Compuserve Technical Forums

[Retired]

For those of us who graduated from the era of the birth of personal computers and participated in Compuserve Forums before the internet, you will be sad to know the last vestiges of Compuserve Forums were closed, thanks to AOL, on December 15, 2017.

The good news is several of the last forums migrated to their own home at Forumania Forum Center

My own interest was in the technical forums that included a Windows Support Forum along with a few others, run by the same people for the past 20 + years. The Technical Forum is now located at https://www.forumania.com/forum/tech-sector

 

[GaryQ]

Hehe, a trip on the "'member when?" train.

 

[Retired]

Gary,

One of the fascinating and most attractive features of the original Compuserve dial up interface was that a member could log into any and all subscribed forums, and send /receive all uploads and downloads to allow full offline operation.

Posts could be read offline and replies written, then in a fifteen or thirty second dial up connection, all offline content would be transferred.

 

[GaryQ]

Steve,
Because of the long distance and subscription fees to CompuServe I stuck to local BBS's in Montreal. My area of expertise was C-64 terminal and multi file transfer protocol implementations and adding file download sections to a friends BBS. But many of my friends also used CompuServe at the time.

The running joke for a long time was my "auto-dial cassette deck" my C-64 user port had a dead pin (of course it had to be the one used to pulse the phone line relay in the modem) so I hacked my old C-64 cassette deck and re-wrote the code to pulse the relay in it to dial the phone line. things have never been as fun as those early days of creativity and ingenuity.

I really miss my Commodore 64 but I sure as heck don't miss 300 baud connections

 

[Retired]

The Radio Scrap TRS-80 was the first computer in my house, that was purchased to substitute for the mechanical teletype machine I was using in my amateur radio station for RTTY.

My transmitter was running a full kilowatt, and when I ran at full power, because the TRS-80 body was made of plastic and not properly shielded, the TRS-80 crashed, requiring a reboot using a cassette tape to reload the program.

 

[GaryQ]

The all in one TRS-80? Or the smaller ones that came out like the COCO?
My first was a Timex Sinclair 1000 with 2K ram... you ran out of memory just thinking of writing a program

1KW transmitter.... did you mess up the neighbor's TV signals with that thing?
I was too poor for ham radio. It was just "hello skipland anybody out there?" on the CB as a teenager.
Sheesh I feel old

 

[Retired]

1KW transmitter.... did you mess up the neighbor's TV signals with that thing?

I tried to be diligent about building well insulated, shielded and well grounded connections to preclude interference.

Steve