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Re: The BBS era

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On Mon, 20 Jul 2015, Shadow wrote:

> On Mon, 20 Jul 2015 22:56:24 +0300, Marko Rauhamaa <marko@pacujo.net>
> wrote:
>
>> RS Wood <rsw@therandymon.com>:
>>
>>> What a great article about what life was like at 2600 baud, and how
>>> /exciting/ it was. Almost makes me want to fire up a DOS box just to
>>> play around with it again.
>>
>> Interesting. For some reason, I managed to skip the whole BBS era even
>> though I was active with computers since around 1980. Maybe it had to do
>> with the fact that phone calls were metered in Finland (outside the
>> Helsinki metropolitan area). I now read in Wikipedia that Finland had
>> quite many active BBS's but I don't remember actively registering their
>> existence.
>>
>> In college, it was always all about the Internet.
>
> 	Ah ... youngsters. I started off with a 1200 Zoltrix, and used
> Bluewave and later Uniqwk (coded by my fellow Brazilians). I remember
> how excited I got when I managed to download something ....
> 	Oldsters will be telling us about their 300 baud modems and
> Unix terminals.
> 	;)
> 	[]'s
>
You think you had it hard?

The first modem I had was a 300baud, inside a Radio Shack Model 100 
laptop.  A nice ASCII keyboard, but 40 columns of 8 lines on the screen? 
something like that.  All of 8K of RAM standard, I filled it up to the 
maximum of I think 32K, the first 8K module costing about fifty dollars, 
the later ones being cheaper.

It was the one computer I never really used.  I go it when it was on sale 
in the fall of 1985 (so I paid about $300 if I remember), and I thought I 
could make use of the portable feature.  But I never had the nerve to take 
it out in public.  I did it once, and everyone passing by stared at it. 
It wsa really cumbersome to transfer files to the main computer, and since 
it had such little memory, you needed those transfers.  The screen was too 
small for much use on BBS's.  Maybe if I'd gotten it after some BBS use 
I'd be fine, but BBSs were intimidating the first few times, so every so 
often (and this went on for almost a decade) I'd decide it was time to get 
online, call a BBS (I'd find the number somewhere, likely one that was 
desperate fro callers), go through the registration process (they never 
let you poke around before registering, so you had to register just to see 
if there was a reason to join up) and then basically disappear, the 
process too much, but also before they were networked (and I kept picking 
non-networked BBS's), most had relatively small user population.

So I'd call one up, and have endless problems because the instructions 
would scroll off the 40 by 8 screen before I had a chance to take it in, 
which added to the problems.

I eventually got a 1200 baud external modem, and did use it with a desktop 
computer, that was 1989.  I bought that 1200baud as soon as the price kind 
of dipped below the $100 Canadian mark.  And I still didn't stay online.

Finally in 1994, a year after we had news of a group starting a 'freenet" 
here, I found some BBSs that were worth staying on.  They were networked, 
which improved traffic and "diversity" of users, and one had all of three 
lines, which made it popular, but also made it easier to get on.  That BBS 
actually kept a list of local BBSs, I guess that faded out in 1996, 
actually into the Internet era.  By 1994, one could get email (not just 
Fidonet mail) and some newsgroups (well it wsa more a matter of what the 
users asked for, a BBS wasn't likely to bother with a newsgroup that 
nobody was asking for).

About 1997, the local paper ran an article about BBSs, and it was 
interesting, someone was quoted as saying "it's easier to use, more 
intimate, and less porn" or something like that, compared to the internet. 
Yet at the very same time, I saw people on the internet dismiss BBSs for 
pretty much the same thing, "too had to use, blah blah blah and it's got 
porn".

It was an interesting period, since the internet only became local as the 
masses arrived. Previously, the chances of bumping into someone you knew, 
or was local, was very unlikely, unless you went to a University.  So 
there was all kinds of talk about getting people online, and all kinds of 
talk about making things local, which hadn't been an issue just a few 
years earlier.  BBSs would have helped take up the slack right during that 
period, but right on that cusp, the BBSs were dismissed.


One local alt weekly bought an existing BBS in the fall of 1994 (they'd 
done a story about the "online world" six or 12 months previously, 
featuring that BBS) which right at that point made sense.  They could be 
online, but by providing phone lines, allowed users access without having 
to pay for an ISP which was still kind of expensive (and limited hours) at 
the time.  They helped sustain it by selling more extensive access, and it 
kept going for years, people willing to stay with their system.  But it 
was a failure as an online newspaper, a couple of years later, people 
expected them to be on the web.

I have no idea how things skew now.  I suspect there are still plenty of 
people who don't have internet access due to the cost, but I'm not 
certain.  Going to the library, or using wifi at McDonalds only works if 
you have a portable device.  But all of that has been forgotten.  The 
great revolution failed.  Usenet was layed out around topics because if it 
was by region you weren't likely to find many in your region.  But that 
set the tone, so people congregated around topics even as the local masses 
arrived, rather than building up the local.  I'm not sure I'm better 
informed about local things than before the internet, indeed it may be 
worse, since old media has dried up.  Sure, if I want to know about this 
or that, I can find those spaces, but I have to know about them first. 
Lots of things no longer cross my path, unless I'm willing to go to those 
dedicated spaces, while just about anything I've become interested in, 
including amateur radio when I was about nine years old, was a result of 
coming across it in some shared space like the newspaper or a general 
magazine.

   Michael

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The BBS era RS Wood <rsw@therandymon.com> - 2015-07-20 22:23 +0300
  Re: The BBS era Stephen Thomas Cole <usenet@stephenthomascole.com> - 2015-07-20 19:29 +0000
  Re: The BBS era Marko Rauhamaa <marko@pacujo.net> - 2015-07-20 22:56 +0300
    Re: The BBS era Hils <hils@saynotospam.net> - 2015-07-20 21:32 +0100
    Re: The BBS era Shadow <Sh@dow.br> - 2015-07-20 21:19 -0300
      Re: The BBS era Michael Black <et472@ncf.ca> - 2015-07-20 21:25 -0400
        Re: The BBS era RS Wood <rsw@therandymon.com> - 2015-07-21 10:25 +0300
          Re: The BBS era Marko Rauhamaa <marko@pacujo.net> - 2015-07-21 10:38 +0300
            Re: The BBS era "voyager529" <voyager529@live.com> - 2015-07-22 17:16 -0400
              Re: The BBS era Marko Rauhamaa <marko@pacujo.net> - 2015-07-23 01:16 +0300
                Re: The BBS era "voyager529" <voyager529@live.com> - 2015-07-23 17:36 -0400
                Re: The BBS era Marko Rauhamaa <marko@pacujo.net> - 2015-07-24 00:56 +0300
      Re: The BBS era Mike Spencer <mds@bogus.nodomain.nowhere> - 2015-07-21 00:58 -0300
      Re: The BBS era Paul Sture <nospam@sture.ch> - 2015-07-21 10:04 +0200
  Re: The BBS era Ant <ant@zimage.comANT> - 2015-07-21 03:15 -0700
    Re: The BBS era Michael Black <et472@ncf.ca> - 2015-07-21 14:43 -0400
      Re: The BBS era Nyssa <Nyssa@flawlesslogic.com> - 2015-07-21 15:23 -0400
        Re: The BBS era Hils <hils@saynotospam.net> - 2015-07-21 22:59 +0100
          Re: The BBS era Andy Burns <usenet.feb2014@adslpipe.co.uk> - 2015-07-22 08:20 +0100
            Re: The BBS era Ant <ant@zimage.comANT> - 2015-07-23 21:34 -0700
        Re: The BBS era scott@alfter.diespammersdie.us (Scott Alfter) - 2015-07-22 16:58 +0000
          Re: The BBS era Nyssa <Nyssa@flawlesslogic.com> - 2015-07-22 15:42 -0400
            Re: The BBS era Mike Spencer <mds@bogus.nodomain.nowhere> - 2015-07-22 17:54 -0300
            Re: The BBS era Rich <rich@example.invalid> - 2015-07-23 10:08 +0000
      Re: The BBS era Ant <ant@zimage.comANT> - 2015-07-23 21:33 -0700

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