General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: I remember the Internet back in the early 1990s. [View all]csziggy
(34,136 posts)Many companies had message boards where users - often professionals supporting businesses - could interact with technical personnel from major tech companies to find answers.
I hung out on the CompuServe message boards for years. The per minute charges were crippling, but most of us used a wonderful program called TAPCIS (The Access Program for the Compuserve Information Service) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TapCIS). Tapcis allowed users to go online for short bursts - a typical session would let you download message headers and replies to your previous messages. Then you would mark the headers you wanted to read, write replies, go back online, retrieve the marked headers and upload your replies. You could take you time offline, reading threads and writing replies to those, then go back online to upload all those.
Rather than spending hours online reading threads live, I would spend a few minutes a day online with TAPCIS and reading and replying offline. It saved me hundreds of dollars.
Sometime after AOL acquired CompuServe, they upgraded the archaic servers that used the software that TAPCIS could access and the program no longer worked. There is still a community of TAPICS friends but it no longer very active so far as I know.