Before everyone discovered the Internet, people who wanted to communicate online used bulletin board systems (BBS), which were usually running at someone's home and could accept only one person online at a time. A lot of busy signals! Increasingly, they turned to commercial services, such as CompuServe. Like the BBSes, these were all text, all the time, accessible from a DOS interface. CompuServe and its kind charged by the minute, so offline reader/writers were popular.

The forums on CompuServe operated much the way newsgroups do now. People posted and replied to messages in threads. The forums were devoted to various topics, with subsections in each forum for different interests.

In 1992, in CompuServe's Education Forum (EDFORUM), a group of software developers got together and started a somewhat informal group they dubbed the Educational Software Co-Operative. Andy Motes, author of the popular School Mom program, was the chief organizer. The group generated enough interest that it was granted its own section in EDFORUM.

ESC's first Web page appeared in the spring of 1995, modestly placed in a directory under Richard Harper's account with Msen. In the fall, the page moved to the ESC's new account with ExecPC.

In 1996, America Online (AOL) set up a shareware forum for the Association of Shareware Professionals (ASP). ESC was also a participant, and during the time the forum was active, the AOL keyword ESC would take users directly to the ESC's area, including a message board and a link to the ESC's website, which was now hosted on AOL.

In the spring of 1997, ESC acquired its own domain, edu-soft.org. CompuServe's EDFORUM remained the online meeting place for ESC members, but it began to fade away, and by mid-1998 it was no longer mentioned in the newsletter. A message board was set up on the ESC website. In cooperation with the ASP, ESC also acquired its own newsgroup, which became its official forum for online communication. After some time, ESC left the ASP's server, and the newsgroup eventually landed at its present location.