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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."
Woo-hoo.
I used to be quite active on the local BBS scene. Operators would get the latest archive CD-ROMs of the day, and then post them online for others to access.
Nowadays, no one really uses BBSes anymore. Everyone has direct links to the resources BBSes used to offer. Most of Walnut Creek's old content was available from ftp.cdrom.com (now run by simtel.net). Want music from the Hornet Archive? You can't purchase the CD anymore; you go online to hornet.org.
This extreme centalization of content worries me. Instead of colleges purchasing CD-ROMs of technical abstracts, they now subscribe to an ever-changing online service that provides them. Should said service go under or lose their data, humanity as a whole is at a loss.
Call me a troll, but one of the biggest reasons we should be against DMCA, SSSCA, and other such acts is because they require all content to be managed from a central authority. Should that authority go bankrupt, millions could lose access to a variety of works.
While peer-to-peer is one extreme the industry does not like, centralization is another problem. We need to start up the BBS era again; anyone have money for a spare phone line?
I think it is funny and as usual will piss off the loosers out there that don't understand the irony when they call someone 'newbie' yet this newbie has probably designed most of the shit these punks are using, but just doesn't go around flaunting it like a tool.
I remember when I was 12 in '85 and playing around with my Commodore 64. I borrowed a 300 baud (back when a baud was a bit... time flies) and quickly got my own 1200 bps. A little time went by and I managed to talk my mom into getting a second phone line -- thus Ground Zero BBS was born. Working for all of 1 meg online: a 1541 and 1581 floppy drive. Ran the thing off of CNet BBS software if I still remember. Phone number at the time was 216-381-6550. Don't bother calling 'cause it's long dead though.
Lasted for around 4 years, which was a fairly long time as far as BBSes went. I still remember the first couple of callers. Watching them sign on and leave messages. I got to know everyone on there. It was like a close group of friends -- maybe 30 or so regulars. We had a couple of get-togethers. By Co-sysop started dating one of them too.
Sigh...
Times are changing. Back then I knew almost everyone that was online in the 216 are code. Now most everyone is on. Heck, the code split twice because of all the new phone lines being put in.
It's something that I'm sure to tell my future kids some day. Back when we were on the cusp of something big. Back when computers were as uncommon as rotary phones are now.
...once the Internet has become an unusable, proprietary, virus-plagued and outlawed Big Brother hell.
It might be quite different from the former Fido BBSes as far as technology is concerned, but the users and sysops will have the same spirit: freedom.
What I really miss is being able to talk to people in my area, usually within the 8 mile band A radius, that spend as much time with their computers as I do.
What do we have now.. LUG meetings? Except for some of the famous ones like SVLUG, the ones I've heard about and been to are just a bunch of people who can't get Red Hat installed.
I've been content to talk to coders from around the world. I find them because they're part of an OSS project I'm working with, or they're on IRC, or they post to the newsgroups I read. But I will probably never meet them, go find some decent bars in the area, or talk about the local CompUSAs and which ones have the best selection. I have to do that alone.
Atari was my dream computer in the late 70's. After all, who could afford a IBM-PC?
Compuserve @ 300 baud was my link to the "world".
Much of what I remember was the problem that if you had a program on tape, you could not transfer it to a floppy, because the file headers were different. Thus, you had to either type it in again (booting with the floppy active) or download it from the Compuserve forum. The file (not gonna dig to find it) was about 64k. Again and again my connection would choke, and I'd have 2+ hours of long distance phone charges for nothing. This would always happen when I had 95% of the damn thing downloaded!
Finally, since I already had typed the thing in assembly from Compute! magazine, I found a way to get it onto a floppy and gave up on Compuserve. They were the AOL of yesteryear, anyway. Bastards! (although they deserve credit where due - pioneering and all that)
Using the Computer Shopper, I ran my phone bill up terribly calling and subscribing to any BBS I thought would be cool.
I once ran into one that scared the bejeezus outta me with some satanic crap...I immediately wiped all references to my visit and took a long deep breath before I called another BBS, thanking my lucky stars that I wasn't *posessed* from logging on to that thing.
I thought that this might interest someone, or I wouldn't have bothered typing it...
db
Cig:
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Absolutely. And we'll have some nicer tools to play with like 802.11b and Bluetooth. That way your average mug punter won't even need a phoneline - he just uses the card that talks to his digital camera and PDA.
:v)
I hope someone is working out the protocols for this. Very few people realise that the wireless Freenet is going to be as big - if not biger than - the internet we know today.
Vik