Re:5 million solders? I dont think so.
by
Phroggy
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Another example is "Three-hundred baud is around five words a second - you can read faster than that". First of all it's more like fifty words per second, and no, you generally can't read novel material faster than that (and I've tried, on live chat with a 300 baud connection when other people were using 2400bps modems - and I'm a fast reader).
Um, dude, yes, you can read text at 300bps. You might have trouble reading a novel at that speed, but you can certainly read text from a chatroom (or teleconference, as they were called in those days). Assuming N81 (no parity, 8 bits per byte and one stop bit), that's 33 characters per second, which is about 5 words or so. Maybe 6 or 7 if they're short.
If everyone else was at 2400bps, 300bps may have seemed fast if you were also trying to type at the same time the text was coming in. That was kinda challenging.
-- $x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$]; $x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
Why do I keep seeing stuff like this here? If you like BBSs, join one. I'm a member of one and I run one. Mine doesn't have that many users, and is only up for testing purposes, but the other one I'm on has 17 users and 27 rooms as well as a LORD clone (Scary Caverns). There are many others out there with many more users.
Seriously, if they're cool, use them.
Here is some more info
by
Billly+Gates
·
· Score: 2, Informative
He worked as a consultant for IBM. Whenever you bought IBM mainframes and or mini's a consultant usually came with the purchase. My father purchased 1 mainframe and several mini's back in 79 and happened to recieve Christensen as a consultant.
Anyway the link is here written by Christensen back in 88. Amazingly his old cbbs program for cp/m ran for 15 years before being retired!
He tried to get my father to join his bbs but my old man didn't have a pc or I should say Micro-computer back in those days and did not see the fun in it or understand why anyone would need a computer at home. Back in 78 the pc's did not have any off the shelve software like development tools( besides Microsoft Basic), spreadsheets, or games. Christensen's z-80 computer for example only had 16k of ram, an editor and assembler compiler. Thats it. My father only knew cobal and IBM 360 assembler so he couldn't really program it.
Anyway how it got started was that he loved to share diskettes and tapes with his buddy in Michican. The blizard of 78 was real bad. My parents could not leave the house for close to a week and snow drifts almost reached the roof. It took 2 days for my father to clear out a path to his car. We had close to 5 feet of snow. Anyway as the story goes he couldn't share the diskettes with his buddy so he decided to develop a way to use a phone line and a cbbs was born.
He also came up with the idea of using phone lines before modems were around. Back in the early or mid 70's he was playing with a spectograph and was analzying analog data over an ethernet line. Out of curiousity he examined a phone line and saw striking similarities when examing the wave forms. He wondered if it were possible to use phone lines as a poor mans wan. He began working on a modem and hayes beat him to it before he was done.
ARE still cooler. Some still exist. Some friends have one running at telnet://bbs.mysticone.com We even have registered Tradewars and LORD.
It's like... the BBS days minus the long distance charges(and multi node is suddenly much cheaper).
Re:Out of Curiosity
by
MsWillow
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I'm not sure what happened to the *original* CBBS hardware, but several years ago, Randy Suess sold me one of the old hard drives, a 10-meg one, that had been used in *a* CBBS. He also sold off a bunch of S-100 boards, and an old chassis, so I suspect the original CBBS hgardware was sold off, over the years, as parts no longer needed.
Randy's running Chinet nowadays, and last I heard, Ward had CBBS. You could always ask Randy, if you're curious.
--
Lemon curry?
Re:Snow day...
by
Forgotten
·
· Score: 2, Informative
No, it really didn't. It seems that way to many people because they started on BBSes, then moved to dialup shell account access and eventually SLIP and PPP access. But on the actual network side of things, there's little connection between BBSes and the Internet. Some big multiline boards became small ISPs, but that's really more like repurposing old equipment. The only real connection I can think of is between Waffle boards and other UUCP systems, and those notably weren't really ever part of the BBS scene - precisely because they were leaf nodes to the Internet instead. There were FIDONet gateways and such in the early nineties, but rather than evolving they mostly just did out as cheap, real net access came along and the sysops lost interest.
The relationship of the BBS scene to the ARPAnet/Internet is really one of parallel evolution or microcomputer imitation of what the real iron had already been doing for a decade. It didn't evolve into anything - it died out, as many parallel evolution strains do. I'm not dissing it exactly (you can probably tell I was right into BBSes) but it was the toy version, and the people involved basically outgrew it and left it behind.
Slashdot Mirror
Another example is "Three-hundred baud is around five words a second - you can read faster than that". First of all it's more like fifty words per second, and no, you generally can't read novel material faster than that (and I've tried, on live chat with a 300 baud connection when other people were using 2400bps modems - and I'm a fast reader).
Um, dude, yes, you can read text at 300bps. You might have trouble reading a novel at that speed, but you can certainly read text from a chatroom (or teleconference, as they were called in those days). Assuming N81 (no parity, 8 bits per byte and one stop bit), that's 33 characters per second, which is about 5 words or so. Maybe 6 or 7 if they're short.
If everyone else was at 2400bps, 300bps may have seemed fast if you were also trying to type at the same time the text was coming in. That was kinda challenging.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
Why do I keep seeing stuff like this here? If you like BBSs, join one. I'm a member of one and I run one. Mine doesn't have that many users, and is only up for testing purposes, but the other one I'm on has 17 users and 27 rooms as well as a LORD clone (Scary Caverns). There are many others out there with many more users.
Seriously, if they're cool, use them.
He worked as a consultant for IBM. Whenever you bought IBM mainframes and or mini's a consultant usually came with the purchase. My father purchased 1 mainframe and several mini's back in 79 and happened to recieve Christensen as a consultant.
Anyway the link is here written by Christensen back in 88. Amazingly his old cbbs program for cp/m ran for 15 years before being retired!
He tried to get my father to join his bbs but my old man didn't have a pc or I should say Micro-computer back in those days and did not see the fun in it or understand why anyone would need a computer at home. Back in 78 the pc's did not have any off the shelve software like development tools( besides Microsoft Basic), spreadsheets, or games. Christensen's z-80 computer for example only had 16k of ram, an editor and assembler compiler. Thats it. My father only knew cobal and IBM 360 assembler so he couldn't really program it.
Anyway how it got started was that he loved to share diskettes and tapes with his buddy in Michican. The blizard of 78 was real bad. My parents could not leave the house for close to a week and snow drifts almost reached the roof. It took 2 days for my father to clear out a path to his car. We had close to 5 feet of snow. Anyway as the story goes he couldn't share the diskettes with his buddy so he decided to develop a way to use a phone line and a cbbs was born.
He also came up with the idea of using phone lines before modems were around. Back in the early or mid 70's he was playing with a spectograph and was analzying analog data over an ethernet line. Out of curiousity he examined a phone line and saw striking similarities when examing the wave forms. He wondered if it were possible to use phone lines as a poor mans wan. He began working on a modem and hayes beat him to it before he was done.
http://saveie6.com/
ARE still cooler. Some still exist. Some friends have one running at telnet://bbs.mysticone.com
We even have registered Tradewars and LORD.
It's like... the BBS days minus the long distance charges(and multi node is suddenly much cheaper).
I'm not sure what happened to the *original* CBBS hardware, but several years ago, Randy Suess sold me one of the old hard drives, a 10-meg one, that had been used in *a* CBBS. He also sold off a bunch of S-100 boards, and an old chassis, so I suspect the original CBBS hgardware was sold off, over the years, as parts no longer needed.
Randy's running Chinet nowadays, and last I heard, Ward had CBBS. You could always ask Randy, if you're curious.
Lemon curry?
No, it really didn't. It seems that way to many people because they started on BBSes, then moved to dialup shell account access and eventually SLIP and PPP access. But on the actual network side of things, there's little connection between BBSes and the Internet. Some big multiline boards became small ISPs, but that's really more like repurposing old equipment. The only real connection I can think of is between Waffle boards and other UUCP systems, and those notably weren't really ever part of the BBS scene - precisely because they were leaf nodes to the Internet instead. There were FIDONet gateways and such in the early nineties, but rather than evolving they mostly just did out as cheap, real net access came along and the sysops lost interest.
The relationship of the BBS scene to the ARPAnet/Internet is really one of parallel evolution or microcomputer imitation of what the real iron had already been doing for a decade. It didn't evolve into anything - it died out, as many parallel evolution strains do. I'm not dissing it exactly (you can probably tell I was right into BBSes) but it was the toy version, and the people involved basically outgrew it and left it behind.