CompuServe Launches: Consumer Internet Age Begins

Before the World Wide Web, before AOL, before most Americans had ever heard the word "modem," there was CompuServe. On September 24, 1979, the Columbus, Ohio-based company launched MicroNET, the first commercial online service available to consumers with personal computers. For the first time, ordinary people could send electronic mail, read news, and access databases from their homes. CompuServe had started in 1969 as a time-sharing computer service for businesses, renting out excess mainframe capacity to corporate clients. When personal computers began appearing in the late 1970s, company executive Jeff Wilkins recognized that those same mainframes sat mostly idle during evenings and weekends. MicroNET, later renamed the CompuServe Information Service, sold that spare capacity to home users for $5 per hour during off-peak times. The early service was primitive by modern standards. Users connected through acoustic couplers at 300 baud, roughly 30 characters per second. The interface was entirely text-based, and navigating required memorizing page numbers or typing commands. But the appeal was immediate. CompuServe's forums, called SIGs (Special Interest Groups), became the first large-scale online communities, connecting hobbyists, professionals, and enthusiasts across geographic boundaries years before anyone coined the term "social media." By the mid-1980s, CompuServe had grown to over 600,000 subscribers and offered services including stock quotes, airline reservations, shopping, and the CB Simulator, an early form of online chat. The company introduced the GIF image format in 1987, a file type that would outlast CompuServe itself. At its peak in the early 1990s, the service claimed over 3 million subscribers worldwide. The arrival of the graphical World Wide Web and America Online's aggressive marketing campaigns eroded CompuServe's subscriber base throughout the 1990s. AOL acquired the service in 1997. But for nearly two decades, CompuServe proved that millions of people would pay to communicate and access information through networked computers, validating the commercial model that the entire modern internet economy rests upon.