With the introduction of more powerful machines enabling display of color, CompuServe introduced the much more capable Graphics Interchange Format (GIF),[1] invented by Steve Wilhite.

Other early recruits from the same University included Sandy Trevor (inventor of the CompuServe CB Simulator chat system), Doug Chinnock, and Larry Shelley.

In the earliest buildups, each line terminated at a single machine of CompuServe's host service, so that one dialed different telephone numbers to reach different computers.

Alexander "Sandy" Trevor secluded himself for a weekend, writing the "CB Simulator", a chat system that soon became one of CIS's most popular features.

[11] In July 1980, working with Associated Press, CompuServe began hosting text versions of the Columbus Dispatch, The New York Times, Virginian-Pilot and Ledger Star, The Washington Post, San Francisco Examiner, San Francisco Chronicle, and Los Angeles Times were added in 1981; additional newspapers followed.

It was common during the early 1980s to pay a $30-per-hour charge to connect to CompuServe, which at the time cost $5 to $6 per hour before factoring in the connection-time surcharges.

CNS has been the primary supplier of dial-up communications for credit-card authorizations for more than 20 years, a competence developed as a result of its long-time relationship with Visa International.

The B+ protocol was later extended to include the Host-Micro Interface (HMI), a mechanism for communicating commands and transaction requests to a server application operating on the mainframes.

HMI could be used by "front end" client software to present a GUI-based interface to CIS, without having to use the error-prone CLI to route commands.

In 1993, CompuServe Hong Kong was initiated as a joint venture with Hutchison Telecom and was able to acquire 50,000 customers before the dial-up ISP frenzy.

This broadened the audience from primarily business users to the technical "geek" crowd, some of whom had earlier used Byte Magazine's Bix online service.

WinCIM also allowed caching of forum messages, news articles and e-mail, so that reading and posting could be performed offline, without incurring hourly connection costs.

In conjunction with AOL's marketing campaigns, this caused a significant loss of customers until CompuServe responded with a similar plan of its own at $24.95 per month in late 1997.

AOL used a freely available graphical user interface-based client; CompuServe's wasn't free, and it only had a subset of the system's functionality.

By late 1994, CompuServe was offering "unlimited use of the standard services (including news, sports, weather) ... and limited electronic mail"[c] for $8.95 per month – what The New York Times called "probably the best deal.

"[34] TapCIS was written in Borland's Turbo Pascal code by Howard Benner, a marketing executive from Wilmington, Delaware,[35] who joined CompuServe in 1981.

[36] Regarding WinCIM (and predecessor CIM), PC Magazine wrote[34] that "They give you a broader view of what's available" and by using it "you can more easily navigate the service."

They explicitly caution that, unlike TapCIS, it "won't save any money ... it could actually take you longer to retrieve and answer messages ... than without it.

"[34] Although OzCIS and OzWIN (its Windows-based successor) were described as "free for personal use"[34] by PC Magazine, it was shareware,[e][37] like WinCIM, TapCIS and NavCIS.

For example, if a text file contained the line The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog, the word 'fox' could be replaced with word 'wolf' using the command: /c/fox/wolf To see the result of the edit, the user could type: /p and in this case, would see The quick brown wolf jumps over the lazy dog There were many other commands, including a repeating capability later, which allowed significant file manipulations without the need to write special programs.

Long the largest online service provider, by 1987 CompuServe had 380,000 subscribers, compared to 320,000 at the Dow Jones News/Retrieval, 80,000 at The Source, and 70,000 at GEnie.

was an unlimited-access flat-rate online service operated by CompuServe, starting March 1996;[50] its closure was announced by November of the same year, to be effective at the end of January 1997.

Toward the end of the year, AOL was reportedly working on using the domain for a social networking service concerning the popular online role-playing game World of Warcraft.

There were technical problems—the thousands of new generation U.S. Robotics dial-up modems deployed in the network would crash during high call volumes.

Parent company H&R Block was going through its own management changes at the same time, beginning with the retirement of CEO Henry Bloch.

[57] In February 1998, John W. Sidgmore, then vice chairman of WorldCom, and the former CEO of UUNET, devised a complex transaction which was ultimately satisfactory to all parties.

[citation needed] In January 2007, CompuServe e-mailed members that Windows Vista was not supported, and suggested switching to the AOL-branded service.

[68] The service was proposed by Paul Stanfield, an independent business-to-consumer electronic commerce consultant, to Martin Turner, Product Marketing Director for CIS UK, in August 1994.

Turner agreed and the project started in September with rapid market research, product development and sales of online space to major UK retail and catalogue companies.

This was a repeat of the first formal test of the service on February 9, 1995, which included secure payment and subsequent fulfilment of the order by Royal Mail postal delivery.