It was suicide.

Remember CompuServe? The loser in the battle against AOL?

The early Compuserve setup had you hang your telephone handset on a microphone base to serve as a modem with which to dial in. My friend’s father Bill was a way early adopter of CompuServe (in 1986 or so), and their house couldn’t be reached for hours at a time. Who had two lines, other than the rich kids? Bill tried to explain the appeal of that little window to me, describing how you could check the weather, or book airline tickets. True, these are now important functions of internet use, but as a teenager, they were totally uninteresting.

I never really used CompuServe myself, but I did have friends and relatives with CompuServe email addresses (you know who you are). I’d have to guess it was those user names / email addresses that sank the ship. [six numerals]-dot-[four numerals]@compuserve.com. What were they thinking? Seven digits pushes the boundaries of short-term memory hold (eg, when you look up a phone number for immediate use). But 10 random digits?! I’ll bet their users never got any mail.

P.S.: I see that CompuServe still exists (or at least, they still have a page up). The most recent information appears to date back to 2001. Hm. Maybe it’s just a vegetative state. Have pity and pull the plug, someone.