Over at The Paper PC blog, columnist Robert S. Anthony writes about the demise of Classic CompuServe. This is the old-school, text-based version of CompuServe, the first online service to get any kind of real public traction.

I signed up for CompuServe in 1983 or 1984. It cost $10 an hour and I had to call long-distance to get on (back when long distance cost serious coin). I sometimes spent $100 or more a month using the service at a time when I made about $13,000 a year. My Commodore 64 and my 300 baud modem were the gateway to this online world, and I spent hours reading special interest sections or chatting with people.

In many ways, CompuServe was my introduction to the online medium. From there I moved to GEnie (the same sort of service but cheaper), then Prodigy, then AOL, and then I got my own Internet account in the days when the Web had not yet been invented and everything was done by text.

Soon came the Web, and then I got a job in the fledgling online journalism medium, and then 14 years went by and here I stand. But it all started with CompuServe.

Back in the day, I’d try to explain to my friends why I loved the service (or even what it was) and I would get the Thousand-Mile Stare in return. Some of those folks were journalists, and some of them now are ex-journalists, and I suspect that might not be the case if they’d paid a little more attention to CompuServe.