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July 4th, 2009

RIP – CompuServe

Ladies and gents, this week AOL shut down CompuServe for good.

While I was a GEnie user myself, I can’t deny the allure of those CompuServe ads back when I was but a little kid. Ads like this one in mags such as Compute! really made me think that something special was happening online. CompuServe was the biggest, so naturally I thought they were the best.

An ad similar to the one I linked featured a picture of a shopping mall on a computer’s screen… and I remember thinking that there was no way that they could do something so graphically advanced at that time. It was true, of course, because everything was in plain text: the way to really shop online.

In the end CIS became a shell of its former self, being absorbed into the AOL juggernaut and keeping “current” versions of software around for 10 years. Sad.

Posted in Technology

matt covington July 17, 2009, 3:57 pm

I have a conflict between Compuserve and Fire Fox. When I open Compuserve on Fire Fox it keeps saying Document contains no data
Matt

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