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A Documentary About Bulletin Board Systems
Windrip writes: "Jason Scott is compiling a history of the BBS. The BBS documentary is a virtual park bench waiting for people who want to reminisce about the good old days of FIDO, 9600 baud, zmodem. /. had an earlier post from Jason about textfiles.com, now he's looking for a few of the million stories in the naked net."
It was a cold, bianary day on the naked net. At least I think the 'net was naked, all the URLs I visit seem to be that way, even the White House. Just pics of girls so hot they'd melt the GLH* off of Ron Popiel. But of course there were also lots of pics of girls so ugly I'd swear my monitor whinced. Pics of guys looking like girls, girls looking like guys; it was obvious to me that the naked net was a dangerous and confusing place to be...
To Be Continued...
*GLH = Great Looking Hair - "Hair in a can" kind of thing
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
Here is my BBS reminiscence,
I was nice normal American boy. It was 1991. I logged into the Windy City BBS. Some of you may not remember the WCBBS, 70% of all the porn on the Internet posted before 1998 originated there.
Two hours after logging in I was versed in fisting, wife swapping, water sports, bestiality, etc etc etc... I was then ready for college and the brave new world of connected systems.
I blame BBSs for horrible person that I am.
God bless the Windy City BBS! Cheers!
The fastest touch-typist in the world can't type faster than a 300 bps modem can transmit; 110 bps maybe. Of course, most hackers, are hunt-and-peck and can't even reach that. However, I can still remember when I could read faster than my modem could transmit. I'd wait impatiently for the words to finish displaying on my Apple II's greenscreen monitor III, which leads to my point:
You kids complain these days about how long it takes for your fancy videos to download...well, back in MY day, we had to wait for the WORDS to finish downloading, and we LIKED it! We didn't have none o' these annymaitud JIFF files, and we only had one color, GREEN, and the pixels were the size of your fist! And we LIKED it that way! And those empty threes you like to listen to, why, back in my day we were just happy that we could hear CHR(7) - sometimes we'd listen to it over and over! You kids today are soft...sad, so sad...
and how we had to suffer through 4-bit porn.
God, those bright orange, poorly dithered flesh tones are still burned into my eyes...
I remember how pissed I would get at people that would write: :-)
ha
ha
ha
ha
ha
after making a joke. It would take ages to print at 1200bps. This was back in the old days, before we had
They forget that in every bbs, there was a lot of interesting activity such aD!*"/$&!")( NO CARRIER