Editing CompuServe (section)

===Founding===
CompuServe was initiated during 1969 as Compu-Serv Network, Inc.{{efn|The earliest advertising shows the name with initial capitals.}} in [[Columbus, Ohio]], as a subsidiary of Golden United Life Insurance.<ref name="CompuWired79">{{Cite magazine |last=Tweney |first=Dylan |date=September 24, 2009 |title=Sept. 24, 1979: First Online Service for Consumers Debuts |url=https://www.wired.com/2009/09/0924compuserve-launches |magazine=Wired}}</ref>

Though Golden United founder Harry Gard Sr.'s son-in-law Jeffrey Wilkins is widely miscredited as the first president of CompuServe, its first president was actually John R. Goltz.<ref name="SecretHistory">{{Cite book |last=Banks |first=Michael |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=1J78hiHKaPoC |title=On the Way to the Web: The Secret History of the Internet and Its Founders |publisher=Apress |year=2012 |isbn=978-1-4302-5075-3}}</ref> Wilkins replaced Goltz as CEO within the first year of operation. Goltz and Wilkins were both graduate students of [[electrical engineering]] at the [[University of Arizona]]. Other early recruits from the same university included Sandy Trevor (inventor of the CompuServe [[CB Simulator]] chat system), Doug Chinnock, and Larry Shelley.

The company's objectives were twofold: to provide in-house computer processing for Golden United Life Insurance; and to develop as an independent business in the computer [[time-sharing]] industry, by renting time on its [[PDP-10]] [[midrange computer]]s during [[business hours]], mainly to other businesses.<ref name="CompuWired79">{{Cite magazine |last=Tweney |first=Dylan |date=September 24, 2009 |title=Sept. 24, 1979: First Online Service for Consumers Debuts |url=https://www.wired.com/2009/09/0924compuserve-launches |magazine=Wired}}</ref> It was divested as a separate company during 1975, trading on the [[NASDAQ]] using the symbol CMPU.

Concurrently, the company recruited executives who changed the emphasis from offering time-sharing services, for which customers wrote their own applications, to a service providing application programs. The first of these new executives was Robert Tillson, who quit [[Service Bureau Corporation]] (then a subsidiary of [[Control Data Corporation]], but originally formed as a division of [[IBM]]) to become CompuServe's Executive Vice President of Marketing. He then recruited Charles McCall (who succeeded Jeff Wilkins as CEO, and later became CEO of the medical information company [[McKesson Corporation|HBO & Co.]]), Maury Cox (who became CEO<ref name="CoxCEO.NYT94">{{Cite news |last=Lewis |first=Peter H. |date=August 31, 1994 |title=Compuserve To Offer Link To Internet |work=[[The New York Times]] |url=https://www.nytimes.com/1994/08/31/business/company-news-compuserve-to-offer-link-to-internet.html}}</ref> after the departure of McCall), and Robert Massey (who succeeded Cox as CEO).

In 1977, CompuServe's board changed the company's name to CompuServe Incorporated. In 1979, it began "offering a dial-up online information service to consumers".<ref name=CompuWired79/> In May 1980, at which time Compuserve had fewer than 1,000 subscribers to its consumer information service, H&R Block acquired the company for $25 million and within four years had grown its subscriber base to about 110,000.<ref name="BlockHR.NYT84">{{Cite news |date=April 14, 1984 |title=New ventures for H & R Block |work=[[The New York Times]] |url=https://www.nytimes.com/1984/04/14/business/new-ventures-for-h-r-block.html |access-date=July 8, 2019}}</ref>