[ih] Chat room and forum archives

[John Levine]

It appears that Jack Haverty via Internet-history <jack at 3kitty.org> said:
>IIRC, I had a Compuserve account, although I can't remember exactly 
>when.  But I think I remember that Compuserve's charges were based on 
>hours of connect time.   So there was financial pressure on Users to 
>dial up, do what you wanted to do, and hang up as quickly as possible.

Yup. There were programs for your PC that would connect, upload
whatever you had written, download all the messages in groups of
interest, and then hang up, so you could peruse them and reply
offline.

AOL was like that until they switched to unmetered service.