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FrankWilhoit 13 hours ago [-]
I was there. What killed Compuserve was an attempt to build an entire back-end infrastructure, software and hardware, de novo, using immature consumer-grade technology. It was a shocking thing to witness from the inside. The pivot from proprietary to open-standard was not the problem. The problem was trying to build a software ecosystem in which no one knew what they were doing and the OS (Windows NT) didn't work yet, and to populate a data center with almost-but-not-quite redundant commmodity compute and networking. Came time for the big relaunch ("WOW!") and for every person who succeeded in signing up for the new service, ten others tried and failed. No one could come back from that.
imglorp 7 hours ago [-]
I'm most curious what happened to the Compuserve server software, and could some of it be resurrected as an interactive exhibit?
There is a guy on YouTube playing with SC-40s who has part of the TOPS-10 based stack, which I guess is what you mean. The Internetty stuff went by the umbrella name of HMI (Host-Micro Interface) and was guarded like the recipe for Coca-Cola. The boundary between the server and client was...fractal. Everything was about saving/spoofing bandwidth. The "browser", WinCIM, contained a huge library of UI element templates.
Some paper was preserved by CHM: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30848845
https://bitsavers.org/pdf/compuserve/
Ooh, and these SC-40s have compuserve tags and a stack of disks! I hope someone preserved the data.
https://onlineonly.christies.com/s/firsts-history-computing-...