamed CompuServe Information Service in 1980, around the time it began offering online newspapers, starting with the Columbus (Ohio) Dispatch. But it was chat that people used most. The CB Simulator was one of the first online real-time chat programs in the world, and CompuServe users loved it. CompuServe added a wealth of other features: stock quotes, weather reports, forums, even airplane-ticket booking. And, of course, there was e-mail, which CompuServe apparently trademarked as Email. CompuServe e-mail addresses were a strange collection of octal digits, like 72241.443@compuserve.com.
CompuServe’s heyday was the early 1990s, when it was the largest and most popular online service in the United States. However, its text-centric interface and by-the-minute fees eventually made it an easy target for AOL, which offered a prettier face and unlimited service for a flat monthly fee. The Internet overtook both services by the late 1990s.
As Internet service providers began offering easy ways to connect, and as resources on the web grew, the closed garden of carefully selected services offered by CompuServe grew less attractive. The consumer service was eventually sold to AOL, which closed the proprietary features in 2009 but still offers a CompuServe-branded monthly ISP.—DT