The Off-Key Bard
History

This Day in History — CompuServe Brings Online Services Into the Home

On this day in 1979

On September 24, 1979, CompuServe launched MicroNET — dismissed internally as "schlock timesharing" — and discovered that what people wanted most online was to talk to each other.

The Off-Key Bard sits in front of a home computer in 1979 and connects a modem to the telephone line. There is no World Wide Web. No Google. No Facebook. No graphical browser.

"But there are messages, news, games, information — and other people. The online world is already beginning to take shape."

On this day in 1979, CompuServe launched MicroNET — a consumer-oriented online service sold through Radio Shack stores that let home computer owners dial into CompuServe's mainframes during off-peak evening hours. It was one of the earliest major commercial online services aimed at ordinary people, and it helped introduce a generation of computer users to the idea of going online from home.

CompuServe's corporate sales force reportedly mocked the fledgling consumer service as "schlock timesharing." It turned out to be one of the most prescient products in the history of computing.

The Business Logic of Empty Computers

CompuServe itself was already a decade old. Founded in 1969 as a division of Golden United Life Insurance in Columbus, Ohio, it provided computer timesharing to businesses — organizations could remotely access mainframe computing power rather than buying enormously expensive machines of their own.

But those computers weren't equally busy around the clock. During evenings and weekends, when corporate customers used less capacity, CompuServe had mainframes sitting relatively idle. Meanwhile, the Apple II, the Commodore PET, and the Radio Shack TRS-80 were putting personal computers into homes for the first time.

The business idea was straightforward: let home computer owners connect to CompuServe during the hours businesses weren't using it, charging them a fraction of the daytime corporate rate. Users with a computer, a modem, and a telephone line could dial in at $5 per hour — a meaningful expense in 1979, roughly equivalent to $22 today, and teenagers sometimes spent their entire weekly allowance for a single hour of time online.

MicroNET launched September 24, 1979, marketed in partnership with Radio Shack. It ran at speeds of around 300 baud — slow enough that text appeared on the screen one character at a time, sometimes visibly. There were no photographs streaming across the connection. No video. Everything was text.

But what users could do with that text was remarkable for the era.

What You Could Do Online in 1979

The service offered electronic mail, news wires, weather forecasts, stock quotes, airline ticket booking, shopping, and databases. Users had alphanumeric IDs — strings of octal digits separated by a comma, like 12345,012 — rather than the email addresses we know today. The service was renamed CompuServe Information Service in 1980 when H&R Block acquired the company, and it expanded rapidly.

In 1980, CompuServe began working with newspapers to deliver online editions, starting with the Columbus Dispatch. By 1982, at least ten major papers had joined — The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and the San Francisco Examiner among them. A 1981 KRON news segment demonstrated the Examiner's online offering. It took approximately two hours to download a single edition. The anchors presented this as a marvel.

Also in 1980, CompuServe introduced the CB Simulator — a 40-channel real-time text chat system modeled after the citizens-band radio craze of the 1970s. Users chose handles and joined channels to converse with people they might never meet in person.

The CB Simulator quickly accounted for 20 percent of all time users spent on the service. Not news. Not stocks. Not travel booking.

Chat.

This lesson turned out to be universal. Decades before social media, an executive at CompuServe summed up what his company had discovered: "It turned out that what was most popular is not reading reliable news sources, but just shooting the breeze with your friends or arguing with strangers over politics." The company had invented the internet comment section, the chat room, and the social network simultaneously, without entirely meaning to.

GIF, and the Limits of the Walled Garden

In 1987, CompuServe engineer Steve Wilhite developed the Graphics Interchange Format — the GIF — as an efficient way to distribute compressed color images across slow dial-up connections. The format escaped the proprietary service that created it and became a permanent piece of internet culture.

CompuServe's subscriber base reached millions of households by the early 1990s. But the service's fundamental structure — a proprietary network in which users dialed into CompuServe's own computers and accessed only what CompuServe provided — was becoming a liability. America Online offered a friendlier graphical interface and distributed millions of free trial disks. More fundamentally, the World Wide Web offered something proprietary services couldn't match: an enormous decentralized universe of websites and content outside any single company's control.

AOL purchased CompuServe in 1998. The service was shut down in 2009.

The state of Ohio subsequently designated the building that once housed CompuServe as a historical site — recognition that what had started on a Tuesday evening in 1979, with home computer hobbyists dialing into idle corporate mainframes, had genuinely changed the world.

"The modem called, the screen replied,
A distant world was found inside.
Before the Web had yet been spun,
The online age had already begun."

History reminds us: CompuServe didn't invent computer networking, email, or the Internet. Its importance was something more subtle — helping turn network access from something associated with universities, governments, and corporations into something a person sitting in a living room with a home computer and a telephone could experience. And in doing so, discovering what every social network since has confirmed: connecting computers is useful. Connecting people is what they're actually for.

Sources

← Back to the Desk — History