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(CIS, CompuServe Interactive Services). An ISP andon-line service portal based in Columbus, Ohio, USA; part ofAOL since February 1998.CIS was founded in 1969 as a computer time-sharing service.Along with AOL and Prodigy, CIS was one of the firstpre-Internet, on-line services for consumers, providingbulletin boards, on-line conferencing, business news, sportsand weather, financial transactions, electronic mail,Usenet news, travel and entertainment data and on-lineeditions of computer publications. CIS was originally run byCompuServe Corporation.In 1979, CompuServe was the first service to offer electronicmail and technical support to personal computer users. In1980 they were the first to offer real-time chat with itsCB Simulator. By 1982, the company had formed its NetworkServices Division to provide wide-area networking to corporateclients.Initially mostly serving the USA, in 1986 they developed aJapanese version called NIFTYSERVE. In 1989, they expandedinto Europe and became a leading Internet service provider.In 2001 they released version 7.0 of their client program.CompuServe home (http://compuserve.com/).