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The 25th Anniversary of the BBS
Jason Scott writes "25 years ago today, Ward Christensen and Randy Suess officially announced the creation of a little project they threw together with a 300 baud Hayes modem, a Z-80 based S-100 computer, and a phone line. They called it "Chicago Bulletin Board System" (CBBS) and it was the first dial-up BBS. From this beginning, BBSes grew into the many thousands and became an entire industry, and when the Internet started to mature with the World Wide Web, the users who had cut their teeth on BBSes moved over to it. So raise a toast to these two fellows for a quarter century of great online times."
What ever happened to the Double Ought X00 (sp)? fossil driver. Did Windows XP incorporate this feature? What about BinkleyTerm and TradeWars?
Tradewars.
I'm not personally REALLY in that time frame when BBS's were truly the "thing" but... :D hey, remember when? *chuckle* how times have changed
~Just keep eating, porky. Fat people are harder to kidnap.
And probably did when it was made, too :)
Happy Birthday to the CBBS, and a toast to the first major communications devopment of the 21st century.
but I spent most of my free time on high school on the Des Moines, IA area BBSs playing those great ASCII 'door games' (the Pit and TradeWars!!) Does anybody still use that software? like Spitfire, etc. or was it killed by the internet?
According to the link, it was January 16, 1978, not February.
This brings back the memories, though. My first BBS usage was on a CP/M machine, too. Ahh...
--RJ
hacked!
A good list of still active BBS is available here
There's a growing sense that even if The Future comes,
most of us won't be able to afford it.
-- Lemmy
I ran a 16 line Worldgroup based system, almost always full with people playing Majormud.. I had to drop it because It was just a hobby to me and I couldn't afford to get internet access support.
I enjoyed the local community created through the BBS's, nowdays thats no longer the case, with almost any bbs that is still running has internet access and users from all over..
Personal Website
And don't forget to register at BBSmates to keep up with days gone by.
Check here:
http://www.bbsdocumentary.com
In short, Jason Scott is making a film about the BBS and the important aspects it played in the world. It's an ambitious project, and I had a lot of fun doing my interview, and anyone who has something to say about the BBS experience is encouraged to help him out.
Jason is one heck of a cool dude...can't wait to see how this turns out.
// Agent Green (Ian / IU7 / KB1JQO)
// IEEE 802.3: All 10base Are Belong To Us
Not very long ago I set up a box with DR-DOS and RA and set up a small menu for a remote office that had trouble getting onto the internet and needed some drivers. I posted the drivers onto my "BBS", had them dial in, and presto the remote office was back on the VPN in no time. ;-)
That's the kind of skill that comes in handy when real shit happens.. and it was fun to look at the post-dotcom admins' faces
Learn from the mistakes of others. There isn't enough time to make them all yourself.
I used to run a BBS "The Game Grid" from 92-95 till the internet started to be the next big thing. I had 20+ door games including a few i wrote myself.
Message networks allowed people to communicate across the nation. It was USENET and email for non-internet folks. (This was before the internet was opened up.)
Fidonet was obe of my favorites as it forced the sysop to prove they could configure everything properly. It was open on systems run on all sorts of OS could join.
Later message networks used the QWK format which was much simpler.
Others like the RIME network used proprietary software, but allowed more control and file attachments.
Ah, those were the days.
I ran a Maximus based BBS on OS/2 for years, finally I had to kill it because there were hardly any users anymore. I had TradeWars installed as well! :-) It was fun! I even installed an OS/2 port of a mud. Those were the days...
Anyone know of a LORD (Legand of the red dragon) game still running and connectable VIA internet BBS?
Check out TextFiles.com.
I especially love the anarchy files. "Wahahhahah!" There's also great commentary about the whole BBS scene.
For anyone looking for that file they saw on a BBS 15 years ago, you may be able to find it here.
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
Celebration !
I rememberm dialing into the Local High School BBS and just chilling, and playing games with other. who would have thought back then, those BBS'es would turn into this, what we know now.
it is kind of cool to think about
Cheers to the invention of the BBS!
---
LORD.
Come to the University of Mars! Classes starting soon!
The real fun with BBS's was tricking fellow users into accidentally typing +++
Shortly after the first BBS, the first C64 Hacker figured out how to rig his system to get free long distance telephone calls so that he/she could stay connected to Chicago from the West Coast 24/7.
And on the really cool BBS's you played Pimpwars, not Tradewars.
Another interesting fact I remember back in the day was being able to type faster than the 300 baud modems could send. Imagine that your fingers can transfer information from your brain to the computer, but the computer to computer connection can't keep up, granted this was before windows even. The idea of a personal computer has been around for ages and the computer to be used as a communication device is not a new idea.
The internet did not kill BBS's, BBS's simply became antiquated. Centralized file sharing was replaced by FTP and GOPHER (yes ... gopher ... I guess HTTP could be thrown in here too), message boards by Instant messengers (who remembers the beta versions of Mirabilis??) and the online community expanded to include every corner of the world not just the distance a spont was away to be too far because that would be "long distance" and cost an arm and a leg to get on.
Most BBS's, unless they had some money, had no more than 2 nodes, now it's not uncommon to see a website that gets hit with more than a million hits a day (putting their link on slashdot doesn't hurt).
The BBS was a prelude to the dial-up isp, and any BBS's that wanted to stay in business learned the wonderful ways of SLIP CSLIP and PPP ...
Am I really that old, geeze.
Ignore the "p2p is theft" trolls, they're just uninformed
Other Denver oldies:
The Nile
The Courtroom
Werdna's Lair
The Dragons Shadow
IDS Starcross
Anyone still around who remembers Screaming Demon ][ in Madison, WI? Jesus Christ, that was so long ago...
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
There's a site called BBSmates that lets users of the old BBS systems get back in touch.
It looks pretty complete, I even found a bunch of old boards that I used to call in the Wichita, KS. area code.
It's funny, some of the people I met on those BBSs I still keep in touch with, while friends I had in high school I never hear from.
"For a successful technology, honesty must take precedence over public relations for nature cannot be fooled." -Feynman
That program became the singly most modified program in computing history due to the many hardware environments in which it had to operate (no standards - no "IBM" to say where serial ports should be addressed, etc).
Too bad there isn't a CVS history of all those changes ;-)
--sex
Very popular slashdot journal for adul
I found a list of BBS systems in some computer magazine and I thought, 'Huh? What's this about?' So I dialed one, probably in the midwest, and the world of the BBS opened up to me. Wow, files! For free? Cool!
I later discovered a BBS in Petaluma, California run by Vern Buerg (His current web site, not the original BBS) and his wife Julie. That was the first time I began to use message boards, play football contests, make friends online. I hung around there most every day and understood the ability to create an online community.
The Web came along later and opened this concept up to the world. But in my mind it all began with the BBS and watching those text lines crawling across my screen at 300 baud. Oh yeah, and seeing FIDO show up in ASCII art. Cute doggie! :)
-----
---
The website listed below is a guy personally financing a documentary about BBS'.
I owe my current career (computer engineer) over the fun I had with Mustang Wildcat! and RA back in the 80's.
http://www.bbsdocumentary.com/
2400 baud! roXor!
10 MD
I grew up on BBS's; I think I was 12 when I first started calling boards. Chinet was my first exposure to Unix, although I didn't really understand what it was, at the time. ("It looks like DOS.. except you can dial into it... weird!")
I like to think of myself as an "old timer" (most computer geeks I deal with weren't into BBS's/too young), but this really puts things in perspective for me - because I recently just turned 25, myself!
If you had told me, back when I was 15, that BBS's would be all but gone, yet everyone would own a computer - and be connected to one another - I'd have thought you were crazy. I can't wait to see what it's like 25 years from now!
CBBS was how IO first got on the 'net, back before there really was a 'net. I stayed with them, as Randy moved CBBA to a UNIX machine, and got hooked up for USENET news and email, and when he formed a small "net" with the authors of the conferrencing software, "Picospan", in Ann Arbor. Karl Denninger and Bill Vajk were also UNIX bitheads who were tied in there (Hi Bill!)
:(
There was a real sense of community back then. Most people knew each other, and hung out together, even having picnics and other get-togethers. The net has grown a lot since Ward came up with XMODEM, and oft-times I miss the friendly (and not-so-friendly) rivalries of the early days. I now live in Seattle, and though I use a small local ISP, I don't know a single person who uses it. It's grown so impersonal
I really hope that the early days can be documented, and hope that they can capture a sense of how alive it felt back then, how people would go out of their way to be helpful to total strangers (and believe me, we had quite a few who were totally strange, myself among them).
Lemon curry?
I have wanted to setup a telnet bbs for quite some time and have searched for methods of doing it but have failed miserably. Just curious if some of you could post some helpful links to some of the better telnet bbs servers and locations for games... Paying a small price is not a problem.
- what is the definition of simultanagnosia?! I've been meaning to look it up!
Anyone remember the BBS's you could telnet
to in the early 90's? Like mars.ee.msstate.edu
or phred.pc.cc.cmu.edu? They were fun but never
caught on in a big way. I guess it was hard
to compete with USENET and IRC.
Back in the early 1990s, I was involved in a project called ZaMIR Transnational Network where we used BBSes to link peace groups in ex-Yugoslavia (crossing borders of nations that were at war at that time). There was even a BBS running in the besieged city of Sarajevo. Internet technology may be the ubiquitous thing now, but remembering our efforts at FoeBuD at that time, I'm still amazed what you could actually do with simple dial-ups.
BBS were my first dosage of electronic connectedness. It was so awesome that I could hold discussions with such wide ranges of people, and nearly all of them stayed hospitable. Or who can forget Legend of the Red Dragon. I remember I downloaded I Renegade BBS software just to install LORD. Oh those were the days. BBS also introduced me to my first porn. Was it called GIFlink? It let you watch the picture as it was transmitted, great way to weed out duplicates. So much has changed in 10 years.
L.O.R.D., FidoNet, and ascii porn.
Good times, good times.
Whiner: blah blah blah
Guru 1: This xyz BBS has a cute bug to gain system privileges...
Guru 2: Agree and talk about it but no details until the whiner starts reallllly begging to know the details. Then:
Guru 1: Ok type +++ (originally typed as ++ space bkspace +) followed by ATH and hit enter
Whiner: NO CARRIER
And of course being a busy BBS he would be kicked out for a jolly good time. The fun at the inept continued when we created variations on the ATH theme on the same victim :-)
---
I credit early days BBSing with my typing skills, helping my writing skills, and even my socialization skills (uh, you know, on the war boards...). If you missed those days you missed out; it was so much more "underground" than the Internet ever was, and consequently, a lot more enjoyable, especially for geeks. You could come home from your boring school filled with stupid jocks and just enter a totally different world.
I'm definitely still nostalgic for the 80 column greenscreen and carrier tone.
-iocat -uif -immortal
Dude, I think I can see my house from here.
Somtimes it's good to have a global scale, and sometimes it's good to be able to go have a beer where everyone knows your name.
The internet is like an planet sized mall. A BBS is like your neighborhood bar.
Yes, you and your friends can meet at a bar in the mall, but it *isn't* really the same thing.
I guess we just have to redefine "neighborhood" now.
There are certainly benifits to the "mall" model, I admit. I "know" people all over the world, whom I've never actually met, who I could call on to put me up on their couch for a couple of days if I needed it.
The flip side is that I, perhaps, know fewer in my own meat space neighborhood of whom I could ask this favor.
The world is different for "interneters" than it is for BBSers.
KFG
SRE and Pimpwars! Many a night spent dialing in at 300b at midnight trying to get my 'turns' info for the day.
SRE developer now works for Google (http://www-cs-students.stanford.edu/~amitp/).
Geez, I loved that game.
Oh, The Pit, too!
10 MD
Hey all,
BBS's are still in use. For a start, radio amateurs using packet radio still use BBS systems like F6BBS. See http://www.f6fbb.org/.
1200 baud, ascii art, horrendous setup: it's all still there and in use today. I run a system and so do many other radio hams. Slow, primitive, but free, and I do not rely on the phone or cable company!
Cheers,
Michael VA3MVW
---
BDOS ERR ON A:>
Here's a nice site for finding your old BBS buddies and the systems you used to visit:
http://bbsmates.com/
I've found a bunch of people on the systems I used to be an administrator for - even ones that I had forgotten about. It's a nice resource for seeing exactly who is out there still, and what they're up to.
-Matt
I ran a RENEGADE system myself back in the early nineties but the online games were the thing. TradeWars, BRE and LORD are the first to come to mind. Not sure about today but as of last year there were still a few telnet BBS systems kicking around that you can log in and play the golden oldies. Take a look for the telnet BBS list if anyone is interested.
I dimly recall meeting Ward and Randy at a Cache meeting around that timeframe as well.
Those were the days! (Damn, I feel old...)
I guess this is where the sysops wax poetic about the good old days ;)
;-)
I ran a 2 line BBS for several years, and used several software packeages, from sbbs, rbbs, tbbs, and finally settled into ezycom, an aussie package. We offered Fidonet, and I had made HOMEMADE scsi cables (i was really broke back then) to daisy chain old 1x cd rom drives for files (3 of them) on a ibm 386/20 with 4mb of ram, 80mb hard drive, a 14.4k (when they were $275) and a 2400. (thank god for a 'borrowed' copy of Desqview
That is what amazes me, we could tweak out the last few bytes of low ram, and used ram disks for overlay files, with just 4mb. I guess I miss that level of tweaking. While I get some of that with Linux, I certainly don't with Windows.
Running a BBS taught me to actually do something with a computer, and was the foundation for learning networking. I have thought about setting up a telnet bbs, and even installed and tested software, but I haven't had the heart to actually go online.
I guess you can't go back.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
I believe without BBS's we probably wouldn't be where we are today.. I believe they pioneered the way for some of the modern internet commucations that exsit today..
I had a long, nostalgic evening going over all the old FidoNet stuff the other night. I used to run a Fido BBS (node 2:252/204) in 1991, when Fido was just reaching 10,000 nodes (and I thought that was massive!) Looking at Fido's nodelist, it hit a maximum of 37,000 nodes in 1995 then went into a decline. However, Fido still has 10,000 nodes!
:-)
Looking through a recent nodelist, I noticed quite a few familiar names from 1991. My BBS ran RA with BinkleyTerm as a front-end, and DesqView as the multitasker (on a 386 with 2.5MB RAM). I later put Linux on that machine (I started using Linux when distros didn't exist, it was just a boot/root disk, format the hard disk and cp -r from the root disk).
Aaah, the memories
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
Anyone remember Damar's legendary warez BBS in the 714 area code? Or Ice Palace, or the gov't BBS AIS?
Ahh those were the days
... sigh... the memories.
On my Apple II, on ASCII Express, the term software, you could xfer with Kermit or Christensen protocol (later renamed XModem).
It was so fun, though. Great for communities. Great to learn all about computers, to make friends and have great GTs.
Have a nice day
Mike
At age 8-9, LORD thought me about the birds and the bees through Violet!
every one keeps talking like BBSs are dead, Im running one and there are more in the interbbs leagues (BRE & FE) now that when I ran it the first time. My LORD games have 3x the active participants (granted, I have 7 internet accessable nodes now instead of one local phone line). look here to see a large list of telnet BBSs... many of which have been around for years!
Then come by my BBS... telnet://www.gargoyleslanding.com
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
According the Ward himself, CBBS stands for Computerized Bulletin Board System. What Ward and Randy had in mind was replacing the cork bulletin board where members woud post buy,sell and trade notes at CACHE meetings with a computer version. It's also commnoly misnamed "Community."
/. when I tipped him off about a discussion with more incorrect information about MODEM vs. XMODEM.
Ward Christensen posted more history here on
There's some more history in an interview here.
Ward's a terrifically nice guy who also invented freeware when he gave away all of the useful utilities he wrote. Teh reason for that was more that he didn't want mess with accusations of competing with his employer than an early movement for Free Software.
Ever dream you could fly? Get up from the Flight Sim. I Fly
There is still an annual CBBS get together in Chicago every year. A number of the folks from those days still drop in on newsgroups like chi.general and chi.internet.
Randy is still around. He runs a CBBS successor called Chinet www.chinet.com.
BTW: Ward is also the fellow who invented XMODEM
Quote from their site
BBS Simulator (Sim-BBS) is a BBS simulator game, your users get their own BBS, which they have to take care of, and upgrade as it gets bigger. They start with an 286 with 1 meg of ram, a 10 meg hard drive, and 10 non-subscribers. The have to Read their mail, and work on the board to increase their number of users. The goal is to be the biggest board, and to keep the users happy.
I'm not affiliated with groutySoft and I don't know how much bandwidth they have, so please be kind.
We were working on a campaign to get into the Smithsonian. I'm pretty sure that I know who owns it, Roy Lipscomb. He bought it from Randy for $20 (? maybe less). Randy was using it to hold up a table. Hes not known for sentiment.
Like was common for hobbiests in those days, Randy built it from chips they salvaged from old mainframe boards. They would heat the back of the boards with a blowtorch to melt the solder and then slam it against a table to pop out the chips.
It didn't even have an OS in the beginning. There was not even CP/M in those days. The first versions of CBBS talked directly to the hardware. Later Ward rewote CBBS to run over CP/M.
Ever dream you could fly? Get up from the Flight Sim. I Fly
I'd wager there's still someone out there using a BBS system, if only for nostalgia. Hell, look at NES, Genesis, etc. emulators. Look at C= 64 emulators!
;)
:P The *good* MUDs are still alive and well. There's plenty of sites that list MUDs, themudconnector.com has probably the largest listing.
:p)
People get nostalgic.
ASCII-based gaming is still alive and well. I recall seeing a 'net based Tradewars, at least, which reminds me, I need to Google for it one of these days. I miss that game.
Text-based gaming in the form of MUDs is also well alive, and is enjoying a rebirth, thanks to the advent of games like EverQuest and DAoC. Thanks to those games, tons of MUDs are dying out.
That's a good thing - the MUDs that are dying are the countless thousands run by 14 year olds who slap on an ANSI color patch and call it 'fully customized'.
You probably won't get that 'Old World Charm' that a local BBS used to give, but many of the smaller games do have very close-knit communities, even if the people are scattered across the globe.
(Just Googled for Tradewars. Ridiculous number of sites, by the time I check them all out, CowboyNeal will be 92.
If only they made games like that today!
I'll take that over quake/medal of honor etc. any day of the week.
I can't help but post an ad :)
For doorgames (lord, tradewars, bre etc.)
telnet://clockworkorangebbs.org
For messages
http://www.clockworkorangebbs.org
- Jimbob
There are three thinfs that make a BBS great, and possible to survive even in these days of the internet. First, you need great folks willing to sacrifice time to make things fun. There are lots of those kinda folks around. Second, you need great doors...like TradeWars 2002 (I still play that through telnet) and lastly, the one thing that makes a great BBS....PRON! Gotta have it! Seriously though, there were a lot of BBS that were porn havens. I should know, I ran one!
.sig: It's what's for dinner.
I first started getting into BBS's when I was 11-12.. I got to love the Major BBS format, mainly because of a game called Galactic Empire. I would waste months at a time playing that game.. I was so sad when the BBS I played it on when down, I decided to start my own. Galaxy BBS, in omaha nebraska. I started it out with 4 lines, and within a year I was up to 12-lines. Those were the days..
Yes, QWK was originally designed for offline messaging by regular users, but it eventually became used for echomail by some networks as well. The way it worked was crude compared to FidoNet technology, though. If I wanted my BBS to exchange mail with yours, I'd have a special account on your board (or vice-versa). My BBS would then call up yours, and using scripts would navigate through your offline mail system as a regular user would. The offline mail system would know, of course, that it's another BBS calling. But basically it was a hack on top of the typical QWK offline mail system.
There were several networks that were QWK based, mostly in North America (Zone 1), and mostly based on commercial BBS software like PCBoard. Since you were in Zone 3, this might explain why you never saw this used. As far as I know, the mechanism more or less relied on the fact that all PCBoard systems were effectively identical, perhaps with just different text for the prompts. PCBoard was pretty popular in North America. It was basically the software to run if you wanted to have a "professional" looking BBS, and many of the large commercial BBS's ran it (some others like Wildcat and MajorBBS were also popular among commercial boards).
Anyway, to get other BBS software to work as a hub on a QWK network wouldn't really be feasible since you'd basically have to emulate PCBoard. But it was possible with some hacking to join a QWK network even if you ran other software. I ran Telegard as my BBS software and ended up hacking up some terminal scripts that allowed me to join a QWK network as a node. The QWK technology was technically inferior to FidoNet technology in just about every way. It probably originated as a kludge when the developers of certain BBS packages wanted built-in echomail but were too lazy to bother implementing all of FidoNet's technical specs. This then became the most convenient option for sysops who were too lazy or stupid to figure out how to set-up a 3rd party echomail front end and "tossing" software.
Eventually some of the QWK networks began distributing their mail using FidoNet technology via gateways.
I ran a system for a year and a half. I played with a whole bunch of platforms- Synchronet, Illusion and Impulse come to mind. I also tried out OBV/2 and PC Board. But Renegade was my favorite. It wasn't as configurable or powerful as the others, but it was reliable and easy to run.
I think learning how to run a FidoNet node was the pinnacle of my computing education. Every computer application after a FrontDoor seems like absurdly simplistic child's play.
The big BBS platform out now is Mystic BBS. It's very friendly to the internet. As a matter of fact it doesn't need any third party software.
Yes, you and your friends can meet at a bar in the mall, but it *isn't* really the same thing.
I don't know about you, but the BBSs that I used to frequent had one, or at most two phone lines... so the closest you'd get to actually meeting was
1) Reading whatever messages other people left for you
2) >>>> Sysop is coming online
Getting on the Internet and talking to several friends at the same time was a huge upgrade...
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
The picture of the co-inventor of CBBS: http://timeline.textfiles.com/1978/01/16/2/FILES/r suess.jpg
looks suspiciously like Al Gore. Coincidence? I don't think so.
Hi Folks,for this post , we must be seen the very very speed progress of internet.Already exists connections of broadband super speed(already exist connection of 100MB for home users).And in this recent past the connection was a trash(download until 10Kb).what you think about this paradox???Best regards. Blueice88
A lot of people have probably already mentioned that what made BBS'ing great was its sense of locality. Has anyone ever considered starting a web project to encourage local development of BBS'es in areas again? I'd love to have at least one board to dial into locally; I'd probably call it every day. The only issue with Telnet boards is that they don't really keep the sense of community you'd have in a dial in only situation.
.
Just an idea .
Back then, the entire 'Net consisted of two slow, boxcar- sized UNIVAC computers about 50 feet apart, connected by a wire. It would take one of these computers an entire day to send an email to the other one, which would immediately delete it, because it was an ad. ... just a bit of nostalgia :-)
I ran one of the earliest and longest running BBSes in the country. I'm wondering if anyone remembers it. It was called The DUNGEON. It was born in the early eighties and went through various incarnations of software and hardware (Health/Zenith proprietary, Apple Net-works, TRS-80 homebrew, and then tons of PC-based systems). My entry in the USBBS list was so young it didn't have a start date listed.
Those were the days. I was in school and in the early days didn't have an auto-answer modem. I had a system written in BASIC on my TRS 80 with a manual 300-baud modem and I'd flip the switch when the phone rang. When I finally upgraded to a more automated system, I had the BBS set to call me in the morning to wake me up.
.. then the Proterm extended-ascii flame war movies on the IIgs with the amazing auto-dialing 2400baud Zoomodem (only $99 at the computer faire), later ANSI on the Fountain XT clone..
;)
Going out to kick the shit out of some scrawny scarsdale fronta ala 'Jay & Silent Bob Strikes Back', but wimping out 'cuz you felt so much pity for the kid..
I remember my mom asking my why I didn't just pick up the phone to talk to my friend down the block, instead of the whole complicated manual modem data thing, but she couldn't understand just how COOL it was to see characters pop up on the screen in a raw serial connection and wonder, just a little, whether the other end was your friend, or a turing bot dialed by mistake.
And of course Wargames helped
Seriously, though, it was back in the day when Computer Shopper was useful, when it carried pirate BBS classifieds and Northgate clones...
CLI for life, playaz!!!
the closest we got to meeting was *at a bar.*
KFG
When I was 9, way back in 1979, my dad bought a TRS-80 Model I. The next year we got the Expensive, I mean Expansion Interface and a 300 baud accoustic coupled modem. My dad signed up for CompuServe and Genie. I played games online and chatted with folks, but the first time it really hit me what a truely novel, powerful form of communication it was, was when we were trying to figure out how to fit a battery from an older RC car into a newer car my brother had just received for christmas. We went on CompuServe and posted a question in the RC forum, within hours we had several expert replies from around the country. I believe my reaction was "Whoa!" (said like Neo.)
We were also members of a software club (if I recall, there were no laws against software piracy back then. I know we didn't try to hide what we were doing.) that had a BBS. We would pitch in some $$, vote on what to buy, crack the protection and distribute it to the members.
Later on I got a Commodore 64. By then modems were 2400 baud and had modular jacks. I got heavily involved in the commodore BBS scene in Washington state. Most of the BBSs I used had one or at most two phone lines, so you would have to redial again and again. Getting the settings right to connect was a pain in a lot of cases. Connections would drop all the time, so dowloading large files was a crapshoot, as none of the BBSs I remember supported transfer resume.
I remember when AOL started up, I thought "Free? these guys will never last."
I saw home computers go from a weird/fringe hobbiest thing through full commercialization. I saw the online scene go the same route, then the Internet, and later, open source. By the time I got involved in open source in '94, I could see the handwriting on the wall, and I felt lucky to have found out about it before money drove the spirit out of it.
Ahh, the good ol' days, when only enthusiasts were online. S'why I read slashdot, as dumb as it can be at times, at least people here are passionate about computers.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
I'm surprised that no one mentions KOM systems.
They are (still) very much a very good way to communicate. Compared to blogging they tend to make discussions a bit different, in some positive ways.
Check out EasyKOM for example. Text based does not mean inferior experience, on the contrary.
Also, it's GNU licensed.
I ran a BBS from the early to late eighties. I am one of those old timers that can truly remember being able to out type a 300 baud modem. In fact MY first modem was an acoustic coupler model that sped along at the terrific rate of 150 baud.
.ARC format for file concatenation/compression all of those users of different computer types could extract the files too.
The jump to 300 was huge. And the jump from that to 1200 was almost mind numbing.
But nostalgia aside, the best thing that Ward gave to the world was Xmodem. The first portable file transfer protocol available for a multitude of computer types. My users, whether they were using Apples, Commodores, TRS-80's, Peanuts, or PCs could upload and download files from me. Using the
I wasn't much of a programmer but I distinctly remember downloading and looking at the Xmodem source code. I don't recall if it was licensed or not but think about the ramifications of this. Ward released the source code to something to help benefit computer users everywhere no matter what platform they were using. In 'those' days it wasn't a big deal - I'm sure he just thought "hey, someone else could use this" and let it flow. Too often these days innovations such as thing get wrapped in a litany of licenses and red-tape.
The early to mid eighties were a wonderful time to be an online computer user. Holier than thou open source bandwagon jumpers and intellectual property whores who have owned a computer for less than 10 years have no idea what it was like when things WERE open because THEY COULD BE. It wasn't a big deal to make something available to the public like it is now. It was almost like "if you're smart enough to know what this means then you have every right to look at it". Very non-chalant and very cool.
These days when the open source community develops something revolutionary its very much "Yay us!" from the techie crowd. Back then it wasn't a big deal. It didn't have to be. It was almost taken as a given.
My how times have changed. Ward's contribution to the technical community of both bulletin board systems and especially the Xmodem protocol make him a pioneer that your pimply-faced, teenaged next door neighbor sadly will never appreciate.
-Necro
Hats off to you, BBS of yore.
Is it fascism yet?
Was the extremely compact interface. Ward had most of the commands aliased as single characters and they could be strung together to make complex commands. Very useful when you were paying long distance charges to access. CBBS was the most efficient command interface I've ever seen on a conference system. After CBBS the full screen, full word command interfaces became popular followed by GUI's on the net but I still miss the original.
do you remember when you needed to write the sysop and actually have *references* to get access to the latest Warez? the cool thing about BBSs was the accountability. You only had a few local ones, you built a name for yourself, where people knew you. On the internet, you can spam at will and no one will know who you are or hold a gurdge. I miss the good old days, there was a real sense of community on the BBSs
The worst part about the internet IS precisely because you can't separate one group from another. The nice part about BBSs was that you had a nice local group and that heck, if you didn't WANT to be part of the same system as everyone else, you didn't HAVE to.
The internet is the great melting pot--or cesspool, depending on how you look at it. Just looking at my firewall logs makes me wish there was some other internet I could join, sometimes.
When I first started with CP/M I had a telcon Zorba, with no telecom program. One of my first programs that did anything of worth was an assembler program to get into a Buffalo NY BBS. Once you were into a BBS the world really changed. There were other people to talk with, exchange programs, etc. I learned more about CP/M from the online world.
:-)
Last BBS that I ran was Waffle based. A great program for newsgroups and download areas. Waffle was great, there were about 3.2 million options you could set, but in most cases it worked "out of the box".
Ahh those were the days, but it's hard to think that I'm really that old
zen ink here in Austin, a door called Legend of the Red Dragon, and Ralph - a free BBS that actually have Internet email available! Oh, and downloading a file with pi rendered to one million decimal places. It fits nicely on a floppy disk.
I was Tangent Z!
There IS still new development with bbses, even besides some programs moving to groupware, there is also this one: http://sourceforge.net/projects/ibbs So many things have changed, it would be really interesting to see what we would have now with the internet, IF demand for bbs usage kept climbing as it was.
During the mid '80s I brought up one of the first privately owned multi-line BBS systems. It ran some software I developed called "The Connection". The computer was an Altos 586 with 5 dial-up lines (2400 baud! WooHoo!) under the Xenix OS.
;-)
The main difference between this board and most of the others around at the time was that the community of people were largely NOT computer geek types (like me) but more-or-less normal folks who just happened to have computers. It was designed following the model of the CDC "Plato" system to be extremely easy to use.
At the time I was trying to use it to convince investors to put money into making a large scale national E-Mail/bulletin board service but was (of course) told I was crazy, the average person would NEVER buy their own computer or use E-Mail.
Still got the computer laying around here somewhere, but would have to figure out the right way to wire up a serial cable to make it talk to my PC if I want to use it
Milo from Kangaroo Koncepts
I remember getting up early (4am)to play tradewars just after its daily maintenance. I remember LORD and getting killed just about every day. And I remember a chat program called LISA. You can carry on a conversation with it and it fooled alot of people into thing they were talking to a real person.
I got into bbsing late in the game with my own Searchlight BBS and had the fake sysop chat program LISA. It was fun to sit and watch visitors who wanted to talk to the sysop talk to this program - especially the preacher who started with the romans road with her to try to convert her. It was almost embarrassing. Then Lisa started talking about sex so I had to "accidently" hang up on him.
It was a good thing that garbage accounted for almost 90 percent of the disconnects in those days.
just had a look at your necklace and earring creations - fscking awesome!
Take care and keep up the good work,
CD
Use ISO 8601 dates [YYYY-MM-DD]
matt4077@yahoo.com
spambot foil hat
Aren't blogs sort of filling up that "local community" space? Several blogs I read regularly have very narrow topics and a few dozen at best regular posters in comments. It starts to get that old BBS feel when you recognize just about everybody in the comments section, and you expect to see them there daily. The people may be spread out geographically, but the blog does connect the readers in the same way a multi-line BBS did back in the old days. Even better, blogs don't boot you because you've been online for 20 consecutive miutes!
Telnet - Bah! Must be one of those wannabe 'beemer boards. Yep saw em (IBM based BBSs) come in and cover the calling area like a plague and push out the old Apple II and TRS-80 systems and the popular Commodore and Atari Color BBSs - not soon after, asking for contributions and whining about how every one only called to play TradeWars or LORD (actually the sysop whine is a common malady - now it is usually called the webmaster whine). Then saw them all die off as the users went to AOL and Prodigy and later the Internet...
:-)
n fo .html
And those BBS parties were fun (such a suprise to see the 'real' person behind the handle), and also having two names in social situations. (Real name 'Larry', BBS Handle 'Joe Commodore'), I knew I was taking to a fellow user or systop if they greeted me with , "Hey Joe!" Also I did meet my wife via my BBS too.
My Commodore BBS is still on-line - 16 years and counting; though even I don't log in more then once or twice a year, (too busy with other things like work)
http://www.portcommodore.com/commodore/bbs/slri
Silicon Realms BBS: (209) 754-1363 (when my data line is free)
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
ATZ
:-)
ATDT 5551212
I want my rights back. I was actually using them when our government stole them after 9/11.
Ahhh LORD,
'You give the old man -10000000'
Gee, that old man funded many a campaign to slay the dragon and lay Violet.
"She's a West Texas girl, just like me" - G.W Bush Iraqis
was my system of choice - I ran from 1200 baud to cable modem with it.
It's Christmas everyday with BitTorrent.
"S-100" refers to the Altair (8080)-inspired bus standard used by the machine.
Damn, it doesn't seem like that long ago. I can still remember the phone #: (312) XXX-8086. To Ward and Randy, Thanks for the memories.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
And don't forget Stacker !
:)
I remember trying to fit all that FIDO mail on a 20MB Seagate RLL Harddrive. Remember when harddrive used to cost $800? Imagine the BBS you could run if could magically transport a modern system back in time. The storage and speed would be insane!
I used to run the T.A.G. BBS, and I even wrote some door programs in Borland Turbo Pascal. Remember the automagic file detecting ZMODEM upload door? That was mine
The main advantage of the BBS was the fact that it was cheap to produce for the functionality you got. All you needed was some BBS Software a computer with a modem and a free telephone line. The phone line was around $12-20 a month. So if you wanted to have a small BBS of your own it was relitivly easy to set up and use.
BBSs also had the advantage of beeing a more of a one stop shop with a file download area, message boards, and Games all in one spot with the simular group of people in your area using them. While the internet seems more geared to giving people some usefull or at least your point of view on information it has become very buisness like and has lost a lot of charm of the old BBSs. I tried some of the new Telnet BBSs but they as well dont have the same charm because they are to widly accessed. It was fun to dial into 20 BBSs and see usually the same people. It made it feel more like a comunity and not a place to watch comericals.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
pajonet.com - aka macombunderground bbs
Well the whole story begins in the early fall of 1987. Jeff, a young boy about the age of 17 started one of the most talked about BBS's this side of Lake Ontario. The dream started on a Commodore 64 1/2 (we modded it a bit) and one of those awesome hayes 1200 that we got for 350 bucks out of the back of the old computer shopper magazine. Remember the old thick ass fat ones with like 100 pages of pure classifieds in them? We coded up a litle proggie using some templates we found in C= mag and voilla it was born.
Within the period of about 4 weeks, we had about 100 users and my mom almost revoked the phone privaleges! We made a deal to only have the c64 plugged in from 10PM to 6AM, and boy was it ever busy. We have since developed our little spot on the www at pajonet.com, so when you are done slash dotting about, drop by and spend some time! just like old times...
Sounds like a BBS to me.
Once again, the editors of Slashdot want you to think that the BBS is a product of days gone by. I'm here to remind everyone that those days never ended.
I've been running UNCENSORED! BBS since 1988 and it's still a hip, hot, totally-whats-happening hobby. The community is still there. The fun is still there. The comraderie is still there.
The only thing that isn't still there is the modem.
Slashdot likes to position itself as "what came after the BBS" but with the amount of volume a zillion users generate, you just can't replace the "folksy" feel of your favorite BBS. Get out there and BBS, folks!
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
Agents
-
Hello
:)
I remember those days, i ran a small BBS in my local city (small one), really nice, we were subcribed to FidoNET (we need to make long distance calls to get messages), lots of pics, shareware, we even had people connecting from other states. FXTERM was the program at 2400bps, then 9600bps, 14,400 bps and then pum!, Internet... 28,800 bps and BBSs were lost in space, we closed... but i still have this old page from yellow pages, "Computers", a small mailbox draw, with big letters "BBS" and the phone number... the old days...
My first BBS was way, way back when I had my first computer, a Trash-80 COCO, circa 1980.
16k of ram (upgraded from 4k WoW!!!),
a SSDD 5.25 floppy disk drive,
and a (get this now) 300 buad AUTO ANSWER MODEM ! WOW-O-WOW!!
And all these wonderful items were accessable through my Chiclet keyboard and my 25" TV set!
The BBS software was "Colorama BBS"
I bought it in I think about 1981 and found I had to upgrade to 32k ram (piggy backed 16k chips)
At first it was a private board for me to play with from work and for my friends then when Blade Runner came out in 82 I themed it after the movie that I became enchanted with.
Soon after that I went to work for a computer store and had access to real computers (for that time frame) and began to bring IBM and compaq luggables home. I ended up running the Colorama board for a few years until I built my own IBM from junk parts and discovered PCBoard, I guess around 1985 or so.
I remember getting a Hayes 300 and tricking it into running at 450buad! Wow, that was cool! And then I got a Hayes 1200 and I was THE man in town. With two 10 meg drives and a 300/450/1200 buad modem I ran the biggest and fastest BBS in the county!
Man, what a trip down memory lane!!
And to think that led into me hosting my own webservers at my office a few years ago.
To me it doesn't seem all that long ago but I guess it is. In a way I miss the old days, those were the pioneering days of computers...
Things were simpler back then...
More and more I work with people in the ocmputer industry who have never signed on to a local BBS. I got in late, just before the era of the USR Courrier HST. I remember spending my time on boards running Celerity, Baphomet, DLX, Synchronet, Galacticom,and a few others. I still have friends that I met online back on Destiny(Destination Imagination). How it all has changed.
Thanks for remembering the 25th anniversary of CBBS - I think I might have not noticed, haha, had not Peter Zelchenko (son of one of the early co-sysops, "Alex Zell") decided to have it honored in Chicago with 2/16/2003 declared BBS day by Mayor Daley...which the city accepted, and was "thusly" declared. Anyway just a quick correction, which I see someone else posted, but it seems to proliferate. When Randy Suess & I came up with BBSs back in '78, there were only cork board and push pin ones, or those racks of 3x5 cards in the entryway to the grocery stores, or the "car for sale" type ones at some companies, etc. So we decided to "Computerize" the idea of having a place to post and read things. It was on a computer, so it was an application, or a system, or a program, or something...we chose "system". Thus was born CBBS - as the welcome message said from day 1, "Welcome to Ward & Randy's Computerized Bulletin Board System". Not "Chicago" (that implied we had enough forethought to think there might be ones in other cities, haha) and not Christensen, for it would never have happened without Randy Suess, ...
P.S. my thanks also to Jim Willing who ran a copy of CBBS in the northwest called CBBS/NW and kept CBBS alive for a long time, and to all the people who ran CBBS and made good suggestions.
P.S. these were innocent days - there were no viruses, and while we had users - even nasty users - attempting to mess with CBBS, only one person broke in - and that turned out to be physical security - it was a friend who visited Randy and left a message in a file on the floppy by accessing it locally, haha.
CBBS was certainly the most fun programming project ever - supported by the neat HW Randy Suess came up with - like resetting CBBS on EVERY phone call - a couple 555 timers cross-linked - the first ring hits reset, then an inhibitor 555 timer inhibits rings from resetting for the next "something" (20 sec?) - since CP/M loaded with 2 revs of the floppy, and CBBS with another few, it didn't take long for CBBS to issue the "answer" command to the modem, and thus stop the phone ringing and thus the resets before the 2nd 555 timed out. If CBBS glitched while loading, the 2nd 555 would time out and stop inhibiting reset and the next ring would reset and thus retry the reboot.
Early CBBS was very immature - with users' complaints shaping it - from sending trailing white space (VERY annoying at 110 or 300 baud), to packing down the message numbers (thus not being able to figure out where you left off).
My solution to the latter was to create 50 message files, each one storing messages whose last 2 digits "anded with FFFE" determined the file name - this means message xxx04 and message xxx05 would both be stored in the file messages.x04, etc.
Later I Hashed (by just adding their ascii values together) the user names and wrote them to a 1024 entry file so it could remember your last call, the high msg #, and support flags to allow a set of assistant operators, optional passwords, etc.
Many people thought CBBS was put up for file transfers - well, my original idea of a message system was to have users contribute articles for our club newsletter, but as it formed, a message system seemed more interesting, and file transfers were supported by only a few users such as myself to transfer new releases of the code via Xmodem, into the system which lived 30 miles away at Randy Suess' house (he wanted it "in the city" (Chicago) not out in the burbs where I lived). Not a bad idea.
I could go on forever, I had so much fun with the programming - originally running in perhaps 48K of memory including CP/M - maybe 20,000 lines of 8080 assembler.
CBBS lived into the early 90's (approx 93?) and received over a quarter million calls, on its one phone line! Thanks to Randy Suess for keeping it going all that while, even some sophisticated things like running the actual files off a unix share! It ran on a PC with a hacked up 8080 emulator, TSR's to handle interrupts I added to the code, etc. Fun fun fun!
Gee, I did go on forever. I promise I will stop!
Ward Christensen
[here comes one]
paragraph breaks, haha. I'm a novied /. user ;-)
Jason Scott is doing a great job of documenting the history..including some of the "bad guesses" at what CBBS stood for. I had forgotten it became "community" once in a while, too ;-)
Little known is that Randy Suess actually copyrignted the phrase CBBS, and drives around - or drove around - in a car with "CBBS" license plates (My licence plate is Xmodem, haha).
I think it would be sort of fun to put up some sort of CBBS emulator on the web, seed it with all the files I can scrounge up from - alas - happens to be 10 years ago that it died - and let it rip.
Many would say "this is dumb". But then I guess you could call a 3 year old dumb if compared to an adult. It was the infancy of the "microcomputer industry".
P.S. I would like to say one thing about "me" and the stuff I did you have commented on - lots of give-away-stuff (disk editor, including looping 1-line macros (search for blah blah at offset xyz and replace it with something and loop 12 times, etc), disk cataloging program, Xmodem, etc).
The thing I'd like to say is that I was not a genius, or even very smart - because back THEN I was programming in a VACUUM. There were not millions of people doing more than I was at the time. Anything I could think of, would not exist, so just writing it became quite easy. I didn't have to write very GOOD code, I didn't have to compete with brighter people - I just "lucked out" to have thought of some of the stuff before others did, have a good enough job to not want to try to make money off of it, etc.
Regrets? I regret that when the IBM PC came out, with its 160K floppies (My CP/M system had 1.2M floppies and an 8M hard disk), 16K of Ram (or whatever - compared to the 256K I had on my CP/M system), and a few hundred character per second screen scroll rate (I believe my CP/M system scrolled text at about 50,000 characters/sec - it used hardware to change the starting display line not a block move instruction)...I repeat, I regret NOT scrapping my investment in CP/M and porting my programs (Oh, forgot the famous "disassembler, with its - ahem - clever name: Resource) ... to the PC environment. As a result by the time I got a PC (after XT's came out, and I wanted to be "better" so got an external 15M drive (whooie!), all the bright aggressive programmers had started to saturate the market with their software. My disk utility? languished, as Peter Norton took over the helm of that ship; Commercial file transfer software became common, but some things like disk cataloging or disassembling never quite reached the stage they should... this "segment register stuff" made disassembly QUITE difficult compared to the simple linear 64K memory model of the 8080...
But I ramble...
I AM amused your comment got a "5", mine seem to get a "1". Working for IBM, a "1" is best, I'll just think of it that way ;-)
P.S. Just to ramble some more:
1. In 1974 I learned that "TTL" electronics, and an "8008" microchip could make a home computer, and wrote to Heathkit to suggest they "invent" the home computer. Their response "We already have an analog computer kit, why would we want a digital computer kit?".
2. In approx '78, I wrote to IBM saying that I'd had a "microcomputer" for 3 years by then, and thought IBM should commercialize the microcomputer by coming out with one. Got back an answer "we don't see a market for such a device".
Wish I'd pushed a bit!
Ward Christensen
I lived in St. Louis at the time, so many of the BBSs would have a copy of Fire Escape's BBS List (for the Greater St. Louis Area). It appears to have stopped being updated a couple years back, though. I found a number for the BBS, but a quick call finds that I may have pissed off someone (it's 2am here), and that there is definately not a BBS on the other end. I remember being excited when the new Fire Escape Directory came out.
I remember once chatting with the Sysop's son, who happened to be my age, and we almost met IRL.
My usual name at the time was TURTLE, due to my current interest in TMNT. I even had a cool ANSI sig in full color that I was able to map to a key-combo (many BBS Servers allowed Macros, including WWIV, Telegard, and Wildcat).
I remember logging onto my first private piracy board. The Sysop had to call me and talk to me in person before I was given access. While I no longer openly condone piracy or anything, I must admit that it contributed to my development. I remember getting Turbo C++ 3.0 and the source to WWIV among other things (which I don't remember so much, though I'm sure included many games, like Commander Keen 2 and 3). Playing around with WWIV and Modding it helped me learn a little bit about C++ and the joys of logic around the age 14, and ultimately led to me majoring in CS.
Another great experience was Anarchy Files. While I haven't done 90+% of anything I read in such files, I still found myself totally intrigued with them. Phone Phreaking, Bombs, Early Social Engineering to get into systems, even Instructions to make LSD in your kitchen (never tried it, sounded a bit shady). All of it fascinating. Even today, I can amaze my friends with a simple bit of trivia or two, like how to kill someone with pipe tobacco (soak in water, ring out and throw away tobacco, now your have a super concentrated deadly poison). Of course, you always follow up such a conversation with maniacal laughter.
And of course, Tradewars. I can't remember how much time I spent in that game back in the days where it was almost always only 1 user on at a time. I played it a little my freshman year of college, too, but it was quite different, having multiple nodes (more like a MUD), and ran through a telnet client (or mudding client if you're hardcore).
Probably the greatest memory of the time was checking my "e-mail" and having it all be useful. If I wanted a larger penis, I did what every other boy did and exercised it myself, with not one piece of spam to try to persuade me of another method.
--paul
-- Every time you kill a kitten, God masturbates.
Wrote a old school C=64 style bbs for linux, its still up if anyone would like to check it out. The address is:
:P
telnet://velvet.ath.cx
l8r
tHe sHacK! bBS (telnet://velvet.ath.cx)
[shameless plug]
In case no-one else has already mentioned it here..
There's a very good Internet BBS called Monochrome. Originally run from a UK university, it's been running for over 10 years; I've been using it since 1993.
Access is via telnet/SSH; address and other details are at:
http://www.mono.org
OK, so it's not quite the same thing as CBBS (but feel free to hum a 300-baud carrier tone as you use it, if it makes you feel better) but it's the next best thing. ASCII graphics, multiple termtype emulations, chatrooms, discussion files - what more could you ask for?
[/shameless plug]
There were many a night I stayed up late playing on BBS's. We had many chatters in my area, some had dialin nodes in all the state counties (!), and it was so cool to be able to talk to people from around the state. Downloading MOD's, game demos, playing the online ones. A friend of mine ran his own for a while on a little 386. What a crazy bastard he was. One phone line and a 386 being held together with duct tape (seriously)! But he had The Pit, and what an awesome game it was! Hell, we almost failed High School ;-)
I think because Internet access is so common nowadays, the community concept of a BBS has been moved onto the Internet, more or less.
Infopop's Ultimate Bulletin Board and Jelsoft's vBulletin software packages, along with the software used to create and run Slashdot, have created the means to re-create the community message boards that the old BBS systems fostered.
As a teenager I had a Tandy Color Computer with a 300 buad modem, seen everyone starting to put up BBS's so I wrote my own in BASIC.
No files to share, just user login and post messages.
Later I moved up to a Tandy Color Computer 2, and started to run a BBS using OS9 (Unix type OS), I ran the BBS in a Shell window and could run my programs and run the BBS at the same time....that when windows was just starting and I had multiple windows and true multitasking.
My last upgrade for the BBS was to a Color Computer 3, 20 MB Hare Drive, I would download files off the internet for users.
Was not long after that I closed my BBS down, got too busy with college to run it.
Wise men speak because they have something to say, Fools because they have to say something!!!!
THANKS, WARD!
I forgot to mention that Ward and Randy acutally Coined the term BBS. As Ward says Randy copyrighted CBBS instead of BBS, but he could have easily claimed the shorter term. The term BBS didn't exist until they came up with it. If he had protected the name all of those [A-Z]BBS's that came along would gave had to choose a different name.
BTW, One of my favorite USENET threads begins at article 3 here where a guy with the handle "BBS2" challenges Randy about his online attitude and a few chimed in and attempted to clue in "BBS2" that he owed Randy for his name among other things. You may have to search threads elsewhere on chi.* for the rest of that conversation thread.
Here's goes the off-topic part: Ward, the problem with mod scores is that the moderators tend to only look at recent articles. "Recent" is measured in hours. I tried to get your previous post modded by posting a reply up but it didn't happen. *sigh*
Ever dream you could fly? Get up from the Flight Sim. I Fly
>Way more than 50% of the people on the road think that they're "above average" drivers (85% last I heard)
The one thing that unites all human beings, regardless of age, gender, religion, economic status or ethnic background, is that, deep down inside, we ALL believe that we are above average drivers.
Dave Barry, Things that it took me 50 years to learn. (The list was originally published in Dave Barry Turns 50 and had more than 19 items as far as I remember, but I don't have the book handy)
Just typing NO CARRIER at all would fool some term progs into thinking you'd dropped connection. Fun times.
I don't want it to seem like I am trying to discredit CBBS but it seems to me that almost 30 years ago there were 2 services available - Comp-u-serve and The Source. These were axcessable via dialup or DataPac. Both were BBS style services and very popular. In 1975 I ran a BBS in Victoria, BC, Canada for the Island Microcomputer Society. It was written in DecBasic and was running on a Digital PDP-11/20 with a 12 line Gandalf 300 baud frontend. cheers..........
.. is still played religiously... www.thestardock.com
Yes, let me explain myself.
I actually called Ward after the story was posted and apologized for swapping "Chicago" and "Computerized". I'd already submitted the story to Slashdot and had it rejected, and my "second try" had the mistake in it. Of course, that's the one that got in....
My biggest issue was making sure that Randy's last name was spelled correctly. And that I did.
You may be that old, but neither you nor anyone was ever that fast at typing. 300 baud = 300 bits per second = about 30 bytes per second (not forgetting overheard and stop bit) = 1800 characters a second. Words Per Minute is calculated by dividing the total number of characters by 5, so that comes out to 360 WPM, which is at least 120 WPM past the world record IIRC.
:)
Just because your modem was slow doesn't mean it made you faster
JUST FYI - Tradewars 2002 is still alive and kicking, with thousands of players.
Rather than being run as a door from a BBS, there is a telnet game server called TWGS (TradeWars GameServer). More info may be found at http://www.eisonline.com
The United States Open Tradewars Tournament is starting on 2/23/03.
Hardware met Software on the road to Changtse. Software said: "You
are the Yin and I am the Yang. If we travel together we will become famous
and earn vast sums of money." And so the pair set forth together, thinking
to conquer the world.
Presently, they met Firmware, who was dressed in tattered rags, and
hobbled along propped on a thorny stick. Firmware said to them: "The Tao
lies beyond Yin and Yang. It is silent and still as a pool of water. It does
not seek fame, therefore nobody knows its presence. It does not seeks fortune,
for it is complete within itself. It exists beyond space and time."
Software and Hardware, ashamed, returned to their homes.
-- Geoffrey James, "The Tao of Programming"
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