CompuServe Information Manager (CIM) was CompuServe Information Service

CompuServe

CompuServe was the first major commercial online service in the United States. It dominated the field during the 1980s and remained a major player through the mid-1990s, when it was sidelined by the rise of services such as AOL with monthly subscriptions rather than hourly rates...

's client software. The program provided a GUI

Gui

Gui or guee is a generic term to refer to grilled dishes in Korean cuisine. These most commonly have meat or fish as their primary ingredient, but may in some cases also comprise grilled vegetables or other vegetarian ingredients. The term derives from the verb, "gupda" in Korean, which literally...

 front end to the text-based CompuServe service that was at the time accessed using a standard terminal program with alphanumeric

Alphanumeric

Alphanumeric is a combination of alphabetic and numeric characters, and is used to describe the collection of Latin letters and Arabic digits or a text constructed from this collection. There are either 36 or 62 alphanumeric characters. The alphanumeric character set consists of the numbers 0 to...

al shortcuts.

Issued at the same time as the GUI-only America Online began to grow in popularity, CIM was available for MS-DOS

MS-DOS

MS-DOS is an operating system for x86-based personal computers. It was the most commonly used member of the DOS family of operating systems, and was the main operating system for IBM PC compatible personal computers during the 1980s to the mid 1990s, until it was gradually superseded by operating...

 ("DOSCIM"), Microsoft Windows

Microsoft Windows

Microsoft Windows is a series of operating systems produced by Microsoft.Microsoft introduced an operating environment named Windows on November 20, 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces . Microsoft Windows came to dominate the world's personal...

 ("WinCIM"), Macintosh

Macintosh

The Macintosh , or Mac, is a series of several lines of personal computers designed, developed, and marketed by Apple Inc. The first Macintosh was introduced by Apple's then-chairman Steve Jobs on January 24, 1984; it was the first commercially successful personal computer to feature a mouse and a...

 ("MacCIM"), and OS/2

OS/2

OS/2 is a computer operating system, initially created by Microsoft and IBM, then later developed by IBM exclusively. The name stands for "Operating System/2," because it was introduced as part of the same generation change release as IBM's "Personal System/2 " line of second-generation personal...

 ("CIM for OS/2") and allowed access to CompuServe's features, such as its forums, chat, e-mail, and messaging facilities; these continued to be accessible via standard communications software using alphanumeric shortcuts. The first versions were released in around 1990. Version 2.0.1, released in 1994, included a version of the Mosaic web browser.

Later, CompuServe switched parts of its service over to a new binary protocol called HMI, or Host Micro Interface, which was more of a binary machine protocol and was not usable directly via a telnet

TELNET

Telnet is a network protocol used on the Internet or local area networks to provide a bidirectional interactive text-oriented communications facility using a virtual terminal connection...

 client like the old text based interface, thus requiring the use of specialised client software like CIM. Version 3.0 (CompuServe for Windows 3.0), in 1997, was intended to compete head-on with AOL, and was released amid an advertising campaign in which CompuServe was briefly re-branded

Brand

The American Marketing Association defines a brand as a "Name, term, design, symbol, or any other feature that identifies one seller's good or service as distinct from those of other sellers."...

 as "CSi".

After CompuServe was purchased by AOL

AOL

AOL Inc. is an American global Internet services and media company. AOL is headquartered at 770 Broadway in New York. Founded in 1983 as Control Video Corporation, it has franchised its services to companies in several nations around the world or set up international versions of its services...

in 1998, CompuServe began providing CompuServe branded versions of the AOL client software known as CompuServe 2000 and CompuServe 7 and its protocols as a way to access the service, however it continued to remain possible to connect to WinCIM via HMI, which became known as the "CompuServe Classic" service.