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HP 95LX Games From CompuServe in the 1990s

Tuesday, July 27th, 2021

In the mid-1990s, my dad gave me a Hewlett Packard HP 95LX he bought from a friend and never used. The HP 95LX (1991) is a really cool handheld PC that runs DOS from ROM. While looking for 95LX software around 1997 (according to the file dates, although it’s very possible I grabbed them earlier), […]

[ Retro Scan of the Week ] My CompuServe Password

Tuesday, June 17th, 2014

I still love my dad’s handwriting. Here it is, folks: My CompuServe Information Service password that I used from 1993 until the late 1990s: “Needy-Sacred”. Feel free to log in as me the next time you get a chance. (I kid.) “Needy-Sacred” is an almost magical combination of words for me — probably because it […]

[ Retro Scan of the Week ] Grolier’s Encyclopedia on CompuServe

Monday, August 23rd, 2010

“Press <CR> for more” For my sixth grade social studies class, I wrote a report on Mikhail Gorbachev, former President of the Soviet Union. And he really was “former” then — the USSR had fallen apart just two years prior to my report in 1991. For that report — which I ran across recently — […]

[ Retro Scan of the Week ] CompuServe Borg Cube

Monday, March 2nd, 2009

Resistance is futile. (click for full advertisement) Long-time readers of VC&G may recall me talking about my adventures on CompuServe from time to time. Needless to say, they never looked like this. But I did have a few nightmares featuring enormous floating hive-mind spaceships hooked up to my computer when I was 12. On second […]

[ Retro Scan of the Week ] James Bond on CompuServe

Monday, September 15th, 2008

The Man with the Golden Gun I spent more hours on CompuServe in the early 1990s than I probably should have — considering it cost something like $4.80 (US) an hour. But of all the commercial online services at the time, CompuServe’s combination of history (it had been running since 1969), depth, and variety blew […]

Looking for Former Employees of Online Services (Compuserve, Prodigy, etc.)

Wednesday, August 2nd, 2006

I’m doing research on the history of commercial online services such as Prodigy, Compuserve, AOL, GEnie, Delphi, Q-Link, The Source, Dow Jones News/Retrieval Service, any videotex or teletext service, and many others for an upcoming project of mine. I would like to talk to, and perhaps interview, former employees of any of these online services […]

Reverse Engineering Prodigy, Part 1

Friday, January 15th, 2021

[ Please welcome Phillip Heller, VC&G’s newest contributor, who is a member of the Prodigy Preservation Project. Phillip will post more updates on his progress here in the future. –Benj ] Beginning in the mid 1980s, there were a number of online “walled gardens”. Among them were CompuServe, Genie, Delphi, Quantum Link (later PC-Link, AOL, […]

[ Retro Scan ] WorldsAway Mousepad

Thursday, March 9th, 2017

Echoes of Ancient Technicolor Greece Back in 1995, CompuServe and Fujitsu launched a graphical online chat world called WorldsAway. I used it from the very start (at least within a month of the launch, I think), and quickly became enveloped in the beautifully illustrated world and the sense of community it fostered. I’ve written in-depth […]

[ Retro Scan ] HP 95LX

Tuesday, August 30th, 2016

HP-95LX: Like a computer-shaped cookie that you can’t eat In case you didn’t know, the HP 95LX is a small, portable IBM PC compatible machine running a full version of MS-DOS that ran off of two AA batteries. It marked the beginning of HP’s palmtop computer line, which I wrote about recently in a slideshow […]

One Scan Per Week for Ten Years

Monday, February 1st, 2016

On January 30th, 2006, I posted my first entry in the Retro Scan of the Week column: “When to Use Low Speed Modems.” Below that first scanned image, I wrote: I found this amusing, so I thought I’d share it. More to come. I was right about that last sentence. Since then, I’ve shared weekly […]