When I first got online in 1994 or so, the World Wide Web was in full flower but had yet to obscure other efforts to bring people together on the Internet. CompuServe was among them, and even then was surprisingly durable: it was founded in 1969, offered to enthusiasts in 1979, and survived to be eaten by prevailing competitor AOL after its more successful advance into the web age. At NPR, Michael De Bonis published a fascinating retrospective.
"They were giant computers. They'd be like having 10 refrigerators stacked next to each other," Baker said. "It had flashing lights. They had spinning tape reels."
Baker said the company's data processing business was doing very well in the late 1970's.
"It was serving some of the largest corporations in the country. But, you know, we still had those large mainframe computers that sat relatively idle in the evenings," Baker said. … On September 24, 1979, CompuServe launched its online service for consumers.
Quoted is my old boss at WIRED, Dylan Tweney: "For a lot of people, CompuServe was a connection to the world and their first introduction to the idea that their computer could be more than a computer. It was a communications device, an information device."
There used to be a CompuServe magazine. Look at those slab serifs.
