Y’S COMPUSERVE?
When Mark Zuckerberg was five years old in 1989, two dominant players in telecommunications made a big announcement. Compuserve (the first major commercial online service provider) and MCI Mail (one of the first commercial e-mail service providers) introduced commercial e-mail relays to the public Internet. These relays connected their centralized networks to the public, outside of their direct control. Facebook’s announcement of entering the distributed trust era with libra, a new cryptocurrency, is the modern-day equivalent.
And it’s likely to have the same result.
it was the largest online service with over three million users. It has since been called the “Google of the ‘80s.” But the big difference is that its network was private and centrally controlled. It was not an open network like the public Internet.
PRIVATE PRECURSOR TO PUBLIC INTERNET
Launched in 1969, Compuserve was an innovator in shared computing. In 1979, it launched Micronet, the first consumer e-mail system. This was quickly followed in 1980 with CB Simulator, the first real-time online chat service. Compuserve quickly added a wide range of consumer information services such as weather, stock quotes and discussion forums. It tied people together globally through its centrally owned worldwide network. By 1991, Compuserve had more than 500,000 simultaneous online users. In 1995,
PUBLICIZING THE COMMERCIAL INTERNET
Early coverage of Compuserve and MCI’s gateways described the relatively unknown Internet as a worldwide research network of government agencies, universities and commercial firms.
American Consequences
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