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Thank you Capt. Obvious. A single bit is enough to cause a cascading failure, and someone overlooked this instance. It's not the first time, nor will it be the last. See New York City blackout of 1977, The Crash of the AT&T Network in 1990, et al.

Happy Birthday (by way of Wikipedia).

Right up until the Google purchase, GrandCentral would allow people to customize their "RingShare" ringback tones in a way that was, I think, unique and unprecedented: You could upload your own MP3s and have GrandCentral play them to callers while your number was ringing.

This was a lot of fun. At a website called Telephone World, I found a great recording of a phone call made through an old Western Electric switch and edited it down to an "old school" ringback signal to use on GrandCentral.

It lasted less than a week for me. Apparently, part of the Google deal was removing the custom MP3 feature. Now there is just a lame "library" of pre-selected ringback tones. Google, RIAA, thanks for nothing.

Right up until the Google purchase, GrandCentral would allow people to customize their "RingShare" ringback tones in a way that was, I think, unique and unprecedented: You could upload your own MP3s and have GrandCentral play them to callers while your number was ringing.

This was a lot of fun. At a website called Telephone World, I found a great recording of a phone call made through an old Western Electric switch and edited it down to an "old school" ringback signal to use on GrandCentral.

It lasted less than a week for me. Apparently, part of the Google deal was removing the custom MP3 feature. Now there is just a lame "library" of pre-selected ringback tones. Google, RIAA, thanks for nothing.

You can find a list of BBSs that have telnet access here.

Here is a few links to some BBS lists... USBBS, Telnet BBS Guide. You should be able to come up with even more using the search engine of your choice. :) Man, I miss the old days sometimes. And how about the old VAX days too??

Don't do it -- don't give the Federal government ANY chance to regulate or require ANYTHING.

It's not necessary to be proactive about this. It will just happen. Like water, human interest will flow through the path of least resistance. That's why so many people download movies and music - the alternatives are more work and less satisfying. Where there is a crippled internet there will always be 1000 untethered darknets.

Industry, and later government, will adapt or die. For instance, look at your beloved hobby of old - BBSing is still exceptionally popular but it has adapted to modern times by hosting "nodes" on telnet ports instead of phone wires. As a result of this infrastructure keeping up with the times, old school networks like DOVEnet and FIDOnet, as well as interBBS door games like BRE and LORD are still going strong.

The people will act, if not speak, and the world will work its ass off to keep up with them. Music stores now sell blank tapes and CDs. The movie industry is ramping up to distribute its products legally via Bittorrent. TV shows are starting to use integrated advertising to combat Tivo.

Just keep living the good life today and big business will catch up in 5 years. Keep on muddling.

You're probably thinking of RIPScrip from Telegrafix. They devised a protocol called RIP that transmitted vector graphics as plain ASCII. Sort of a 90's precursor to SVG. They even developed browser plugins to use their vecor format on the web, and had some interesting demos before even Flash was out. Way ahead of its time, but it never caught on because the company kept everything proprietary, and wanted you to use only their software, or license the protocol from them. I think they finally folded about 4 or 5 years ago.

Some of the old BBS software, like MajorBBS and Wildcat! incorporated support for RIP by default in their later versions, and if you run DOSBox with modem emulation enabled, you can install RIPTerm 1.54 and connect to some BBSes by telnet to see RIP in action.

It's not quite the same, but for what it's worth there are still some BBS's operating that are available via Telnet. Check out here for a listing.

But not the last. The Telnet BBS Guide lists about 100 active dial-up, and 400 Telnet BBS services.

A website and mailing list, monthly updates, with descriptions, lists about 400 active BBS systems, some few of which still offer a dial-up service.

Guess what - the Internet as it existed five years ago doesn't exist, either!

really??

IRC,ftp, usenet,telnet, email, hell even gopher
is still around and being used.

I'd say the internet from over 10 years ago is still there alive and kicking just fine.

just because you dont use anytihng other than a web browser to access the "internet" does not mean it's not ther eand still being used.

Nuff respect to groups like ACiD and ICE for doing what they do with pride. While these two are arguably the biggest players in the ANSI and now "VGA" scene, they're certainly not the only ones still doing it and actively discussing it.

Be sure to check out telnet BBS's - same as the old POTS equivalent but with way more lines and generally better bandwidth (althogh displaying ANSI's is smoother via dialup). A list of active telnet BBS's can be found at The BBS Corner.

Before there was ANSI art there was ASCII. It's a little cheesy and rudamentary but it takes a lot of talent to represent visual art as typographic characters. IRC-ers will dig the ASCII block fonts. For some info on the history of PC art check out Textfiles.com Art.

Parallel to the art scene were the MOD (music module) and demo (megademo\intro\loader) scenes. These disciplines all began in the C64 days, most often seen accompanying cracked games with chippy SID tunes. Warez and demo began together as a sort of cyber-Pangea and though they have separated and flourished in their own way, they still occasionally accompany oneanother to this day. Thanks to products like Sk@le Tracker and ModPlug Tracker the MOD scene is still kicking.

While the popularity of ANSI has declined over the years, megademos are more popular than ever (particularly in Finland, Belgium, Germany, and thereabouts). Demo parties are bigger and badder than ever and are even covered on national television. For a very entertaining primer on the demo scene pick up a copy of the Mind Candy DVD Vol. 1. It's the best $16 you'll ever spend.

ANSI and demos seem to have shared a similar fate. ANSI, in all its blocky glory, is a testement to the speed and limitations of its time - the very definition of zeitgeist. As artists grew in number and in skill, more advanced techniques such as shading and emulating texture were implemented, but there's only so much that can be done with the medium. Demos, by definition, have much more freedom and were, in earlier times, a competition to code the newest, coolest, most efficient realtime effects. 3D video accelerators all but destroyed this pursuit and now the megademo has become more of a demonstration of design than coding. For all the demos you could ever hope to watch, check out The Hornet Archive.

And check out my MODs!

Synchronet is still a very popular piece of BBS software that's used by a great number of BBS's worldwide even today. It's still being actively developed, and is 100% open source, running on Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, and a handful of others (including Win32.) Its features are beginning to rival even those of WorldGroup, with all its built-in services. It can even run old-school DOS doors under Linux by using DOSEMU. When you compare this to other BBS packages out there (such as Falken BBS, which has all but stopped development since changing owners,) it's nice to see BBS software that's still being actively developed with daily CVS commits.

You can check out a list of BBS's running Synchronet (many of them with friendly, active sysops) at http://www.synchro.net/sbbslist.html, or a bigger list of BBS's (all checked to be active on at least a monthly basis) at http://www.dmine.com/telnet/. You can, of course, find out more of Synchronet at http://www.synchro.net.

In related news, Fidonet is still alive and well, and when you compare it against today's spam-infested usenet, Fidonet is actually quite the attractive alternative. BBS's may be outdated and more a novelty these days than anything, but it's still the only thing out there that has that nice, close-knit 'family-like' atmosphere.

Sounds a lot like this old AT&T incident. Particularly the way the failure cascades between nodes.

That's a neat idea, although I guess it does lack the local community aspect that I always liked about BBSes. A google for "setting up a telnet BBS system" (without the quotes) leads directly to This page, which looks pretty helpful.

-Andy
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http://andy.greyledge.net
Free PHP software and Clawhammer Banjo OGGs

A good list of still active BBS is available here

Here is a link.

BBSes are still around, they've just morphed into Telnet BBSes! I sometimes satisfy my text-RPG BBS needs by logging into them. Here's a full list of Telnetable BBSes; there are over 500 hundred available!

If you've never heard of a Telnet BBS you can check out the Telnet BBS FAQ

BBSes are still around, they've just morphed into Telnet BBSes! I sometimes satisfy my text-RPG BBS needs by logging into them. Here's a full list of Telnetable BBSes; there are over 500 hundred available!

If you've never heard of a Telnet BBS you can check out the Telnet BBS FAQ

Get some Telnet BBSes at the same site