Sometimes the oddest things trigger waves of nostalgia. Reading that the CompuServe Information System died on July 1 at the age of 40 was enough to get me wandering down memory lane. You kids today with your fancy-schmancy broadbands and Googlie search engines and hippity-hop music, you have no idea what it was like in those days, do you? So sit down and let Grandpa Spike tell you about the days when rock music meant banging two rocks together and computer networks were connected by a couple of paper cups and a thread.

Okay, maybe not quite so primitive, but I’ve been using computers for a relatively long time – longer than most people I know. Almost 30 years. And sometimes when I look back, I’m amazed at how far we’ve come in such a short span of time.

For me, it all started when I was managing a video rental store in New York City back in the early ’80s. The owner brought in a computer system to manage inventory and track rentals and I found myself drawn to this odd-looking box, playing with it as much as possible whenever his back was turned.

Pretty soon I needed to have something at home. I opted for the Atari 800, a pretty advanced home system back then. It used a cassette player for storage – it took 15 minutes to load a program and, God forbid, if it had trouble reading the tape 14 minutes in, you had to start all over again. So the day I got my first floppy drive was an even bigger deal. And soon I had a modem for the Atari – 2,400 bits per second – and the world was mine.

The only stuff to access back then was something known as bulletin board systems. That was great because I couldn’t afford to buy any software and it helped me find my way to the local software pirates, who naturally were all teenagers. They got a kick out of having such an old guy (I was in my early 30s then) who was as into games and hacking as they were, so they sort of adopted me as a mascot.

In 1986, I was involved in the start-up of a new business creating programming for syndicated radio in the US. I sat down with the two owners (I was the first employee hired) and we divided up the roles. ‘Spike, you’re in charge of computer systems because you have an Atari, so you know the most about it.’ Uh, right, yeah. But by 1987 I was running a network of 25 PCs linked by networking software called Novell Netware.

Soon I had my first computer – a laptop – that could run Microsoft’s new DOS operating system. Made by Zenith, it weighed about 15 pounds and cost a ridiculous amount of money.

You’d think if I was dealing with computers all day long, I wouldn’t want to deal with them once I got home at night. Au contraire! I couldn’t wait to get home, turn on my modem and get online. There was no World Wide Web back then and the internet was used almost exclusively by universities and the military.

For the rest of us, there was CompuServe. Founded by an insurance company and owned at the time by H&R Block, a huge accounting firm specializing in income tax preparation, the service offered email, online shopping and thousands of online forums covering almost every subject matter you could think of. These forums consisted of message boards, chat rooms and libraries of articles and software. If you needed support from a hardware or software company, odds were that they had their own forum on CompuServe. CompuServe had its own massive telephone network back then, complete with local phone numbers to call in practically every US city. You were charged by the minute and it was pretty common for your call to get dropped just as you were doing something that you thought was important. You’d need to dial in again, log in again and navigate back to wherever you were. It sounds incredibly primitive now but it was state of the art 20 years ago.

My monthly usage bills started growing along with this addiction. Me being me, I figured I’d better find some way to do it for free. So I became very active in a couple of forums, eventually rising up to the exalted title of “Co-Sysop”. Sounds very romantic, doesn’t it? Maybe not, but I got a free account with unlimited usage. I posted dozens of CD reviews into the Consumer Electronics Forum library every month for download by paying customers. And on the somewhat more infamous RockNet, I hosted live chats online several times a week. By the early ’90s, I was calling these sessions Dr. Spike: Bad Advice for Bad Lovers. (I’m not saying Dr Phil stole his whole concept from me. But then again, you never know.)

We were a hardcore group, online almost every free moment of the day (something I’m sure my wife didn’t appreciate). We met in person in our home cities and sometimes even travelled across country for massive geek parties. We sneered at other, lesser services. We made jokes about AO-hell and their millions of free floppy disks. AOL even tried to poach many of CompuServe’s sysops back then to beef up their meagre offerings.

In 1998, CompuServe was sold to Worldcom (which later bought MCI and is now a part of Verizon). Worldcom kept the phone network and sold off the information service to arch-rival AOL. But by the time AOL took over, CompuServe had become a distant memory for thousands. AOL of course soon had millions of members each paying $20 a month to access their phone network and get online. That kind of cash flow (along with some, ahem, unusual accounting practices) allowed AOL to use their inflated stock to purchase Time Warner, in what has since gone down in history as one of the worst, if not the single worst, mergers in corporate history.

But I digress (for a change). The beginning of the end can be dated back to 1997 when a company called Spry released a product called Internet in a Box which, if I recall correctly, cost somewhere in the neighbourhood of US$40. That snappy little name caught the eyes and attention of millions eager to try out this new fangled intertubes thingie they’d read about. Internet in a Box included the Mosaic web browser and a TCP/IP program so that one could get online. There wasn’t too much on the web back then, but it seemed that every day, every hour something new was coming online. It was pretty clear to most people that the open standards of the internet were going to supplant the closed systems of CompuServe and AOL and, of course, that’s exactly what happened.

Add to that the advent of broadband access offered by a new generation of service providers and phone companies and pretty soon CompuServe and AOL were scrambling for reasons to exist. So AOL shut CompuServe down last month even as Time Warner is getting ready to spin AOL back out into the world as a stand-alone company.

If there’s any moral to this story, I suppose it’s that nothing lasts forever and, in the world of computing, forever can be a very short time. Most of today’s big players will be tomorrow’s memories. The moving finger writes and, having writ, gives them the finger and moves on. Friendster got its pants whipped by MySpace and now Facebook is taking away MySpace’s space even as they try to hold back the Twitter tide. Someday we’ll all be uploading our 3-D avatars to a new company some 12-year-old kid is putting together in his garage even as you read this. And I still love all of it and can’t wait to see what’s around the next corner – and the next, and the next.