Out of Curiosity
by
Adolatra
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Out of curiosity, does anyone know what ultimately happened to the original CBBS referenced in this article?
BBSs were great:
by
Globe199
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· Score: 3, Interesting
I loved owning a BBS.
Until I realized that using OS/2 on a 486 with 8 MB of RAM, and playing Doom under Windows under OS/2, all the while running WWIV in the background, was not such a good idea.
What are these guys doing these days? Maybe they can come up with something to get the BBS scene going again. I miss it.
Re:my heroes
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 5, Interesting
Think "meta" - route around the Internet.
Work with your neighbors. Build a wireless network using the common pool of equipment. You're not allowed to let other people on the Internet through your connection (check your AUP - many ISPs say something like this), but nothing says you can't let them get to things on your own network!
Start creating content that only exists on the 'wireless' side of your network. Get other people to do the same. When enough compelling content exists on the "other" net, people will find their own way to get to it.
Incidentally, this also sidesteps another problem that many people face on their home connections: "no servers". You're serving inward, not outward, so that never becomes a problem.
I ran a BBS from 1990 to 1999 and shut it down due to a lack of interest. The fundamental concept of a bulletin board where people post about stuff is still needed - stare at your monitor for awhile if you don't believe it. Bring it back at a neighborhood level and you'll find the community that's been waiting all this time.
Re:my heroes
by
Army+Eye
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I know, it makes no sense. The Internet can do everything a BBS can do, and better. But BBSes were still cooler.
Re:why in my day...
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 1, Interesting
You may be joking, but I can really remember walking miles through blizzards to trade Apple ][ software in the early eighties. We did have floppy disks by then, though, and being as we didn't live on a Klein bottle it was only uphill one way.
5 million solders? I dont think so.
by
DaPhoenix
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· Score: 5, Interesting
"The answer was two weeks later, when the Computerized Bulletin Board System first spun its disk, picked up the line and took a message."
"Christensen wrote the BIOS and all the drivers (as well as the small matter of the bulletin board code itself), while Suess took care of five million solder joints and the odd unforeseen problem."
Okay time for quick math.
60 secs a min * 60 mins a hour * 24 hours a day * 14 days (a fortnight) = 1209600 seconds.
5 million solders / 1209600 seconds = ~4.13 solders per second.
Aint no way in hell he did that by hand.
-- --
-=innocent ramblings from the mind of an insomniatic programmer=-
What I really miss about BBS's were the game doors, Especially Tradewars and GTWar. I know people run Tradewares via telnet not, but it's just not the same thing. I got to know the other players and it was more fun because it was personal.
I still hold a grudge against Telus because they bought the company that bought the ISP that bought my BBS to shut it down and harvest their customers. I even cancelled my ClearNet cell phone when Telus bought them.
My idea for bringing a new form of BBS back
by
zymano
·
· Score: 1, Interesting
The phone manufacturers could add some software and modems and then why not have a convergence of technologies like France had with minitel but with cellphones and all other types of phones. Have you ever called a local store to find a certain product but too late and they they had closed ? If you could just call their personal BBS/OS then you could see if they stocked what you were looking for and store hour times.
There you have it. If these idiot electronic companies could get together with a plan to install this stuff then i think life would be easier for everybody. I don't think it could be done without government prodding though.
Some BBS's begat great Internet dynasties
by
87C751
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Northwest Nexus, the major ISP headquartered in Bellevue, WA, began as halcyon.com. And halcyon.com was originally a 386, 8 MB of memory, DESQview 386 and the MS-DOS version of Waffle, all running in Ralph Sims' bedroom. With that kit, Ralph was running very close to a full newsfeed to over 100 leaf nodes back in the early 90's. When someone made a DEC Unix box available (it might have been an Alpha, come to think of it), he migrated and I ported BBStevie to big iron for the first time. Soon afterward, halcyon stepped into the ISP business and Ralph got to quit his day job. I recall that Tom Dell was pretty impressed with what Ralph achieved with Waffle. And I think I had a shell account on halcyon until halfway through the decade.
Those were the days...
-- Mail? Put "slashdot" in the subject to pass the spam filters.
I only sigh....
by
jlleblanc
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I caught the tail end of the BBS era in the mid 90's just as AOL was beginning to ship out their free trial floppies, which everyone else used to get online. Where I lived, AOL didn't have access numbers, so I explored the local BBS'es and learned about modem commands and such instead. (Much better use of time:) Those days were fun.
Re:One slow day in the news world...
by
jericho4.0
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
I'll back you on this.
This is a dupe. From what? Three or four days ago. Yesterday we saw a multiple dupe about some interview Bill Gates gave 8 years ago.
I realize I'm not paying anyone for the right to post this, but someone is paying the editors, no? Christ, start _trying_ to look like pros, at least. Take a fucking journalisim class and discover the concept of journalistic responsibility. I, for one, am tired of seeing dupes that anyone who actually reads the damn site could recognize.
IMHO, slashdot needs to produce a mission statement that clearly states what slashdot is. Are you news? A gossip site? A bunch of kids playing in Mom's basement?
I realize that 'go start you're own site if you don't like it' is a valid response to this post, but I simply don't understand the lack of professionalism I see here. We are talking about 20 posts a day kids, get with it.
-- "A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" - Alan Perlis
Usenet Born at the Same Time - Synchronicity
by
Futurian
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
The impetus to electronically intercommunicate was strong. Usenet was born in 1979, one year after the creation of the CBBS. I was an undergraduate at Duke at that time, and recall being shown a prototype of the project by Tom Truscott. The early messages included arcane comments about operating system programming for "Unix wizards". I told Tom it was excellent, but with my limited horizons I internally felt that the early games "adventure" and "Zork" were more exciting. In retrospect, Tom Truscott, Jim Ellis and the other creators captured the zeitgeist and deserve lavish praise. A full Usenet feed topped 500 gigabytes in 2002, a mind-boggling size circa 1979, and the leviathan keeps growing.
Tom and Jim were great people. They were enthusiastic, friendly, and helpful even to a "lowly" undergraduate. They were always trying to improve Usenet and spoke extensively about how the data structures of the news program had to be redone. Even in 1979 more sophisticated structures were needed to scale up and handle the growing number of news articles. The Duke graduate school did not have a budget item for long distance telephone calls to swap Usenet news items. Luckily, Bell Labs charitably became a hub of the early network and subsidized the long distance calls.
Jim Ellis enjoyed reading SF and his programming skill helped make one positive SF scenario, inexpensive fast electronic communication, come true. I never had a chance to thank him for all his help and for suggesting I read "Shockwave Rider" and "Forever War". Thanks - via the celestial internet.
online discussion systems on mainframes
by
thvv
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
BBS-like functions were provided by various mainframe timesharing systems well before 1978.
Multics had an online threaded discussion system called "continuum" (later renamed "forum") which I used while housebound during the Massachusetts blizzard of 78. The Multics machine wouldn't fit in my apartment though: I had a TermiNet 300 dialed up to MIT's Honeywell 6180.
Multics continuum was first written in the mid 70s in order to bid on a RFP for the Executive Office of the President of the United States (we lost the bid, IBM got it). At the time we were told that the capability desired was similar to a discussion system on the Dartmouth timesharing system.
The PLATO system at University of Illinois had a threaded discussion system in the 70s, as did a similar system, forget its name, at Stanford.
Re:Ahh Those were the days
by
FuzzyBad-Mofo
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
..tie the power cord to your ankle to simulate random rebooting that you somehow blame yourself for..
So you're saying that you had a Spectrum or Timex/Sinclair? <rimshot>
My Commodore had color graphics, rarely crashed, and had no mouse. It needed no mouse. CBM BBSs' were neat, because they could do color PETSCII graphics and even animated screens made from the graphics characters. It was similar (and possibly superior) to ANSI graphics, but this was at a time when the IBM PC had a green screen and a beeping speaker.
Slashdot Mirror
Out of curiosity, does anyone know what ultimately happened to the original CBBS referenced in this article?
I loved owning a BBS.
Until I realized that using OS/2 on a 486 with 8 MB of RAM, and playing Doom under Windows under OS/2, all the while running WWIV in the background, was not such a good idea.
Globe199
What are these guys doing these days? Maybe they can come up with something to get the BBS scene going again. I miss it.
You may be joking, but I can really remember walking miles through blizzards to trade Apple ][ software in the early eighties. We did have floppy disks by then, though, and being as we didn't live on a Klein bottle it was only uphill one way.
"The answer was two weeks later, when the Computerized Bulletin Board System first spun its disk, picked up the line and took a message."
"Christensen wrote the BIOS and all the drivers (as well as the small matter of the bulletin board code itself), while Suess took care of five million solder joints and the odd unforeseen problem."
Okay time for quick math.
60 secs a min * 60 mins a hour * 24 hours a day * 14 days (a fortnight) = 1209600 seconds.
5 million solders / 1209600 seconds = ~4.13 solders per second.
Aint no way in hell he did that by hand.
-- -=innocent ramblings from the mind of an insomniatic programmer=-
What I really miss about BBS's were the game doors, Especially Tradewars and GTWar. I know people run Tradewares via telnet not, but it's just not the same thing. I got to know the other players and it was more fun because it was personal.
I still hold a grudge against Telus because they bought the company that bought the ISP that bought my BBS to shut it down and harvest their customers. I even cancelled my ClearNet cell phone when Telus bought them.
Jason
ProfQuotes
There you have it. If these idiot electronic companies could get together with a plan to install this stuff then i think life would be easier for everybody. I don't think it could be done without government prodding though.
Those were the days...
Mail? Put "slashdot" in the subject to pass the spam filters.
I caught the tail end of the BBS era in the mid 90's just as AOL was beginning to ship out their free trial floppies, which everyone else used to get online. Where I lived, AOL didn't have access numbers, so I explored the local BBS'es and learned about modem commands and such instead. (Much better use of time :) Those days were fun.
This is a dupe. From what? Three or four days ago. Yesterday we saw a multiple dupe about some interview Bill Gates gave 8 years ago.
I realize I'm not paying anyone for the right to post this, but someone is paying the editors, no? Christ, start _trying_ to look like pros, at least. Take a fucking journalisim class and discover the concept of journalistic responsibility. I, for one, am tired of seeing dupes that anyone who actually reads the damn site could recognize.
IMHO, slashdot needs to produce a mission statement that clearly states what slashdot is. Are you news? A gossip site? A bunch of kids playing in Mom's basement?
I realize that 'go start you're own site if you don't like it' is a valid response to this post, but I simply don't understand the lack of professionalism I see here. We are talking about 20 posts a day kids, get with it.
"A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" - Alan Perlis
The impetus to electronically intercommunicate was strong. Usenet was born in 1979, one year after the creation of the CBBS. I was an undergraduate at Duke at that time, and recall being shown a prototype of the project by Tom Truscott. The early messages included arcane comments about operating system programming for "Unix wizards". I told Tom it was excellent, but with my limited horizons I internally felt that the early games "adventure" and "Zork" were more exciting. In retrospect, Tom Truscott, Jim Ellis and the other creators captured the zeitgeist and deserve lavish praise. A full Usenet feed topped 500 gigabytes in 2002, a mind-boggling size circa 1979, and the leviathan keeps growing.
Tom and Jim were great people. They were enthusiastic, friendly, and helpful even to a "lowly" undergraduate. They were always trying to improve Usenet and spoke extensively about how the data structures of the news program had to be redone. Even in 1979 more sophisticated structures were needed to scale up and handle the growing number of news articles. The Duke graduate school did not have a budget item for long distance telephone calls to swap Usenet news items. Luckily, Bell Labs charitably became a hub of the early network and subsidized the long distance calls.
Jim Ellis enjoyed reading SF and his programming skill helped make one positive SF scenario, inexpensive fast electronic communication, come true. I never had a chance to thank him for all his help and for suggesting I read "Shockwave Rider" and "Forever War". Thanks - via the celestial internet.
BBS-like functions were provided by
various mainframe timesharing systems well before
1978.
Multics had an online threaded discussion system
called "continuum" (later renamed "forum") which
I used while housebound during the Massachusetts
blizzard of 78. The Multics machine wouldn't
fit in my apartment though: I had a TermiNet 300
dialed up to MIT's Honeywell 6180.
Multics continuum was first written in the mid 70s
in order to bid on a RFP for the Executive Office
of the President of the United States
(we lost the bid, IBM got it).
At the time we were told that the capability
desired was similar to a discussion system on
the Dartmouth timesharing system.
The PLATO system at University of Illinois
had a threaded discussion system in the 70s,
as did a similar system, forget its name, at
Stanford.
So you're saying that you had a Spectrum or Timex/Sinclair? <rimshot>
My Commodore had color graphics, rarely crashed, and had no mouse. It needed no mouse. CBM BBSs' were neat, because they could do color PETSCII graphics and even animated screens made from the graphics characters. It was similar (and possibly superior) to ANSI graphics, but this was at a time when the IBM PC had a green screen and a beeping speaker.