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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

#91

Post by pmoriarty »

linker3000 wrote: post #82
aedron wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I lived out several years of my youth at 1200 baud. The word "U.S. Robotics" was like porn to me.

In the early days, I had a Miracle Technology WS2000 with manual, rotary knobs to select speeds (all the way from 300 to 1200bps), plus a manual connect/disconnect knob, so making a connection consisted of dialing the BBS number, listening for the tones and putting the modem online. Unfortunately, my modem had a sticky phone line relay and so to disconnect the call the procedure was: turn knob, listen for click, thum…

Manual, rotary knobs remind me of phones with manual, rotary dials. They were everywhere through the entire 20th Century, but now there are plenty of people who've never seen them in their entire life, and of course youtube videos of kids being laughed at by their parents when they're forced to try to figure out how to use them. That's something else we didn't have back then: humiliating videos of ourselves -- recorded by our family, no less -- broadcast to the whole world. I don't blame the kids for failing, though. The dialing mechanism of such phones is clearly not very intuitive.

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

#92

Post by black-tea »

JustSomeNobody wrote: post #81
Endy wrote: post #54

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…

It seems everyone back then on BBS's were enthusiasts. We all had at least that in common. I remember groups of us would all gather on some random night of the week for drinks just to kind of put a face to the handle. It was great. And after we'd hurry and dial back in to see who else just dialed in. Social networks today just leave you feeling gross.

Why don't we just use them then? Only enthusiasts would use them now, as they did back then.

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

#93

Post by pmoriarty »

krapp wrote: post #78
pmoriarty wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>Now so many people have lived their entire lives with the net all around them and only hearsay about what it was like before. 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 eve…

"unlike physical real estate, the internet can be a potentially boundless space and there's room in it for everyone"

There is room for everyone, but what kind of place is it? The observation is that it's no longer what it was, and that something special was lost.

I wouldn't place the blame on the "tourists". First, there are no toursits. Everyone is here to stay. Second, the nerds played a huge role, using their skills and knowledge to make the internet what it is today. Corporations and governments also rushed in to claim their stake, try to take ownership and control -- often quite successfully.

The Gold Rush transformed California, and so did the Internet Rush, if it could be called that, transform the Internet itself. I'm not sure how it could have remained as it was, like in a museum. The use of new technologies alone would have changed it.

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

#94

Post by martin1b »

nkozyra wrote: post #80
eeZah7Ux wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 have a lot of nostalgia for my bbs days, but one thing I distinctly recall was the slowness of it all. The palpable improvement when you went from 300 baud to 600 or from 14k to 28k to 56k. 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?

True but we could do what nobody else in the world could do. We had chat, file sharing, forums, multiplayer games and more before everybody else. BBSers felt like the elite and nobody else understood it.

There was a low barrier to entry. Anyone could start a BBS. Since there were so few, any new BBS would have a flood of new users, making them successfully very quickly.

The slowness created an exciting anticipation.

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

#95

Post by martin1b »

01100011 wrote: post #55

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…

Sounds a lot like Electron. Boeing surplus. Not a lot of those around.

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

#98

Post by fooblat »

porpoisely wrote: post #10

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

Not really, but it probably comes down to how you define terms. If you are considering ARPANET to be "the internet" then you are correct. However, one can argue that ARPANET was just a single isolated network and not really "the internet" until multiple networks were joined via a common protocol. This started happening in 1973[0], the same year the first protobbs, Community Memory[1] came online.

Many would consider the deployment of TCP/IP as the birth of the internet. These protocols were not standardized until 1982[0]. This was well after the first true BBS in 1978[2].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_Memory

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CBBS

edit: formatting

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

#99

Post by NuSkooler »

It's been pointed out already, but a little more info: There is a fairly large (and growing, actually) community of BBSers in the modern area. Telnet is even slowing being pushed out in favor of SSH and/or secure WebSockets (BBS from your browser!) in addition to other crypto and related tech where it can apply. There are boards running on retro hardware, under emulators, and even quite a few modern BBS software being written (disclaimer: I'm the author of one in Node.js).

There is a lot of nostalgia, but also a lot of people enjoy time away from the modern corporate controlled web. A text-mode interface, community, etc. is quite nice at times.

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