Who Owns CompuServe Now? Yahoo Runs the Portal

CompuServe still exists in 2026, but only as compuserve.com, a news portal operated under an AOL Media copyright and owned by Yahoo, which funds managed by Apollo Global Management bought in September 2021. The original dial-up service shut down on June 30, 2009, and the last CompuServe forums closed on December 15, 2017. What outlived the company is the GIF, released by CompuServe in 1987.

Is CompuServe still in business in 2026?

Not as an online service. CompuServe exists in 2026 only as a domain. Type compuserve.com and you get a news portal with world, business, sports and entertainment sections, refreshed from wire copy.

The ownership chain runs through four companies. H&R Block bought CompuServe in 1980 and sold it in February 1998. AOL took the consumer service, Verizon bought AOL in 2015 and Yahoo in 2017, and funds managed by Apollo Global Management completed their purchase of Yahoo in September 2021. CompuServe sits inside that Yahoo business today, and the portal's pages carry an AOL Media LLC copyright.

The pages are not even CompuServe-branded. In 2026 the news section at compuserve.com/news loads under the page title "Netscape News", because it runs on the template built for Netscape's leftover web properties.

Email is the one thread of continuity. Addresses ending in @compuserve.com still deliver, but they sit on AOL's mail servers, and the people who hold them sign in through the same login page that serves AOL mail.

How did an insurance company build the first online service?

CompuServe was incorporated in 1969 in Columbus, Ohio, as Compu-Serv Network, a subsidiary of Golden United Life Insurance. The Ohio historical marker erected at its old headquarters in 2024 calls it "the first major online information services provider."

John R. Goltz was its first president. Jeffrey Wilkins, son-in-law of Golden United founder Harry Gard Sr., replaced him as chief executive inside the first year and ran the company through its consumer expansion.

For a decade the business was timesharing: renting mainframe cycles to corporations that could not justify buying their own machines. At night those mainframes sat idle, and the idle capacity became the consumer product. CompuServe launched it on September 24, 1979, as MicroNET, sold through Radio Shack at $5 an hour plus the cost of the phone call.

What subscribers got was a text menu. Special Interest Groups, shortened to SIGs, held message boards and file libraries on everything from ham radio to programming languages. On February 21, 1980, CompuServe released CB Simulator, written by company executive Sandy Trevor and generally recorded as the first public, commercial multi-user chat program.

What did an hour on CompuServe actually cost?

It was metered, and metered hard. On the early 1980s evening rate, CompuServe charged $6 an hour at 300 baud and $12 an hour at 1200 baud. Daytime rates doubled, because the mainframes were still running insurance work and the pricing was set to keep consumers off them.

At 300 baud, roughly 30 characters a second, $6 an hour bought text that arrived slower than a person reads. A 400K download took about 40 minutes and cost about $8 at the evening rate, which is why file libraries were browsed carefully rather than grazed.

That user base skewed to people who could justify the bill: engineers, lawyers, doctors and programmers. It was a professional service that happened to have chat rooms.

Prices then collapsed under competition. Through the early 1990s CompuServe's hourly rate fell from over $10 an hour to $1.95 an hour, and AOL moved the whole market to a flat monthly fee, which a metered service could not answer. H&R Block, which had bought CompuServe in 1980, spent those years advertising in computer magazines and bundling trial accounts with modems.

Why does every GIF trace back to Columbus, Ohio?

On June 15, 1987, CompuServe released the Graphics Interchange Format. The engineering lead was Steve Wilhite, and the problem he was solving was money as much as bandwidth: subscribers paying by the hour needed color images that did not take twenty minutes to arrive.

GIF used Lempel-Ziv-Welch compression, supported 256 colors, and rendered identically on the Apple II, the Commodore 64 and the IBM PC, which mattered on a service whose subscribers ran all three. Animation was in the specification from the start, although almost nothing used it for another decade.

Wilhite spent the rest of his life defending the pronunciation. After collecting a Webby lifetime achievement award in 2013 he told The New York Times, "The Oxford English Dictionary accepts both pronunciations. They are wrong. It is a soft g." He died in 2022 at the age of 74.

The Ohio marker singles the format out among everything the company shipped: "One especially successful CompuServe innovation was the GIF graphics format." It is the only CompuServe invention still in daily use worldwide.

How did AOL end up with 2.6 million CompuServe subscribers?

By 1994 the American online market had settled into three services: CompuServe, Prodigy and America Online. CompuServe had the oldest and deepest content. AOL had flat-rate pricing and a mailing list, and that turned out to be the larger market.

The open web finished the argument. Once Netscape Navigator put the internet in front of ordinary buyers in late 1994, a walled service billing by the hour had to explain why its forums were worth more than an unmetered web. CompuServe bolted internet access onto its own client, slowly, and kept losing money.

The exit, announced in September 1997 and closed in February 1998, was a three-way trade rather than a straight sale. WorldCom bought all of CompuServe for $1.2 billion in stock and kept the network infrastructure, which was what it wanted. It then handed the CompuServe Information Service and its 2.6 million consumer subscribers, along with $175 million in cash, to AOL, and took AOL's ANS Communications business-access division in exchange. Bertelsmann paid AOL a further $75 million to keep its half of their European joint venture.

H&R Block sold its WorldCom stock on February 2, 1998, and reported net proceeds of $1,032,699,000 from the sale in its annual report that year.

When did the CompuServe forums finally go dark?

In two stages, eight years apart. AOL kept the original dial-up product running as CompuServe Classic until June 30, 2009, when it stopped operating as an internet service provider after thirty years. The remaining subscribers were pushed toward CompuServe 2000.

The forums outlived the service that created them. They ran on, thinly populated but genuinely active, until November 14, 2017, when a notice appeared at the top of every board: "We regret to inform you that the Forums will be removed from the CompuServe service effective December 15, 2017." The owner at that point was Oath, the Verizon unit that held AOL and Yahoo.

The same notice said the rest of the site, meaning news, weather and webmail, would carry on as normal. That is exactly what happened, and it is why the domain is still serving headlines in 2026 while the community that made the name is gone.

The Columbus headquarters at 5000 Arlington Centre Boulevard housed the company from 1973 to 2009. In 2024 the Ohio History Connection and Leadership Upper Arlington put a marker on the site, which is now the closest thing CompuServe has to a monument.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is CompuServe still around in 2026?

CompuServe exists in 2026 only as compuserve.com, a news portal. The CompuServe online service stopped operating as an internet provider on June 30, 2009, and its forums were removed on December 15, 2017. Email addresses ending in @compuserve.com still work, handled on AOL's mail servers.