On June 30th, America Online finally shut down the original CompuServe Information Service, which they had purchased in 1997. While I haven’t really used the service for several years, this is still bittersweet news to me due to strong personal connections. CompuServe was my first exposure to the concept of online computing back in the 1980s and my first professional job in the early 1990s.
My first computer experience was with a Radio Shack TRS-80 Model III that my father purchased in 1980 (when I was 10 years old). Around that same time, Radio Shack made a deal with CompuServe to package and promote their service. Under branding that Radio Shack called “Videotex”, they packaged CompuServe either with a dumb terminal or with terminal software sold for the TRS-80s. My father bought a 300-baud modem and the Videotex package for the Model III, giving us our first look at connected computing.
My exposure to the features of CompuServe during this time was really just a taste as the service came with a pretty high hourly fee for use. I mainly recall spending a little time watching over my father’s shoulder as he used it to access various news, weather, and information like that, although I recall that he generally preferred a competing service called The Source, which CompuServe eventually bought out and absorbed. I also recall having a couple rare opportunities to spend an hour playing some of CompuServe’s primitive early online games.
Due to the hourly fees, I never spent any time in discussion boards or chat, instead getting early exposure to these via privately-run Bulletin Board Systems (BBSs) and, a few years later, with General Electric’s GEnie service, which was one of the first to offer discussion boards and a few other services at a fixed monthly fee instead of charging by the hour. CompuServe was actually one of the last services to drop the hourly charges, which probably played a big role in their eventual decline.
After I graduated from college in 1991 with a degree in Computer Science and Engineering, CompuServe was one of the many technology companies to which I applied. I ended up accepting a job with them as a junior engineer in their Entertainment Technology group, which focused on game products and the CB Simulator, which was their name for online chat. I worked there for around 4 1/2 years, before I decided to move to California to pursue other opportunities in mid-1996.
The CompuServe headquarters was a campus in an industrial park located in the Columbus, Ohio suburb of Upper Arlington. It consisted of two major buildings, the larger one (where I worked) housing the corporate business offices and the operations managing the consumer service. The other building mainly housed their very lucrative network services division. There was a nice employee cafeteria (The Oak Room), which was run by Marriot and an employee fitness center.
View Larger Map
The Oak Room had pretty decent food and I generally ate there a couple times a week. They had a selection of standard grill items (burgers, chicken strips, etc.) that were available every day as well as a featured entree. They would occasionally do prepared to order stir-fry or pasta that were immensely popular and would result in long lines during lunch hour. I’d typically eat there on days that the entree sounded particularly good or when my schedule made it tough to leave the office for lunch. When I did leave, there was a Wendy’s, a Pizza Hut, and a sandwich place across the street as well as numerous other restaurants that were a fairly easy drive. The Oak Room also served as a location for larger meetings and employee gatherings. I even remember just about everyone in the building gathering in there to watch the OJ Simpson verdict on a big-screen TV.
Bigbeaks Blog 