There was a sound the brick made when it connected. Not a handshake screech — something quieter, more deliberate. Compunet users in 1984 knew that sound meant the LINK was happening, the terminal software was rolling down from the server, and in a moment you’d be inside something that felt genuinely unlike anything else running on a C64. That service ran until May 1993. Then it was gone. Until now.
Compunet — properly Compunet Teleservices Ltd, with software by Ariadne Software — was a UK-based interactive online service that lived and died on the Commodore 64. It wasn’t a BBS in the traditional sense. It was something more structured: user-generated pages, electronic mail through its Courier system, telesoftware downloads, and that horizontally scrolling menu interface everyone called the duckshoot. Users connected via a custom 1200/75 baud modem that plugged straight into the cartridge port. That modem — “the brick” — carried an 8K ROM that bootstrapped the whole process, after which the full terminal software downloaded live from the server on every session unless you’d been smart enough to run CNSAVE.
The Protocol Is the Point
Compunet Reborn isn’t a reimagining. It isn’t a tribute page with screenshots and fond memories. It’s a faithful recreation of the original Compunet protocol — running over TCP/IP — built by tgreaves and hosted at compunet.live. That distinction matters more than it might sound. Plenty of retro revival projects approximate the experience. This one reconstructs the actual handshake, the actual terminal behaviour, the actual flow of what Compunet was. The C64 doesn’t know the difference. That’s the whole point.
Getting On the Wire
Connecting requires a C64 or C128, the original Compunet modem, and a piece of hardware that bridges the brick’s serial connection to a modern network — specifically a WiModem or equivalent device capable of redirecting that 1200/75 connection over TCP/IP to the Compunet Reborn server. The full walkthrough lives at compunet.live/connect, and the guide at compunet.live/guide covers the finer points of getting your session running cleanly. This isn’t plug-and-play, but it was never supposed to be. If you still have the brick, you already know that.
Ahead of Its Time, Not Behind It
I keep seeing Compunet described as a historical curiosity, a footnote to British computing history. I think that reading is wrong. A service running on 8-bit hardware in 1984 that offered live-downloaded terminal software, a structured content publishing layer, and real electronic mail between users wasn’t behind the curve — it was defining one. Compunet Reborn doesn’t just preserve that. It makes the argument for it. The protocol was worth keeping because the original design was worth keeping. Go connect and tell me I’m wrong.