f you were lucky enough, as I was, to go to a technically-advanced school or work for a high-technology company in the 70s and 80s, you had Internet access. For most of us though the only way we had to go online was via an online service like CompuServe. Recently, after 30-years of service, CompuServe closed down. I’ll miss it.
I was fortunate to be on the Internet starting in the late 70s, when I was at school, West Virginia University, and later at my jobs at Goddard Space Flight Center. But, when I was at home, I had to use a 300-baud Hayes modem like everyone else in those days to go online. So, I became an early user of online services And, by the early 90s, I was writing a column about them for Computer Shopper, back in the days when that publication was a 1,000+ page giant on magazine stands.
In those days, everything that we now think of as being part of the Web, was only available in far smaller, text-based portions on online services like AOL, BIX, CompuServe, Delphi, GEnie, and Prodigy. Today, only AOL remains in a form that any time-traveling user from 1992 would recognize.
