hckrnws

BLISS is not a place, it is (was) a DEC programming language:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BLISS

For all that DEC is nearly forgotten now, it had far more effect on modern computing than IBM ever did.

DEC OSes are why CP/M and MS-DOS looked and worked the way they did. Even DEC GUIs: OS/2 Presentation Manager fed back into Motif, which lent VMS DECwindows and DEC Ultrix their look and feel, and all this influenced Windows 3.

DEC VMS was a huge influence on Windows NT.

The hardware too: the DEC PDP-7 and PDP-11 shaped Unix, and much of the Unix and Linux design is down to DEC hardware influences.

How PCs look and feel and work is because of DEC, not IBM. Nothing about the PC is at all IBM-like; IBM's OSes are profoundly different, from the 5100 and APL all the way up to modern Z Series mainframes.

Regarding CI$, many of the things that were odd about CompuServe, even the user account names, are because it ran on PDP-10 kit:

https://www.inwap.com/pdp10/compuserve.txt

I did work there. BLISS was originally an academic project (at Carnegie-Mellon) whose point of departure was this. Suppose a compiler to emit machine code comparable, for size and speed, with the best hand-tuned assembler: then what kind of high-level language could be the input to that compiler? What features must it [not] have? The findings were documented in a book, The Design of an Optimizing Compiler by William Wulf et al., published 1971.