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."

Comments

Re:Gee, How Exciting

[hearingaid]

The fastest touch-typist in the world can't type faster than a 300 bps modem can transmit; 110 bps maybe.

Hell, I can type faster than a 300 baud modem can transmit, and I type funny (I tried to learn how to touch-type, got bored; now I touch with about seven fingers :)...

300 baud, at 8-N-1 or 7-E-1, is 37.5 cps, theoretically. Practically, 300 bps modems only reach that speed when they're getting a steady stream of characters. You wind up spending a lot of time just dealing with RTS/CTS and other junk when you've got an irregular stream, as you do when you're typing.

Of course, most hackers, are hunt-and-peck and can't even reach that.

One of the guys I knew when I was in CS was a trained professional typist. It helped him a lot when he was a starving student (tm); he got these really nice jobs typing stuff (and maybe doing other secretary work; he didn't talk about it much, I think he was embarrassed; it was OK for a geek to be a male secretary but he was also a metalhead :) all summer.

However, it instilled in him a tendency to produce really gross code. He was like a human cut-and-paste machine. If he could think of an inelegant solution to a problem, that only meant typing up 5000 lines or so, he just went ahead and did it. (Okay, I'm exaggerating a little. But he did produce reams and reams of code.) He could code optimally, but he rarely did; he typed so fast that he spent actually less time coding by simply overcoding.

So anyway, the point is maybe it's a Good Thing that most hackers are hunt & peckers.

Anyway, back in my day, I had a Gigi terminal (I think) to do my gfx on. I still remember sneakernetting jpegs back from school (where I had Usenet) to my home (where my Amiga could view them, in truecolour; the machines at school hadn't yet even discovered 256 colours).

Many BBS's are still around on Telnet

[almightyjustin]

There's still a number of BBS's around, they've just moved to Telnet. Check out http://www.thedirectory.org/ for a listing...