Memoirs of CompuServe

by Jim Scheef

It’s been about five years since I finally canceled my original account, #76137,757. By that time my sysop account was dead as well so it has been some time since I tried to log on to CompuServe. (I still spell it with the capital ‘S’ out of old habits.) When I saw a news item that the last remnants of the CompuServe Information Service (CIS), renamed CompuServe Classic by AOL, had finally closed, I guess the real surprise was that there was still something to close! In the fifteen years that I was active on CompuServe I had fun and made many friends. It was a community. Today I think social networking is the closest thing to providing the same online community, of course without the educational and business parts that are now provided collectively by the Internet.

CompuServe, the online service, (CIS) began in the mid-to late-seventies as a way to make more money from the existing time-sharing service that was used only during business hours. Before this time, the company had offered just raw timesharing beginning in 1969 where the users wrote their own applications. It was these early users who wrote the first forum applications. In the beginning each forum was different. What’s a forum? Well, by the time I started using CompuServe in the mid-eighties, a forum was similar to a BBS (bulletin board system) in that it offered multiple message boards (sort of like the DACS Community Forums only better), online chat, and a library area for files and documents. By this time, all the hundreds of fora all used the same software, making the service much easier to learn. From its inception, until the nineties, CompuServe ran exclusively on DEC computers. The forum software ran on DEC-10 and DEC-20 computers – the largest machines DEC made. When DEC discontinued that line, CIS parent H&R Block purchased a California company that made DEC-20 clones.

The service consisted of the timesharing plus the national network that allowed connecting by way of a modem and ASCII terminal. For many years CIS ran its own proprietary packet-switching network nationwide competing with Tymnet and Telenet. The Danbury node made the connection a local call.

Like most computer systems of the time, the user interface for all of CompuServe was ASCII text. When you logged in, the system displayed a menu of options on your terminal, or the terminal emulator program running on your computer. The computer could be anything from a Commodore 64, Apple II, or my IBM PC. Naturally CIS was a major source for shareware programs. Remember ProComm? That terminal program became so popular, it had its own support forum!

My association with CompuServe began shortly after I added a 1200 bps modem to my IBM XT. Online services were hot and there were many competing for users of all kinds. If you recall, AOL began as a combination of services oriented to Apple and Commodore users. CompuServe was broader than just computers. There were forums that specialized on every topic and legal form of employment. CIS added business databases like Nexus/Lexus, Official Airline Guide (OAG), IQuest, and many more. Until American Airlines opened EAAsy Saber to regular users, OAG was the only way for non-travel agents to electronically book airline tickets. CIS was one-stop shopping for people willing to pay for the service! To use the service you used menus or commands that made DOS seem simple by comparison.

And CompuServe was not cheap. When I first joined, the connect charges varied with your connect speed from as low as $9 per hour at 300 bps to $36 per hour at 9600. (This is from memory, so I could be off by a couple bucks.) Of course 9600 bps modems were way out of reach of mere mortals. The popular speed then was 1200 bps which was a compromise between a cost of $12 per hour and time watching stuff appear on the screen. Connect charges dropped gradually over the years until pressure from the Internet forced CIS to adopt a flat rate in 1997. I was really fortunate in that I had a boss who recognized inexpensive training when he saw it and subsidized my online habit.

CompuServe was an information aggregator. In other words, they provided a platform and others provided the content. The forum owners were independent contractors who were paid for the connect time they generated. This is why CIS was so resistant to a flat rate fee structure. To me the initial attraction was the IBM PC Forum. This forum grew into three or four fora supporting the IBM PC and clones. Don Watkins managed these forums with a cadre of paid and volunteer sysops. Don was the wizard sysop or wizop. (The term sysop is short for system operator.) I ran up some awful bills following the discussions in that forum. Then I discovered that many hardware and software companies in the PC industry also had support forums on CompuServe, like Ashton-Tate, Lotus, WordPerfect, Hayes, Compaq, Microsoft and many more. My bills got worse.

Then I discovered a program called ZapCIS, later renamed TAPCIS. This amazing piece of magic automated the process of logging on CIS, and then navigating to one forum after another. Initially CIS management fought these third party programs as something that would reduce connect time, but soon they realized this was not the case. When their connect time was more efficient, subscribers (called members on the service) would participate in more discussions that more than made up for the fact that TAPCIS made the connect time hyper efficient. Similar programs were written for just about every platform including the Amiga, Macintosh, OS/2 Presentation Manager, and on and on. All of these programs followed a similar procedure that involved two or three passes on CIS. When you set up the program, you configured it for the various forums and sections of forums you wanted to follow. The first connect session would download all of your email and then visit each forum and download all the message headers in your areas of interest. It would then disconnect so you could review all this offline without any ticking clock. You would select the message threads you wanted to read and start the second pass. This time TAPCIS would download all the messages in the marked threads as well as upload any email you have written and, again, disconnect. Now you could read and reply to the downloaded messages at your leisure. If you had any replies, a third pass would send them on to the appropriate forum. TAPCIS would do a similar function for the forum libraries to automate downloads. One of the best parts was that because TAPCIS knew all the arcane commands, you didn’t need to. It was fabulous and worth every penny of the $50 it cost.

The single feature that made CompuServe better than any other online service was message threading. Threading is the linkage of the original messages to its replies in a parent and child relationship so that a later reader can follow the entire conversation. In a CompuServe forum threads could go on for months and, up to the forum message-base size limit, all the messages in the thread could always be retrieved in proper sequence. There were commands to retrieve just the parent or an entire thread from any message down the chain. This meant that you never needed to quote the message to which you were replying because the reader could easily retrieve the original. Today in email lists like Yahoo Groups, an individual message may have a short reply, followed by the full text of the twenty messages that came before. What a waste of bandwidth! And bandwidth was something precious to each user who was paying for every connect minute.

Back in my General Foods days, I used a fourth generation database product called FOCUS from Information Builders, Inc. FOCUS, running primarily on IBM mainframes, enabled programmers to build applications faster than just about any other tool. The FOCUS users group was called FUSE (the meanings of these acronyms are long ago lost in time). In 1989 the annual FUSE conference was held in Reno, NV, and I took full advantage of this by going out early for a week of skiing around Lake Tahoe. At that conference, the FUSE board decided to open an online support facility, something I had been pushing for some time. A year later we opened the FUSE Forum on CompuServe at the conference in Boston. I was the Wizop (head sysop) with several expert FOCUS users as sysops. Together we started to offer online support to other users. A few months later, Information Builders opened their own support forums, also on CompuServe, where senior support staff answered questions about features, bugs, and the hidden techniques that made FOCUS so powerful. Our forum shifted to more user group activities like lobbying for new features and verifying bug reports.
One of the perks of being a sysop was a “sponsored account” which translates into “someone else pays the bill.” Freedom! The reality was that my connect time really did not change as I already used TAPCIS and there is only so much time.

The FUSE and FOCUS Forums remained open for a little more than seven years when the Internet finally proved overwhelming. One of the regional FUSE groups opened an Internet listserv (email list) on BITNET for FOCUS users. At the same time companies were linking their internal email systems to the Internet and the convenience of “free” corporate email beat the cost and effort of CompuServe. Many companies, including Microsoft, moved their official support to the Internet and CIS lost its luster.

Believe it or not, somewhere during this time, I tried AOL, BIX (BYTE Information Exchange), and Prodigy. On AOL, I never got past the trial period as it was just absolutely terrible when compared to the technical forums on CIS. Many DACS members tried Prodigy when we (DACS) were asked to help beta test the service when it was just starting up. Watching the screen draw at 1200 bps got old after about ten minutes. Of course there was little content so I found Prodigy super dull. Prodigy was unique, to my knowledge, as the only online service to use a true implementation of videotext. Videotext was an early attempt to mix text and graphics (of a sort) on one screen. None of these services had anything close to the CompuServe forum software.

The beginning of the end for CIS came with the sale to AOL. In the mid-90s CompuServe management had finally acknowledged that the DEC-10s and -20s would not last forever and had started to rewrite the entire system to run on Windows NT servers. As part of this they improved the forum software, incorporating every feature the sysop community had ever wanted. We were elated and then along came the Internet. Oops. Well, they took the NT-based system and added an absolutely fabulous web interface at about the same time that Internet competition had forced dropping the connect time charges in favor of a monthly flat rate - $27.95 for all you could eat. This, combined with Internet access, seemed to make CIS competitive. Whatever the reason, H & R Block, Compuserve's parent company (they had renamed the company with a lower case ‘s’ some years earlier) sold out. WorldCom bought the network and AOL bought the online service. CIS became AOL’s price brand as AOL moved to decimate what was left of the former CompuServe to make the AOL service look more attractive. It was sad.

Please do not regard this as a definitive history. This is almost entirely from memory and I have undoubtedly made mistakes here or there. My archives of messages from the forums is on a backup tape somewhere that I no longer have a working drive to read. Media obsolescence. Whenever I have to scroll an email up and down to figure out that people are talking about, I remember CompuServe, the king of the online services.

DacsGear!
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