A decade before the World Wide Web was a thing, CompuServe was the biggest player in the online service space. You could connect to the service with a dialup modem and chat, engage in message forums, play games, and more… for an hourly rate.

Then AOL came along in the 90s and undercut CompuServe’s prices… eventually acquiring the company in 1997.

AOL was more recently acquired by Verizon, which is merging the service with Yahoo and other properties under the new name Oath. But even though the original CompuServe service was mostly shut down in 2009, the CompuServe forums remained (somewhat) active… until now.

CompuServe is alerting users “that the Forums will be removed from the CompuSere service effective December 15, 2017.”

Folks who are still using CompuServe email will be able to continue to do so, and news, sports, weather, and entertainment updates will still be supported for some reason. But at this point the last remnant of CompuServe that actually felt like CompuServe is about to be shown the door.

Honestly, it’s unlikely that very many people will be affected. While there are still some folks using the forums to discuss current events, there are plenty of other places to do that with significantly more active discussions. But it’s still always a little sad to see a little piece of internet history disappear.

via FastCompany

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3 replies on “CompuServe forums to shut down in December (apparently they hadn’t yet)”

  1. Wow, talk about a blast from the past, Compuserve belongs to another era altogether.

  2. Apparently there is still a long standing and relatively active community of fiction authours on Compuserve forums called the Readers and Writers forum. This abrupt closure is causing some angst among the participants

  3. Yep. Moved on a long time ago but still have some fond memories. Not as many trolls back then.

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