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the Blizzard of 1978 and the first BBS

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https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/02/18/41_years_of_the_bbs/

While large chunks of the US used this year's Snowmageddon to binge on
streaming TV or tweet selfies with snowmen, take a moment to remember the
Great Blizzard of 1978, which led to the first Bulletin Board Service (BBS)
taking to the phone lines 41 years ago.

Those brought up with the seemingly endless amount of storage and server
capacity of the cloud in recent times and the connectivity afforded by the
internet are likely scratching their heads at the term "BBS".

...

Kind-of BBS systems had been floating around during the 1970s in the form of
mainframe software, but it was Chicago techies Ward Christensen and Randy
Suess who kicked things off for enthusiasts on 16 Feb 1978 with the launch
of the very first BBS.  In an interview with Byte (PDF), the duo explained
the project took 30 days to put together an assembler in a box rocking an
Intel 8080 CPU and 24K of RAM.

A mock-up of the system was built using MITS 8K BASIC during the first week,
and the pair had people call into the system to critique it.  Once Suess and
Christensen were happy with how things looked, the thing was rewritten in
Assembler language in order to take advantage of the speed and efficiency of
the resulting binaries.

Storage was handled by floppy disk, with CP/M providing the disk operating
system.  With 240K available on a disk at the time, and a directory able to
keep track of 64 files, the team aimed at holding 200 to 300 active messages
on the system at a time.  Those were the days, eh?

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the Blizzard of 1978 and the first BBS RS Wood <rsw@therandymon.com> - 2019-02-20 03:02 +0000
  Re: the Blizzard of 1978 and the first BBS Batchman <batchman@dosville.foo> - 2019-02-20 20:55 +0000
    Re: the Blizzard of 1978 and the first BBS ant@zimage.comANT (Ant) - 2019-02-20 19:10 -0600
    Re: the Blizzard of 1978 and the first BBS Kerry Imming <kcimming@pobox.com> - 2019-02-28 08:58 -0600
      Re: the Blizzard of 1978 and the first BBS FGK <f6k@sdf.org> - 2019-02-28 17:40 +0100
        Re: the Blizzard of 1978 and the first BBS ant@zimage.comANT (Ant) - 2019-02-28 11:49 -0600
        Re: the Blizzard of 1978 and the first BBS Kerry Imming <kcimming@pobox.com> - 2019-02-28 14:43 -0600
          Re: the Blizzard of 1978 and the first BBS not@telling.you.invalid (Computer Nerd Kev) - 2019-02-28 22:04 +0000
            Re: the Blizzard of 1978 and the first BBS FGK <f6k@sdf.org> - 2019-03-01 11:13 +0100
    Re: the Blizzard of 1978 and the first BBS not@telling.you.invalid (Computer Nerd Kev) - 2019-03-15 23:08 +0000
      Re: the Blizzard of 1978 and the first BBS Eli the Bearded <*@eli.users.panix.com> - 2019-03-16 05:52 +0000
        Re: the Blizzard of 1978 and the first BBS not@telling.you.invalid (Computer Nerd Kev) - 2019-03-16 21:44 +0000

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