Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

An old photo of a large BBS (2022)

rachelbythebay.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 196 posts

Re: An old photo of a large BBS (2022)

#52

Post by criddell »

reaperducer wrote: post #21
nitwit005 wrote: post #16

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…

There were also commercial multi-user systems like Compuserve and Delphi.

Re: An old photo of a large BBS (2022)

#54

Post by bch »

> do you think "wow, cool, they got to wrangle all of that", or do you think "OMG they had to wrangle all of that"?

I touch on similar point of view discussing digital audio work I do for fun. I use CSound, which I've heard described as "assembly language for audio", and I think that's accurate.

Anyway, when I first, FIRST started, and got a tiny bit familiar, I thought "Wow, I can do anything!" but quickly realized I was also responsible for everything. No free lunch.

Re: An old photo of a large BBS (2022)

#56

Post by louwrentius »

SneakyMission wrote: post #10

Higher resolution photo https://web.archive.org/web/20230531042903im_/https://static...

In this picture it seems that all machines have a 3.5" floppy disk inserted. Maybe they had no hard drive and only booted from floppy and then ran software over the network?

Re: An old photo of a large BBS (2022)

#58

Post by jasongill »

layer8 wrote: post #44
jacquesm wrote: post #23

The OS that was running on these is irrelevant, the important part is the BBS software. And these usually ran quite a few lines per box, sometimes they would use external racks of modems, but I'm not seeing that here so maybe these were using internal modem cards, so maybe 6 per box, but if they were using external modems it could easily be 12 or more, with the PC cards hosting multiple serial ports, 4, 6 or even 8 p…

Aren’t the modems the black boxes sitting on top of each PC in the picture?

yes, most of them look like USRobotics Courier modems. Note that not all the machines have one, and some have two.

Assuming that the parent commenter is right and that they are using internal line cards, I wonder if the external modems were being added to support higher speeds.

However, the fact that we can see at least 2 (but I think four) 66 blocks means they had 50 to 100 phone lines for the machines visible, which would make sense that the external modems are the primary connection and no internal modems are being used, based on the number of modems visible and the fact that each 66 block can handle 25 lines.

Re: An old photo of a large BBS (2022)

#59

Post by throw0101d »

> It's possible they managed to do some rudimentary multitasking with DESQview (or worse...) and so supported two whole users with each box. Does that mean they had to be at least 386s to do protected mode? Or was it virtual 8086 mode? I (fortunately) have forgotten the finer points of how that stuff used to work. I DO remember how damn crashy a box became when you ran it "under DV". Constant system freezes. Yep.

I don't recall DESQview to be all that crashy. I was aware of a number multi-line BBSes that used it (just in the 416). Some BBS software called out its use specifically:

* https://www.synchro.net/docs/multnode_config.html

* http://software.bbsdocumentary.com/IBM/DOS/OMEGA/

Also, a comment from someone whose uncle co-founded the company Quarterdeck:

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29396561#unv_29400530

Also, also, if anyone wants to simulate the old-school DESQview experience, perhaps try out "twin":

* https://opensource.com/article/20/1/multiple-consoles-twin

* https://github.com/cosmos72/twin

Post reply on HN