Have you noticed anything different about your inbox this week? Where are all the weirdly threatening chain letters from family members you’ve never met? The hyperventilating urgent FWD: FWD: FWD: messages about Barack Obama’s secret Hellenic Polytheism? Your tri-weekly update on the power of prayer, told through the perspective of your fourth cousin’s cat? They are gone, is where, stemmed at the source. CompuServe Classic is dead.

I won’t try to be elegiac here, since I only really remember CompuServe’s service as that quasi-internetlike thing that my parents would let me use on our Gateway for about two minutes at a stretch, as we watched the minutely charges rack up and I desperately tried to figure out where the hell the games were. But those of you of a different generation vintage, with your own super-numerical email addresses, memories of horrifying, unexpected phone bills and bitterness towards the ungrateful kids of today with their “broadband” and “wireless,” feel free to reflect in the comments. [Basex via Beyond the Beyond]