CompuServe

CompuServe, Inc. (CompuServe Information Service, Inc., also known by its initialism CIS or later CSi) was an American Internet company that provided the first major commercial online service. It opened in 1969 in Columbus, Ohio, as a timesharing and remote access service marketed to corporations. After a successful 1979 venture selling otherwise under-utilized after-hours time to Radio Shack customers, the system was opened to the public, roughly the same time as The Source.

H&R Block bought the company in 1980 and began to advertise the service aggressively. CompuServe dominated the industry during the 1980s, buying their competitor The Source. One popular use of CompuServe during the 1980s was file exchange, particularly pictures. In 1985, it hosted one of the earliest online comics, Witches and Stitches. CompuServe introduced a simple black-and-white image format known as RLE (run-length encoding) to standardize the images so they could be shared among different types of microcomputers. With the introduction of more powerful machines enabling display of color, CompuServe introduced the much more capable Graphics Interchange Format (GIF), invented by Steve Wilhite. GIF later became the most common format for 8-bit images transmitted by Internet during the early and mid-1990s.

At its peak during the early 1990s, CIS had an online chat system, message forums for a variety of topics, extensive software libraries for most personal computers, and a series of popular online games, including MegaWars III and Island of Kesmai. In 1994, it was described as "the oldest of the Big Three information services (the others are Prodigy and America Online)". However, the rise of modern systems like AOL, as well as the open World Wide Web system, led to it losing marketshare. In 1997, a complex deal was devised with WorldCom acting as a broker, resulting in the company being sold to AOL. New products under the CompuServe sub-brand ceased in 2002, and the original CompuServe Information Service, later rebranded as CompuServe Classic, was eventually shut down in 2009 after 30 years.

CompuServe was initiated during 1969 as Compu-Serv Network, Inc. in Columbus, Ohio, as a subsidiary of Golden United Life Insurance.

Though Golden United founder Harry Gard Sr.'s son-in-law Jeffrey Wilkins is widely miscredited as the first president of CompuServe, its first president was actually John R. Goltz. Wilkins replaced Goltz as CEO within the first year of operation. Goltz and Wilkins were both graduate students of electrical engineering at the University of Arizona. Other early recruits from the same university included Sandy Trevor (inventor of the CompuServe CB Simulator chat system), Doug Chinnock, and Larry Shelley.

The company's objectives were twofold: to provide in-house computer processing for Golden United Life Insurance; and to develop as an independent business in the computer time-sharing industry, by renting time on its PDP-10 midrange computers during business hours, mainly to other businesses. It was divested as a separate company during 1975, trading on the NASDAQ using the symbol CMPU.

Concurrently, the company recruited executives who changed the emphasis from offering time-sharing services, for which customers wrote their own applications, to a service providing application programs. The first of these new executives was Robert Tillson, who quit Service Bureau Corporation (then a subsidiary of Control Data Corporation, but originally formed as a division of IBM) to become CompuServe's Executive Vice President of Marketing. He then recruited Charles McCall (who succeeded Jeff Wilkins as CEO, and later became CEO of the medical information company HBO & Co.), Maury Cox (who became CEO after the departure of McCall), and Robert Massey (who succeeded Cox as CEO).

In 1977, CompuServe's board changed the company's name to CompuServe Incorporated. In 1979, it began "offering a dial-up online information service to consumers". In May 1980, at which time Compuserve had fewer than 1,000 subscribers to its consumer information service, H&R Block acquired the company for $25 million and within four years had grown its subscriber base to about 110,000.