A great, and free, doc about that time.
https://archive.org/details/bbs_documentary
41 Years Ago, There Were BBS Instead of the Internet
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Re: 41 Years Ago, There Were BBS Instead of the Internet
#22A great, and free, doc about that time. https://archive.org/details/bbs_documentary
That seems be to a collection of clips and things. The 'BBS: The Documentary' was released as ~8 episdoes. You can find them collected here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nO5vjmDFZaI
Re: 41 Years Ago, There Were BBS Instead of the Internet
#23Ah 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…
Sounds like something similar to the IPSS:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Packet_Switched_...
Re: 41 Years Ago, There Were BBS Instead of the Internet
#24The 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 cof…
> The everyday consumer did not have access to the Internet until the 90's
I remember a day in the very early 90s when another node in our UUCP email system told the rest of us that he'd heard that there were now a million computers on the Net. We were gobsmacked. A whole million!
Now an extra million or two computers is mere noise-levels.
Re: 41 Years Ago, There Were BBS Instead of the Internet
#25The internet predates BBS. And I'd credit HTTP, Netscape or AOL for killing off BBS rather than TCP/IP.
Not on DOS machines, which were by far the most popular machine in that era. There was no tcp/ip because there was no kernel. I imagine the protocols that modems used were much easier to implement in each application than tcp/ip.
Even windows 3.1 had no socket support. Anyone remember WinSock?
Re: 41 Years Ago, There Were BBS Instead of the Internet
#26Re: 41 Years Ago, There Were BBS Instead of the Internet
#27a 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.
Go right to the host and read the post,
You'll get the answer you love the most,
But all the way you'll never boast,
Talk to BBS!
People yakkity-yak a streak,
And waste your time of day,
But BBS will never speak,
Unless there's something to say!
Re: 41 Years Ago, There Were BBS Instead of the Internet
#28The internet predates BBS. And I'd credit HTTP, Netscape or AOL for killing off BBS rather than TCP/IP.
Not on DOS machines, which were by far the most popular machine in that era. There was no tcp/ip because there was no kernel. I imagine the protocols that modems used were much easier to implement in each application than tcp/ip. Even windows 3.1 had no socket support. Anyone remember WinSock?
By 1992 there were packet drivers for most ethernet cards as well as a PPP driver. With the Waterloo TCP stack you got telnet, ftp, smtp, whois, ping, and finger. Looking at my old DOS collection I see NNTP, POP2, Gopher, Archie, and IRC as well.
Re: 41 Years Ago, There Were BBS Instead of the Internet
#29I used to be a sysop and made some of my deepest friendships that way. One-to-one chatting via fullscreen realtime updated text with no other distraction has some magical quality to it that makes you talk about all manner of things in depth with another person.
I used to play a ton of MajorMud, half to chat with other people while we played, and half to script it so our characters could keep playing while we were all at school. I met my husband on a BBS, and here we are all these years later. Plain text chat with local strangers in your area code is truly magical.
Re: 41 Years Ago, There Were BBS Instead of the Internet
#30Ah what I would do to play a good ol’ game of TradeWars 2002 the ol’ fashioned way
Good news, there's nothing stopping you: https://www.telnetbbsguide.com/
Dumb question — what would be involved in writing a mobile app that called BBS's? Handled the modem protocols, displayed ANSI graphics, etc....