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41 Years Ago, There Were BBS Instead of the Internet

theregister.co.uk

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Re: 41 Years Ago, There Were BBS Instead of the Internet

#11

Post by em-bee »

a host is a host from coast to coast,

and no-one will talk to a host that's close,

unless the host that isn't close

is busy, hung or dead.

(sing to the melody of the talking horse mr. ed)

i don't know how old this is, and it still fits to the internet, but it's definitely from a time when BBS were still around.

Re: 41 Years Ago, There Were BBS Instead of the Internet

#14

Post by icedchai »

porpoisely wrote: post #10

The internet predates BBS. And I'd credit HTTP, Netscape or AOL for killing off BBS rather than TCP/IP.

The everyday consumer did not have access to the Internet until the 90's when it was commercialized. True, it "existed" before that, it was primarily education / academia and defense-related orgs that had access.

BBSes were primarily text based... early Internet providers opened up access to Usenet newsgroups, email, IRC, etc. which made traditional BBSes look like a toy in comparison. The web put the nail in the coffin, but they were already on their way out before then.

Re: 41 Years Ago, There Were BBS Instead of the Internet

#15

Post by wax66 »

LinuxBender wrote: post #3

LOIS BBS stuck around for a while after the internet was created. For a while you could telnet to it. It was really popular on the central coast of California and as folks got jobs, moved around, that was a way for people to keep in touch. I remember seeing multiple split-66 blocks in the sysops room the BBS was running from, with a couple dozen phone lines. It's sysop (Pete a.k.a. Communicator) passed away and the B…

TREX is still up.

Re: 41 Years Ago, There Were BBS Instead of the Internet

#18

Post by dccoolgai »

There was a time you could (and would) go to a _picnic_ in real life with the other people on the internet. Can you imagine that? Tradewars, chat, warez, Club Caribe, music mods... it was pure magic. I would trade a year on this internet to have that one back for a couple hours.

Re: 41 Years Ago, There Were BBS Instead of the Internet

#19

Post by RawInfoSec »

It was a hard decision sometimes, (as most boards gave only an hour so other people get a turn). Do I play Tradewars? LORD? What about downloading another half of disk 2 of UFO:Enemy Unknown? Maybe I should just stuff it all and go chat with the dude on line 2.

519 was an amazing and active BBS community. I still have friends that I see regularly. Some boards we used to chat all night or on occasion we'd insta-rush a bar, karaoke, or bownling alley at 3am just because we could. Some great memories, people etc. So far on the Interwebs I've found only dragons and monsters! lol

Re: 41 Years Ago, There Were BBS Instead of the Internet

#20

Post by bbhart »

teilo wrote: post #9
hoodwink wrote: post #4

Ah what I would do to play a good ol’ game of TradeWars 2002 the ol’ fashioned way

Recently, as I was doing some deep cleaning in my study, I found a warpgate map in my files that I made in the late 80s. I had forgotten all about Tradewars, so that brought back some memories. I lived in a small town, but there was a service available at the time, a sort of modem gateway network with nodes in a lot of smaller towns. It was a subscription service. Connect to it via a local call, and from there you co…

PC Pursuit from Telenet. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telenet I woke up super early many days so I could explore far-flung BBS’s before school.

And I was 1:377/7 on Fidonet. Good times.

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