CompuServe

As I was recently reading through my Twitter feed, I came across a tweet from Mental Floss. Mental Floss, in addition to being a bi-monthly magazine, is also an Internet blog of random facts, trivia, and interesting articles. The tweet read "On this date in 1979, CompuServe began offering its dial-up service to consumers." I felt as though this tweet related to the articles we have been reading and discussing in class and decided to do a little more research. CompuServe "...was the first major commercial online service in the United States." Its popularity flourished in the 80s and was still big in the 90s. It was eventually purchased by AOL, and finally after 30 years, was shut down. CompuServe was initially created in 1969, but it took ten years to release it to the public. In 1989, CompuServe became the first online service to offer Internet connectivity.
I was intrigued by this topic, because once again, like many of the other topics we have discussed, this simply shows how long ago certain things were developed. I was completely unaware that dial-up was being used in 1969. It is not something generally known because often more recent technology is spoken about.
Another aspect I found to be interesting regarding CompuServe how much it charged its users. In the early 90s, it cost ten dollars an hour to use the Internet. Soon, this decreased to $1.95 an hour. AOL (before it purchased CompuServe) was constantly competing with CompuServe, an offered a cheaper service to consumers that consisted of a flat-rate with unlimited access.  While I do remember my father paying for AOL several years back, I know now that the Internet itself is essentially free. Yes, we are responsible paying for the connection, but we are not charged by the hour or month by an additional company.
Overall, I just found it interesting to see how the Internet and connecting to it has changed over time. I saw it significantly change throughout my life, but not nearly as drastically as it has changed from its start to the present day.