BBSs are still alive; mostly accessed over amateur radio.
I'm getting back into packet radio. SDRs are making this lost art a cheap reality.
41 Years Ago, There Were BBS Instead of the Internet
41–50 of 114 posts
Re: 41 Years Ago, There Were BBS Instead of the Internet
#42when the sysop breaks in when you’re desperately trying to brute force a NUP
Re: 41 Years Ago, There Were BBS Instead of the Internet
#43The movie War Games inspired me to get a 300 baud modem, and one of my first memories of using one was to play Adventure (one of the first text adventure games) on a BBS. I war dialed like there was no tomorrow, and racked up huge phone bills downloading wares from across the country. 300 baud modems were super slow. You could literally watch a line of text be typed across the screen in front of you, one letter at a…
mp3s from a BBS at 9600? Surely you jest. MOD and STM, with an outside chance of WAV, were more like it.
Re: 41 Years Ago, There Were BBS Instead of the Internet
#44There 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.
Hah, those times didn't quite pass.
I went to a subreddit meetup around.. 2009, I think; it was the same spirit. (And we accidentally ran into David Blaine, but that's another story).
But, more commonly, meeting up with strangers you met online is pretty much the default way of meeting people (ever heard of Tinder?).
So it seems like you are complaining about the Eternal September more than anything else :)
Re: 41 Years Ago, There Were BBS Instead of the Internet
#45Barren Realms Elite on Hermes what it was 1991.
Re: 41 Years Ago, There Were BBS Instead of the Internet
#46I 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 got onto the net in the late 90s and discovered IRC soon after. I developed several nice friendships over freenode other IRC servers. Like you said, typing on a terminal without any distractions had a uniquely magical quality.
I've put it down to nostalgia but things like slack and other popular modern tools just don't have the pull which IRC had for me.
Re: 41 Years Ago, There Were BBS Instead of the Internet
#47The movie War Games inspired me to get a 300 baud modem, and one of my first memories of using one was to play Adventure (one of the first text adventure games) on a BBS. I war dialed like there was no tomorrow, and racked up huge phone bills downloading wares from across the country. 300 baud modems were super slow. You could literally watch a line of text be typed across the screen in front of you, one letter at a…
Relive the memory by piping everything through Brendan Gregg's wonderful "baud.pl" script [0]. Truly nostalgic!
(Using "baud.pl" is much smoother than trying to recreate the effect by piping through `pv`)
Re: 41 Years Ago, There Were BBS Instead of the Internet
#48Had to share my story how it was like in South Africa:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q0Dl-HJx7kY
Re: 41 Years Ago, There Were BBS Instead of the Internet
#49Was really hoping for some nostalgic screenshots in this piece
Re: 41 Years Ago, There Were BBS Instead of the Internet
#50Barren Realms Elite on Hermes what it was 1991.
Two words. Gooey Kablooie.