CompuServe

The internet before the internet

Shut down
19902026

CompuServe was the first major consumer online service, opened to the public in 1979: email, forums, chat, stock quotes and file libraries a decade before the web. AOL bought it in 1998 and finally shut the original service, by then CompuServe Classic, on 1 July 2009.

Timeline [edit]

  1. 1979
  2. 24 September 1979 Launch
    MicroNET opens to consumers

    Spare timesharing capacity is sold to home computer users.

  3. 1980
  4. 21 February 1980 Feature
    CB Simulator launches

    The first widely used consumer online chat.

  5. 1987
  6. 15 June 1987 Feature
    CompuServe publishes the GIF format

    Its most durable contribution to the internet.

  7. 1995
  8. 1995 Peak
    Around three million subscribers

    The height of the walled-garden online era.

  9. 1998
  10. 31 January 1998 Acquisition
    AOL acquires CompuServe

    The subscriber base moves to the market leader.

  11. 2009
  12. 15 April 2009 Shutdown announced
    AOL announces the closure

    CompuServe Classic will end after 30 years.

  13. 1 July 2009 Shutdown
    CompuServe Classic shuts down

    The first consumer online service ends.

The site through time

Browse compuserve.com as it was, via the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine:

1979 1984 1989 1994 1999 2004 2009 Full archive →

Ownership [edit]

CompuServe Inc. (H&R Block from 1980) 1979–1998 Founded Columbus, Ohio; H&R Block owned it for most of the 1980s and 90s
AOL 1998–2009 Acquisition, $1.2B Ran it as a budget brand until 2009

Key figures [edit]

MetricValueAs ofConfidence
Registered accounts ▲ 3 million 1995 Reported Approximate peak subscriber count

Confirmed official figures · Reported media, cites a source · Estimated analyst or our estimate

Why it shut down [edit]

Official line: AOL shut down the original CompuServe Information Service, by then called CompuServe Classic, on 1 July 2009, after thirty years of operation.

Our analysis: CompuServe invented much of online life (email, forums, chat, file libraries, online news) and then lost to the open internet it had made people want. AOL bought it for its subscribers, not its future, and let the original service run down to a handful of holdouts before switching it off.

History [edit]

Life before the web

CompuServe began as a timesharing company in Columbus, Ohio, and in September 1979 started selling spare overnight computing capacity to home users. What they got was extraordinary for the time: electronic mail (CompuServe pioneered consumer email), CB Simulator chat in 1980, thousands of moderated forums, downloadable software libraries, airline reservations, stock quotes and wire news, all reached by dialling a local number and paying by the hour.

Users had numeric addresses like 70003,1234, and communities formed around every conceivable topic; for professionals and hobbyists in the 1980s, CompuServe was the online world. The company also gave the world the GIF format in 1987, which outlived everything else it built.

Overtaken by what it taught people to want

The service peaked around three million subscribers in the mid-1990s, then collided with two forces at once: AOL's friendlier, flat-rate mass-market approach, and the open internet, which made any single walled garden look small. In 1998 AOL acquired CompuServe in a complicated deal with WorldCom, keeping the subscriber base.

Under AOL it became a low-cost dial-up brand, its original service renamed CompuServe Classic, running on ancient infrastructure for a dwindling loyal user base. AOL announced the end in April 2009 and closed it on 1 July 2009. The email domain and a portal lingered on for years, but the service that had taught America to go online had stopped thirty years after it started.

Similar projects

AOL Dial-Up You've got mail, for thirty-four years 1991–2025 MobileMe The Apple service Steve Jobs apologised for 2008–2012 Adobe Flash The plugin that animated the web 1996–2020 Internet Explorer The browser that won the war and lost the peace 1995–2022 iPod 1,000 songs in your pocket 2001–2022 GameSpy The middleware that ran multiplayer, then took it away 1996–2014

Sources [edit]

  1. CompuServe Classic, a relic of the dial-up days, finally bites the dust The Christian Science Monitor 6 July 2009 [archived]
  2. CompuServe Shuttered By AOL InformationWeek 8 July 2009 [archived]

Last verified: 11 August 2026. Spotted an error? Suggest an edit (corrections with sources are reviewed and applied).