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CompuServe and black Boston
By adamg on Sun, 07/12/2009 - 9:19am
The news that AOL has shut down CompuServe (thus proving yet again that pretty much everything AOL buys fails sooner or later) gets About Black Boston to reminiscing about how local black entrepreneurs used the network back in the day:
... American Visions was the official magazine of the African American Museums Association when CompuServe partnered to launch its content online. Bill Clinton was the President of the United States as the project was unfolding. Musician Greg Osby was gigging at Wally's Cafe and signed copies of CDs distributed to online members of Go Afro. Boxer Joe Frazier, actress Pam Grier, and author Connie Briscoe ("Sisters and Lovers") were forum guests. George Curry published Emerge Magazine and appeared before the online chat audience twice. There were many other black celebrities there online. ...
Ed note: One of the first newspapers to go online, via CompuServe, was the Middlesex News in Framingham in the early 1980s. We even had a Japanese news crew spend time in the newsroom filming editors preparing stories for uploading to subscribers, who actually paid ($5 an hour) to download news stories - at 300 baud. Here is some more, along with a screenshot of Fred the Middlesex News Computer - I'm not sure my design skills have improved much since then!
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Comments
40 years not 30!
The Network World article you linked to still says that Compuserve shut down after 30 years, even though it started in 1969. Someone already posted a comment there about this, but I don't know if anyone's still minding the store at Network World now that you're gone.
The About Black Boston blog entry repeats the Network World error.
Let Jeff Caruso know
[email protected]
AOL = kiss of death
Yep. AOL is a series of case studies (ha! "Case" studies! Get it?) on how to suffocate startups by assimilating them.
1. Find a company that's small enough to be nimble, innovative and bold.
2. Buy them.
3. Take them off their innovative, bold, nimble projects so you can integrate them into the companywide product quagmire.
4. Add those innovative projects to the companywide product quagmire. There, no harm done; you've added projects and resources, so there's no net change. Right?
5. I said, "Right?"
6. How come those guys never do anything innovative?
Don't forget
Right after you ruin a key chunk of the Internet (say, Usenet), you have to merge with and cripple a huge traditional media company.
USENET
Well, eternal September was awful, but in our defense: Imagine what would've happened if we DIDN'T provide a USENET gateway, and 30 million novices tried to set up Free Agent with Giganews* so they could download binaries? It'd become one big alt.test, only it wouldn't, because they'd be taken offline permanently by the load. The first AOL production news spool was a ginormous 1TB Auspex array, and I think it grew to half a dozen or so - not for disk space, but for spindles.
* Yeah, but I can't remember who the commercial USENET providers were back then.
Ahhh - USENET. No
Ahhh - USENET. No moderators, troll invasions, flame wars.... those were the days!
Yes, it was perfect until those damn freshmen ruined it
I remember when there weren't even any speedbumps on the information superhighway.
A big commercial provider
UUNET, founded back when UUCP over phone lines (just like FidoNet!) was the big thing.
Oh, duh
You'd think I'd remember that. MCI/UUNET were just down the street from us.
Oh, and there's PSI, our first Internet provider - I think we had a 128Kbps line from them.
Had there been no gateway...
...I bet it would've been a long time before any significant numer of AOL users even heard about it, much less were able to use it. :)
Potrzebie
ROTFL! My entire childhood just flashed before my eyes -- Mad Magazine!
(Sister Mary Elephant said NEVER to read Mad Magazine. Satanic, don'cha know.)
CompuServe followup and happenings at The Globe today.
Saw some entries in our Wordpress cloud stats originating from this location and wanted to join this conversation to add more to the conversation.
But, I'm late.
Is this true: The World evolved into the Universal Hub and left Compuserve in the dust. Is that a fair statement?
Was The Channel in Cambridge your competition during the growth years?
from these posts..
Jay Levitt wrote about PSI -- Yes, I remember! Cambridge had a public access broadcast station operated by Continental Cablevision. I think it was on Sherman Street in Cambridge in the 80/90s. Someone told me SUN put a server in that office that created dial-up Internet access for early adopters and anyone else able to get a set of floppies with the client software to connect. I had a set and yep, it put me online and it was so cool. I think the brand logo on those disks said "PSI."
Neilv commented about "gateways" and that was one of them.
Fenwayguy flowed in with a comment about Mad Magazine, but I wasn't sure where he was coming from.
More History:
UH on 3/1/2000 http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://theworld.com
To wit: My first paid-commercial Internet access account was via The Channel, operated by Brian in Cambridge. My Second was from The World and customer service was as great as it is today.
Skip forward to 2009 when Dan Kennedy wrote from Media Nation to advise: "Why the Globe should acquire Universal Hub,"
link:
http://medianation.blogspot.com/2009/02/why-globe-...
Kudos!
Read in the Globe today that NYT has been seeking out new potential owners. They are bidding, coming together and all.. will it happen?
Will they sue owners of blackboston.com, LOL! Will they sue you for Boston-Online.com? Imagine that. Boston.TV - will they sue boston.TV too?
These situations are moot, I hope.
The Big Dig didn't care about my BigDug.com domain name.
Case closed.
This article opened with Adam G's comment which said: "...300 baud -- One of the first newspapers to go Online on CompuServe was the the Middlesex News in Framingham"
Alt-media rules
Another interesting article about The World|
http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/magazine/article...
Hey, check out this marketing statement written in 2000.
"The World, operated by Software Tool & Die (world.std.com) is an Internet service provider in Brookline, Massachusetts. We were the first public dialup Internet Service Provider (ISP). And we're still proud to be the best."
Thanks for the CompuServe and Black Boston post conversation.,
And to anyone reading this who does not know the history of CompuServe and how ordinary citizens gave people somewhere to go and something to do on the Internet, and on the dial-up, when before them there was nothing like what they were doing, then, I am sorry I lost you by writing this.
digitalMass.com, can ya hear me now?
peace!
digitalplumber