Competitors to CompuServe were even more expensive. GEnie was $9/hr, and Byte Information Exchange (BIX) was $12, and I think at the start was even higher.
but the more interesting systems, to my mind, were usenet (born 01980) and fidonet (born 01983), because those were bottom-up, federated, peer-to-peer, grassroots systems
http://annex.retroarchive.org/cdrom/640_studio_ii/INFO/IBMAP...
Compuserve was a huge part of my life at that point in time and I'm so glad it existed. I'm really glad we got away from hourly charges though.
I find it very interesting that we went from people mostly being on Compulserve, to AOL, to Yahoo and the concept of integrated portals, to a bunch of small websites strewn around the internet, and then back to a few social networks. All that happened organically, with no antitrust scrutiny or regulatory changes (beyond the commercialization of the internet) that I know of.
I miss Prodigy as well. Both excellent services in different ways.
While I could never connect to; however you could launch the browser GUI of buttons upon buttons which always left me excited.
The days where you were excited to get a 512mb memory stick for xmas or a new graphics card are long gone, it's sad now that technology nowadays are just a rehash.
There was always something special about AGP but maybe because i'm an adult rather than an edgy teen it's just not the same.
Surprised my boss at work today when I told him I wanted to work on the Solaris boxes.
(At that time, youngsters, the normal thing was to use a travel agent because the only other way to compare fares was to call each airline individually on the phone. The agent did this using their very expensive SABRE terminal.)
I was obsessed with that MUD on CompuServe.
My father had a second phone line at home for work and I'd log in on that line.
Then the bill came in. Something ridiculous for at the time. Hundreds of dollars.
He walks in and says "do you use ... CompuServe?".
"Yes, I like this game that it has"
"Ok, sorry but you can't play that game anymore"
Oh well.
So later I went on to run a dual-node BBS and I could play TradeWars. Not quite the same. Still was cool.
They used to stick free installer CDs in every computer magazine but the takeup was really low.
Fidonet was way more popular here. And in France minitel but it was a bit of an outlier in Europe.
Back to BBSs.