Well, yesterday marked the end of an era. I had been a member of Compuserve since before the internet revolution, back when dinosaurs roamed the planet and 2400 baud was a fast modem. I was running on a 286 machine, and everything was text based, using the modem software's capture buffers to read the threads. Ah, the good old days.
Compuserve's Comics and Animation Forum was the birthplace of this column, and to this day was probably where it had its greatest readership (although it was hard to tell--there were no statistics for individual threads)--or at least its most active responses. Even after I took the column to this site, I still cross-posted to the Comics Forum as often as I could, although I confess I started to drop off after most of my regular respondents left the service for one reason or another. And even after that point, I kept Compuserve, by then swallowed up by AOL as my ISP. It was slightly more expensive, but they had nodes all over the country, the service was good, and it still let me access the forums from the Web.
All that ended Sunday, when I had a problem logging into CSI to get to the Web and update this site. No problem, thought I, just call CSI tech-support for some help. "I'm sorry," the surly techie told me, not sounding sorry in the least, "but we can't help you if you're not using Compuserve's software." I never use Compuserve's software. I never have used Compuserve's software. In the six-plus years I've been a member of Compuserve, I've only had the software installed on the machine when it came pre-installed. Compuserve's software, to put it charitably, stinks on ice. But that's okay, because you never really needed to use it anyway. For a long time, all you needed was a modem and a terminal program--and even after they changed the fora so that plain ASCII wouldn't work, you could get around that with either share-ware, or more recently any old browser. I had my Win-95 Dial-up Networking set up to dial directly into the Compuserve gateway, just as I had for the past two years, just as the Compuserve tech-support guy had told me to set it up last time I called them, just as I had it set up when I successfully dialed in on Saturday night...only now, now, (post AoL) they tell me that they can't support that. "Why not?" I wanted to know. "Because we don't. If you don't use Compuserve 3.0 or higher, there's nothing we can do for you. Install it and call back."
"No," I said, "there is something you can do for me. Cancel my account."
As it turns out, I was wrong about that: I had to call a different number to get them to cancel my account.
I'm with Earthlink now, and so far, everything's fine.
In fact, the Agent newsreader software that I never was able to get to work correctly with Compuserve is working like a champ.
Adieu, CSI. Let flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.