User:AngelTripp/sandbox

Founding CompuServe was first founded in 1969 as Compu-Serv Network, Inc. (the earliest advertising shows the name with initial caps) in Columbus, Ohio, as a subsidiary of Golden United Life Insurance. Harry Gard, Sr. was the founder and CEO of CompuServ. While Jeffrey Wilkins, the son-in-law of Golden United and CompuServ founder and CEO Harry Gard, Sr., is widely credited as the first president of CompuServe, the initial president was actually Dr. John R. Goltz. Goltz and Wilkins were both graduate students in electrical engineering at the University of Arizona. Early employees also recruited from the University of Arizona included Sandy Trevor (inventor of the CompuServe CB Simulator chat system), Doug Chinnock, and Larry Shelley. Wilkins replaced Goltz as president within the first year of operation.

The company objectives were twofold: to provide in-house computer processing support to 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 computers during business hours. It was spun off by Harry Gard, Sr. as a separate company in 1975, trading on the NASDAQ under the symbol CMPU.

Concurrently, the company recruited executives who shifted the focus from offering time-sharing services, in which customers wrote their own applications, to one that was focused on packaged applications. The first of these new executives was Robert Tillson, who left Service Bureau Corporation (then a subsidiary of Control Data, but originally formed as a division of IBM) to become CompuServe's Executive Vice President of Marketing. He then recruited Charles McCall (who followed Jeff Wilkins as President, and later became CEO of HBOC), Maury Cox (who became CEO after the departure of McCall), and Robert Massey (who was the last CEO of CompuServe). Barry Berkov was recruited from Xerox to head product development and marketing.

In 1977, CompuServ's board changed the company's name to CompuServe Incorporated. In 1980, Harry Gard, Sr. sold the company to H&R Block. The purchase provided cash to expand operations, and helped H&R Block diversify its tax-season based earnings.