CompuServe: A Ground Breaking Online Fades Out After 40 Years » Fanboy.com

... was an early powerhouse of connecting people online before the era of the web. And at the end of June AOL ...

... , the only thing now left is a tombstone web portal and a low rent ISP service. Its a sad ending, but once upon a time in the 80s and early 90s CompuServe was THE online service.

The company started life a subsidiary division of a life insurance company that sold time sharing on mainframe computers (because the cost was so high for the hardware companies would rent time when the machine werent in use). By 1975 they were spun off to being a public listed company only to be acquired by HR Block in 1980. But the real breakthrough occurred in the 80s when they started offering their services to home based PC users. This was the dawn of consumers getting online, granted they were geeky consumers — but a start is a start!

... was introduced around 1990 in an attempt to play catch up with services like America Online and Prodigy. At this point the geeks still loved CompuServe, but sadly the other companies were opening the doors to a larger less nerdy market.