The thing is that Compuserve predated websites. The first website to go live was CERN (the lab that now has the Large Hadron Collider), and the site was launched in 1991. It didn’t have much. Just a bit of plain text. Even in the mid-90s, there were only a handful of websites. They didn’t have much content. And most people were connecting at 14.4 kbps. Twice that if you were fancy. 100 k was possible if you had a dedicated line. But we’re talking about kilobytes per second. There was noticeable lag in loading more than half a page of plain text. Small images would slowly come in as you were reading. Which is why Netscape (early web browser bought out by Yahoo) introduced a setting to just not load pictures by default.
So you’d dial into CompuServe and you’d have their main internal features. Forums, email, chat rooms. I had some good discussions there. Stan Lee did a live chat room interview in the comic book forum and I got to ask him a question about Marvel movies (which were notably not very good at the time).
If you wanted, you could then open up a browser window to access the rest of the Internet, but you were charged by the minute for it. While using up a phone line, so no one could make phone calls unless you had a second line. And the phone company charged you by the minute if the access number wasn’t local to you. There usually wasn’t much point to that, though, because there was so little content on the Internet. Everything was internal to Compuserve. (Or AOL, which offered a similar competing service.)
Before Compuserve, I used a local BBS. It was an ad hoc network of a few computers across NJ. You’d have your computer call one of the access servers, and then you could go to the chat room. Everything was text-only. This was before graphical interfaces had really taken hold. But you could chat with whoever was online at the time and send each other files (if you had the time and patience for that). They also had a feature called “e-mail” where you could leave a message for someone who wasn’t online, that they could pick up next time they logged in. But there wasn’t much point to it because, really, what did you have to say that couldn’t just wait for the next time you were both in chat together?
We had meetups sometimes. Because even though it was an online chat room, we were all in NJ. I was 13 and I got my parents to drop me off at a Denny’s in town for a few hours, where all the people I’d been chatting with had converged so we could have dinner together and talk IRL for a bit. We were all excited for the opportunity. Since we were such a large party, they gave us a section to ourselves. Not exactly a private room, but a cluster of tables off to the side with no one else sitting nearby. So, every 10 minutes or so, one or two of us would get up from each table and go to sit at a different table so we could all get a chance to talk to everyone else. Most of them were in their 20s and 30s, and were very surprised to discover that the guy they’d been hanging out with was barely a teenager. But we got along great.
Thing is, the waitress didn’t like it. She was confused by our shuffling seating arrangements, and said she suspected that we were trying to create disorder so we could skip out on the check or something. Which didn’t make any sense, really. One of the adults in the group talked to her and explained, but she still didn’t like it. So the manager came and told us to stop switching seats. We thought that was stupid, but we at least slowed the pace of how often we were moving around. That wasn’t enough. The manager came back. We’d put in our food orders and dinner was almost ready, but after that, we were no longer welcome. The waitress slammed down the checks right next to our plates and made it clear that we would not be ordering anything else. No dessert for us.
To this day, Denny’s is still the only restaurant I’ve been kicked out of, and I’ve refused to eat at any Denny’s ever again.
But we still had fun. Finished dinner, paid the check, left a nice tip, and then stood around chatting in the parking lot for another hour.
Anyway… I fell in with the Lois and Clark fandom, reading fanfic and writing a bit and getting to know people. That was mostly done through an email list. I could chat with people on the Compuserve forum, but the email list allowed us to share our stories with people on AOL and elsewhere. You’d write it, email it to the list manager, get her approval, and then she’d send out a bulk email with a few stories once a week.
From there, it was on to LiveJournal, where you could write on your own page whatever was on your mind and your friends would see the post in their Friends List feed. A few years later, I got an email invitation to join a new thing designed to help people in college connect with each other. But I was in college, and the campus had a great computer system with its own internal chat. I had plenty of ways to be in touch with my classmates, and not much contact with other schools. So I didn’t see the point of this whole “Facebook” thing and refused to join for well over a decade.
And then there were various chat services. AOL Instant Messenger (AIM), ICQ, IRC, etc. (If you watch Twitch, their text chat is still based on IRC.) Kind of like Facebook Messenger, where you can send short messages and have realtime chat with individual friends and groups who also use the same service.
