Farewell, CompuServe
It is a bit with sadness that I hear of the demise of CompuServe today… Back in 1989 (at the age of 15) I ended up getting an account on CompuServe, I spent an entire summer on there suffering severe jetlag, as the majority of people weren’t in Germany but in the US.
I also, fondly I might add, remember that I pissed some guy who showed up in a German forum with his Doctor Title proudly attached to his username. I dressed him down as it struck me as “show offish” and didn’t quite fit in the online world of CompuServe (and a little while later NewsGroups).
This, kids, was before the Internet Browser came along. It was an age where you were using command line tools to even navigate through CompuServe. Later on they came out with a Windows client that made things a bit easier, but I mostly used the command line edition as it was more flexible… Yeah, even back then, before I met Linux I was more interested in typing my way around the networks than clicking on buttons.
The end of CompuServe is somewhat bitter sweet to me. I left CompuServe after AOL bought them out, things changed, and not for the better. It ranks in there with the FIDO network for me, another thing I used heavily in the late 1980s early 1990s to “find my way around”. I guess most people who will end up reading this will have no idea what FIDO or even a BBS was, but back then, it was THE thing. You wanted warez? You got access through friends to a BBS, you wanted to send emails, you got something that was connected to FIDO.
My local FIDO note was part of the MausNet (Link in German) network in Germany, more precisely, Stuttgart II. I actually knew the SysOp who ran it literally out of his parents basement and we ended up playing Magic and a few other things. he also drove an old Mercedes with a Star Trek Sticker on it (“My other vehicle is a Starship”).
I just notice they still have a website up: maus.net.
It’s odd really, I haven’t used CompuServe or a BBS in a long long time, and yet, I look back at this and I just realize how much fun these were. We “abused” the German ISDN protocol, as we had figured out that via the data channel (the one that transmits the caller ID and other connection info) we were able to keep data flowing without having to pay for the connection. In Germany you had to pay by “unit”. Before they privatized the telephone business and turned it into the Telekom there was a “day rate” and an “evening rate”, but the data channel wasn’t part of that, so I was able to keep a connection (albeit at only 5K/s) open 24/7 without getting dinged… Good times I’d say 
It was also before the masses started discovering the Internet, the tone was different…
In the mid nineties I switched over to a local ISP, back then the Internet in Germany was still mostly run by the Universities. The cool thing about this was that there were only a dozen or so peering points in the German Internet and I ended up knowing every single admin of these notes. If something didn’t route right I was able to talk to them and get the problem fixed. No crap of calling up a clueless tech support person, I was able to go straight to the source (literally).
I also knew the senior SysAdmin at the University Stuttgart who was also (at that time) the “owner” of the Stuttgart peering point, I was several times in the server room “touching” the Internet….
Yeah, I admit I miss the times. As fucked up as CompuServe became after the takeover by AOL (and AOLs invasion of NewsGroups, I remember that one too), the Internet was still mostly left to a few people….
Am I a snob for thinking back those times? Yeah, probably. There are many good things that a broader acceptance of the Internet has brought, the problem is, in my estimate, we don’t use it.
So yes, sorry to hear that CompuServe has gone the way of the Dodo, I had good times there, I had a good time on the internet back then in general, these days? Signal to Noise is clearly in favour of the noise…. Sad.
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I had a CServe account too back in the previous century. It was clunky and quirky but it was also a lot of fun.