WOW! by CompuServe
CompuServe's last-ditch answer to AOL — a brightly colored, family-friendly online service with a cartoon interface and unlimited hours for $17.95 a month. It crashed and burned in less than a year, but if you had it, you never forgot it.
CompuServe launched WOW! (the exclamation point was part of the brand) in March 1996: $17.95 a month flat for unlimited access, with up to six user accounts per household. It was among the first online services to offer flat-rate unlimited hours — the pricing that would soon become the industry standard — with separate kids' and adults' areas, parental controls for internet and email, and an aggressively hand-drawn, cartoonish interface that looked nothing like its gray corporate parent. It was pitched squarely at families who found the online world too complicated.
The service died before it could build momentum: only about 102,000 subscribers ever signed up, the flat rate made profitability nearly impossible, and the launch was hamstrung by software that wasn't ready in time for its planned Windows 95 integration. CompuServe announced the shutdown in November 1996 and closed WOW! on January 31, 1997 — barely ten months after launch — refocusing on business users. A footnote in the dial-up wars, but a vivid one: the colorful CDs, the cartoon login screen, the family service that vanished mid-conversation.
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