I just went through a house move and unearthed a spiral-bound CompuServe user’s manual from 1985. I have hand-written notes on the inside cover with the billing rates around that time. Cost was broken down in two tiers, prime time and after hours and then further by the speed you connected.

300 baud cost $12.50/hour in prime time and $6/hour in the evenings. 1200 baud cost $15 and $12.50. 2400 baud cost $22.50 and $19. Minimum wage at the time was $3.35/hour. Inflation-adjusted that’s $55/hour for a 2400 baud prime time connection.

2400 baud modems were brand new in '85 and it would still be a few years before they were widely used. I’d been running a BBS since '82 so I always wanted to be ahead of the curve for speed and compatibility.

This was sort of the beginning of the end for CompuServe’s real success. 1985 was also when local BBSs started to figure out how to federate and link up. FidoNet was really starting to take off and if you were a CS Major you probably had access to the proto-internet in the computer lab on campus at your college. It wouldn’t be until 1990 before the first search engine existed, though.

I took a bunch of terrible photos of the book but then found that Internet Archive has the whole thing scanned in great quality.

Here’s some photos of the book I have here because the artifact is kinda cool just itself: https://imgur.com/a/XQWi9cK

Here’s the scan: https://archive.org/details/compu-serve-information-service-users-guide/mode/2up

That first photo on Imgur of the book’s cover is 3.1mb. It would take 174 minutes to download that file at 300 baud. A blistering 21 minutes at 2400 baud. It would require 3 floppy disks to store it.

The text of this Lemmy post? 1,884 bytes which would take 6.3 seconds to send at 300 baud.