[NonNefarious]

And CompuServe wasn't even the Internet. It, like AOL, was a glorified bulletin-board system. AOL tacked Internet access on as an afterthought.

I remember getting personal developer support from Microsoft on CompuServe in the early '90s. MS engineers would actually send us some of their internal tools to investigate bugs. We helped them fix stuff in ODBC, and they gave us good support while we built what was, at the time, the biggest Visual C++ project they were aware of.

Obviously this kind of interaction is impractical today, but there must be some middle ground between it and what we currently see: companies shamefully abusing and hiding from their customers.

[rmasters]

Brings back memories. I was a MS support engineer on CompuServe around 1989. I supported Windows/286 and 386, Excel, and Word for Windows. I posted around 25 to 30 messages a day. I had a partner named Bassam, if I recall correctly. It was just the two of us, and there was a period of time when it was only me.

Many times I wondered "if they only knew MS Windows support on CompuServe relies on one intern working out of a frat house (at the UW)." I used a US Robotics modem running at 300 or 1500 baud without error correction. I had to write my responses in notepad and paste it in due to line noise.

Helping so many people every day was very satisfying and I am still proud of that work.

[NonNefarious]

You should be! As you can see, people are probably still talking about it 20 years later.