91–100 of 196 posts
Top comment about this photo is ( and the poster) Scott Miller - Apogee/3D Realms Founder @ScottApogee BBS's (bulletin board systems) were the backbone of the online world before the Internet came along in 1995. Apogee teamed up with Dan Linton's BBS, called Software Creations, and we poured $200k+ into it to grow it to nearly 140 call-in nodes with a T3 (high bandwidth) line.
I can recall people being very impressed at unix systems being able to handle many clients, and being personally confused at the idea of a computer only being able to handle a single user.
I can recall people being very impressed at unix systems being able to handle many clients That seems odd to me, too, because before DOS and the Commodore 64/Apple ][ era, multi-user systems were everywhere. Not just mainframes and minicomputers, but there were many dozens of multi-user systems based on CP/M, MP/M, and other operating systems. Even Tandy had them. The revolutionary part of the "personal computer" era…
It wasn't as secure or as easy, but you could certainly do multi-user systems without protected mode and within very small RAM amounts.
I used to dial into that BBS... long distance. It had a huge library of shareware. https://groups.google.com/g/bit.listserv.games-l/c/1tg85kGBH...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It depends on the era. Earlier: one PC per user, shared file system using a Novell network. Later: multitasking OS (Desqview, OS/2) or BBS software that natively supported multiple users (like MajorBBS.) I ran a BBS on an Amiga for a while. The OS natively supported multitasking, but I only had one line. At least I could log in the same time as a user...
The older brother of a friend of mine in the 90s was the co-sysop of one of Sweden's largest "elite" BBSes at the time, Farout BBS. I got to tag along to the sysop's apartment once and see the setup, which was an Amiga 2000 with 3 active nodes and available serial ports for a total of 7 nodes, though the sysop hadn't gotten around to get more telephone lines wired to his apartment.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think we used RocketPorts for a while until switching to Livingston Portmaster 3s, which you plugged a T-1 into.
Portmasters were very popular. Later on the ISP I worked with moved on to Ascend boxes which had digital modems (T1 / PRI lines.) PRI was a huge step. The "individual modem" days were a mess. Each modem had a serial cable, phone line, and power brick. I remember doing some maintenance in one of the POPs. There were at least 100 modems, stacked on a cheap plastic shelving unit. The shelving unit was sagging from the w…
Those were the days. I still believe nothing replaces the camraderie of the small, local BBSs. The large ones were good too, but these tended to resemble the modern Internet forums a bit more. I miss BBSs and that's why I featured them in the story of my sci-fi game! If you are interested: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3040110/Outsider/
Higher resolution photo https://web.archive.org/web/20230531042903im_/https://static...
In the alcove on the right, I think I'm seeing 66-blocks, breaking out the phone lines that must be routed to each machine. Two blocks stacked, each with a fanout of wire on the right side.