I emigrated here from the AOL version of the SDBM, and have been an AOL user since…oh, perhaps 1992, I guess. But that was not my first online service. I was briefly on CompuServe (until the first bill came in).
Way back in the dim dark reaches of my mind’s junk closet lies the notion that there were TWO software packages that would let you access CompuServe. One, CIM (stood for something, damned if I can recall what, and I could even be wrong about the acronym), was free; then there was a more fluent, powerful, and oh, I don’t know, impressive-in-other-ways software package that you had to PAY for, which of course I didn’t do, and IIRC this CompuServe-on-Steriods software application was called Navigator.
Jump forward a couple years and online services are being challenged by the world wide web and independent email, both courtesy of the suddenly popular and trendy INTERNET. And how do we browse the world wide web? Well, in its primordial stages, some of us used Mosaic, but almost overnight (alongside of the popularity of the WWW) the Browser of Choice that supplanted Mosaic was from Netscape and was called…Navigator.
OK, folks… AOL had yet to acquire CompuServe (whatever happened with that anyway? Does AOL still run CompuServe as its own independent kindgom? They certainly don’t seem to have merged the two!); CompuServe was still in fact, IIRC, the king of online services, AOL having not yet caught up in user count or depth of online resources; and so along comes serious competition from the completely independent internet, via world wide web, and the upstart new browser, using the same name as CompuServe’s premium service browser, manages this HOW, exactly?
I’ve never heard of any deal between Netscape and CompuServe regarding the rights to the name. Nor have I ever heard of Netscape being sued by CompuServe. And under the circumstances, why would CompuServe have been even remotely cooperative in this matter?
Those of us who were once subscribers to CompuServe will attest to the unlikelihood of CS lacking mercenary inclinations here.