71–80 of 114 posts
Bbs is still a thing in Chinese circle. In Taiwan is Ptt, in mainland there are still a few such as newsmth.
Nostalgia time... I remember when my grandparents tried to help their misbehaving grandson by buying him a C=128-D at Toys "R" Us along with a 1200 baud modem. I quickly grew bored with Q-Link and found about the network of BBSes which existed in the late 80's. It wasn't long before I had ran up an $800 phone bill, and for the next 20 years my grandpa wouldn't talk to me. I found friendship and mischief, a world of w…
The 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`) [0]: http://www.brendangregg.com/Specials/baud
How we used to marvel at bidirectional transfers. x-modem, y-modem, x-modem, q-modem. I can hear the handshaking as shrilly as they ever were. Good time.
I remember seeing a steady 4.0kB/s on a 33600 baud USRobotics modem and going "wow we are at peak performance, let's just hope noise line or something doesn't degrade it" heheh
good times indeed.
The 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.
MP3 was introduced in 1993, which was around the time 14400bps modems were introduced. These things cost something like $350+ in 1990s-dollars, and I at least had more time than money at that point in my life.
In 41 years we moved on from BBS to BS
In that regard, this website is keeping the hope real, being really lightweight and snappy.
It was interesting watching some of the larger ones in my area turn into the most successful ISPs at the time (and get consumed later by the much larger national ones).
It inspired me to run my own, and while I only had the one line, and a very simple set of RemoteAccess screens, the experience taught me a hell of a lot about computers in general.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
My biggest surprise was how quickly everything happened. One day you were considered a massive nerd for having your own computer, spending a lot of time on it, playing games on it, and socializing with others on it. Seemingly the next day everyone was online and had their own email addresses. I remember being amazed the first time I saw website advertised on the side of a bus. It seemed like the world had massively c…
It's become so ubiquitous that the nerds have started complaining about how the tourists have ruined it.
Which is understandable on the one hand, and regrettable on the other, because unlike physical real estate, the internet can be a potentially boundless space and there's room in it for everyone.
The 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…
I played MUDs on a 1200 baud modem, and I was at a distinct disadvantage. Going to 9600 was incredible.
I actually used it for work for a few years for dialling in from home.
Like so many of us, I miss the days of the BBS. But I think I know precisely why I do. BBS systems and Usenet were plain-text communications which were fast and open. There wasn't much space for user tracking, analytics, etc. There just wasn't much corporate space. Yes, there were corporate BBSes and public FTPs; but by and large they couldn't pull your call log and see what you'd been up to. There was a sense of pri…
Indeed plain-text BBS (over a slow modem) were faster than loading 10 MB of javascript over an ADSL. Also the information density and signal-to-noise ratio was higher. Even if you use ad-blockers.
I think we romanticize this stuff too much. Even showing a splash screen of ASCII text was stuttered. Chat operations were slow over the wire, you just never knew because ... maybe they just hadn't typed anything?