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 DC DSLThere's a reason I'm Command.Premium
join:2000-07-30
Washington, DC
kudos:2
 ·Covad Communicat..
·Verizon Online DSL
| reply to travelguy
Re: Farewell Guys said by travelguy: And if memory serves, they converted over to OS2 based systems at one point, at least for the forums. People forget how powerful and useful forums were at the time. The only competitor was The Well out of San Francisco, but they were a bit esoteric even for the geeks of the time and never broke out of their niche. I recall talking to an upper level manager at Compuserve once to see if I could arrange to license the forum software for an internal company project. He literally laughed out loud and said they would never do such a thing. If we wanted to use that software it would have to be as a private forum hosted on their computers. It was NT, not OS/who. I was a consultant to the database design team, trained most of their programmers in the ways of things NT, and led the software quality review process. I also was the father-confessor/sensei for the WinCIM development team.
You really wouldn't have wanted the old forum software from the DECen. While on the surface it was a model of "elegance in simplicity," under the hood it was literally held together with prayers and the programming equivalents of baling wire and duct tape. Forum traffic and data storage demands were causing behind-the-scenes calamaties on a daily, and eventually hourly basis.
They had originally wanted to go to OS/2 in 1989, but a holy war broke out between the entrenched DEC camp and the Blockheads who wanted to bring in IBM. The matter was finally decided after the IBM/Microsoft break-up and MS dispatching Dave Cutler as an emissary to win over the hearts of the DEC boys.
RIP my dear, old friend.
Love,
72331,2600
70011,032
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There is no giant fur-bearing trout. | |
efrem
join:2002-04-03
Westport, CT | 
WinCIM 2.0.1 |
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DC DSLThere's a reason I'm Command.Premium
join:2000-07-30
Washington, DC
kudos:2 Reviews:
·Covad Communicat..
·Verizon Online DSL
| said by efrem:Ok, here is more food for nostalgia. I had to boot up an old Win'95 box for this.
There was a heated debate that raged for months about the graphics used in WinCIM. The ultimate selection of what shipped pretty much sealed the fate of "professional" CompuServe. The Blockheads were hell bent on keeping people from defecting to AOL, and one of the big reasons cited for people cancelling was "it's too hard for non-techies to understand." (Another was that the long-established community etiquette and forum conduct policies made people who didn't have good writing and interpersonal skills unwelcome.)
WinCIM was considerably more functional than the traditional TTY comm package used by most people, especially with the TapCIS-like features. However, the dumbing-down of the UI universally insulted and offended the long-time user population. The UI team went so far as to drop beta testers who submitted negative feedback about the cartoonish graphical elements, and regularly purged unflattering remarks from the WinCIM beta and support forums. (This attitude was a key reason I declined to extend my consulting contract with them.)
Management was also uninterested in stemming the exodus of vendor-sponsored support forums to the Internet. The attitude was basically denial and "they'll be back!" One of the marketing execs I frequently dealt with in 1994 brainwashed most of the decision makers into thinking the Internet was "no different than BBSes of 10 years ago, and people didn't care much for those because they had to call each one separately." He literally laughed me out of a meeting where I suggested exploring creating gateways or getting in on hosting those websites as a way to stem defections or revive relationships and keep the brand relevant. Oh, well. What would I know about stuff like that?
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There is no giant fur-bearing trout. | |
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