101–110 of 114 posts
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…
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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?
> a splash screen of ASCII text was stuttered ...on a 600 baud modem. Not on a 28.8Kbps. I remember doing timing analysis at the time.
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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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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.
I can remember that. A group of us who go to whoever's house had just gotten a new game, piece of hardware, etc When we left we'd always say "see you on the roadhouse!", which was a multi-line board that we'd all dial into when we got home
Nowadays, 47 and crustier, I can hardly be arsed to answer a Facebook message, and all the avenues for social connection have become kind of overwhelming. I can't imagine how it is for people my age or older who picked this all up late.
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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?
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>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 skil…
BBSes had soul. Everyone was excited to be there. Most everyone was an enthusiast. We had chat, forums, filez, online games before everyone else. Nobody outside of that world had any idea what we all were doing.
Ha! So true. There was a technical debt that had to be paid for entry. Really kept things from de-evolving. The best we have today seems to be invite-only sites but with limited features in comparison.
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I ran a Utah BBS in the late 80's on a phone line I "found" in my childhood bedroom. I've thought, a bit, about setting up a "BBS" hosted on any computer connected to any WiFi access point. Here are my initial ramblings about the idea. https://blog.joeldare.com/wireless-bbs/
What was the name? I remember Raistlins Castle and stargate but I can not recall the names of the others. I spent a LOT of time back then playing barren realms elite.
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I ran a Utah BBS in the late 80's on a phone line I "found" in my childhood bedroom. I've thought, a bit, about setting up a "BBS" hosted on any computer connected to any WiFi access point. Here are my initial ramblings about the idea. https://blog.joeldare.com/wireless-bbs/
Thanks for posting this! I ran across this post a while back and couldn't for the life of me find it again - I liked the idea the last time I saw it. The first thing that came to mind was a wireless BBS running on a solar-powered Pi Zero, left in some remote location.
I've got a spare Mac Mini and an extra wifi router. I think I'll try to set this up for my neighbors soon. Most people probably wouldn't guess the password so I might have to go unencrypted.
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What was the name? I remember Raistlins Castle and stargate but I can not recall the names of the others. I spent a LOT of time back then playing barren realms elite.
Mine was called PoiZoN BBS.