Compuserve Advert - October 1990

It's been ten years since Compuserve launched the world's first online real-time chat service, the CB Simulator, and a couple of years since the "invention" of Internet Relay Chat - the online messaging/chat system that was closely modelled on the CB-radio concept.

At the time, Compuserve - along with the other "big three" dial-up services in the US, The Source and Dow Jones - had about 400,000 subscribers, but now - according to the advert - it had 600,000 subscribers by itself. That puts the UK's Prestel service, with its 90,000 subscribers at its peak, into perspective.

The advert is announcing the launch of CompuServe/FORUM in the UK and Europe, along with its email, 27,000 public-domain software programs, 1300 reference databases, travel and news.

It cost £29.93 to sign up - about £89 in 2024 - and there would have been a £6-£10 per month subscription on top of that, plus 1p per minutes cheap rate calls, if you were lucky.

Oh, and modem speeds at the end of the 1980s were around 9,600 bits per second. At that speed, it would take around 17 minutes just to download a single megabyte of data.