Honestly it looks like most of it was long since destroyed.
What’s left on the Compuserve forums
As you can see, not a heck of a lot there. I didn’t even know they were kept around, but rather I had a feeling that they were part of those big ‘wise’ investments where companies pay an insane amount of money for old tech companies, and promptly shut them down.
Compuserve is owned by AOL, who in turn along with Yahoo! was bought by Oath: a division of Verizon. And what is interesting there?
Yep, they are indeed moving everything they have bought to OpenStack, and killing everything else that can’t easily make the jump. From someone who works in the field I know that the people who sign checques always are more interested in new and exciting than anything old, associated with older companies, and older executives that have either moved on or out of the way creating that power vacuum that jr’s crave. And in that bussle it’s time to kill the old.
Too bad it’s never preserved, nor do they honestly ever care about the brands they spend so much money on removing from the market to remove any chance of resurgence in competition.
Personally I’d just see it as a waste of time and effort, all this buying and shutting down. All it tells me is that Verizon knows that it fundamentally can’t create a messenger that could rival AOL instant messenger, nor could they run a communications forum longer than Compuserve so their only way to clear the space and remove any doubt is to spend billions to shut down zombie corporations who have been doing their best to destroy themselves for the past 20 years.
Look no further than AOL’s own acquisition of broadcast.com, and how within the space of 3 years AOL took it from a company to simply paying 5.7 Billion USD for a $9.95 domain name.