Why, in my day, when it was a blizzard we didn't have no fancy BBS. We had to walk 15 miles (uphill bothways, of course) to the nearest house to trade our warez. All we could afford was one piece of paper though, and we had to write the zeros and ones on it. Bah, kids. Zzzzzzz....
Few know this, but CBBS, running on its original hardware, is the comments server for slashdot.org.
--Pat
BBSs were great:
by
Globe199
·
· 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.
Two stories from three decades ago...I guess Linux can only have so many kernel updates to report about...
-- I'll form my OWN solar system! With blackjack! And hookers!
Ahh Those were the days
by
Saoi
·
· Score: 5, Funny
single character commands, harsh bootings, sounds like my kinda system, pity I wasn't born yet:(
Re:Ahh Those were the days
by
antiprime
·
· Score: 5, Funny
Get drunk to simulate the slow response time, then try to navigate through your favorite modern windowing shell without using a mouse, tie the power cord to your ankle to simulate random rebooting that you somehow blame yourself for: exactly the same effect. For advanced nostalgia, futz with your monitor and display settings so everything's a shade of green and black.
5 million solders? I dont think so.
by
DaPhoenix
·
· 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=-
Re:5 million solders? I dont think so.
by
Mike1024
·
· Score: 4, Funny
Hey,
Suess took care of five million solder joints and the odd unforeseen problem... 4.13 solders per second.
Aint no way in hell he did that by hand.
He did not do it all by hand, he did not do it with Ayn Rand, he did not do it for a band, he did not do it to command.
He could have used a solder bath, that could have worked with your math, or may have used another path, for the figures which cause your wrath.
Michael
-- "Goodness me, how unlike the FBI to abuse the trust of the American public." -- The Onion
Re:my heroes
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· 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.
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.
Flashbacks????
by
sickboy_macosX
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I thought This was discussed last week, leave it to slashdot to start beating a dead horse..repeadtedly, until people start complaining.
Not trying to be a troll, just saying hey, we have already discussed it.
Memo To Malda: Make sure your not posting the same story a week later...
-- ---/* In Soviet Russia, the Mac OS X kernel panics you! */
Some BBS's begat great Internet dynasties
by
87C751
·
· 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.
One slow day in the news world...
by
pVoid
·
· Score: 3, Funny
Man, this article reminds me of the simpson's episode where bart picks up a magazine of "Find Waldo", and all you see in the picture is this big empty room with waldo in the middle, to which bart says "man he's just not trying anymore"...
The article is a dupe, and it's not even a karma whore, it's a single line, with a single link.
I'm not really complaining though, so don't think I'm a troll or something. It's just good to have a sense of humour about ourselves every once in a while.
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
Never would have known...
by
cabra771
·
· Score: 5, Funny
that those damn people at Blizzard not only killed all my social skills by releasing Diablo and Diablo II, but now I learn that they got me hooked even earlier! Damn all those BBS's I used to visit!!!
--
-my other sig is your mom
Kids and Doors (True Story!)
by
romper
·
· Score: 5, Funny
In the late 80's my parents took away the monitor to "ground" me from playing Tradewars 2002 on the local BBS.
Of course I could blindly launch telemate from DOS and knew how to turn on the printer log and start the dial-up.
The printer didn't even have ink! We had to read the carbon copy.
Oh man, I remember how great those days were. Sitting for hours on end chatting away, playing door games, downloading shareware, adn:)(&(& )_& (*
*&_(P&*
(*()*+ *A+S)(*D+)( *
I(_A)SD*_)Id +++ NO CARRIER
-- Everyone is entitled to their own opinion. It's just that yours is stupid.
Re:It was GREAT!
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 3, Funny
True story.. I once got banned from my favorite BBS for swearing in the chat room. the word ass appeared TWICE in a fit of line noise..
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.
Slashdot Mirror
Why, in my day, when it was a blizzard we didn't have no fancy BBS. We had to walk 15 miles (uphill bothways, of course) to the nearest house to trade our warez. All we could afford was one piece of paper though, and we had to write the zeros and ones on it. Bah, kids. Zzzzzzz....
,
faeryman
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
I wonder if the internet would even exist if those guys had had girlfriends during that week snowed in.
First BBS's, and then Warcraft!!! What next?? Some sort of fancy persistant universe?? CRAZY!!
Two stories from three decades ago...I guess Linux can only have so many kernel updates to report about...
I'll form my OWN solar system! With blackjack! And hookers!
single character commands, harsh bootings, sounds like my kinda system, pity I wasn't born yet :(
"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=-
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.
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
Not trying to be a troll, just saying hey, we have already discussed it.
Memo To Malda: Make sure your not posting the same story a week later...
---
Those were the days...
Mail? Put "slashdot" in the subject to pass the spam filters.
The article is a dupe, and it's not even a karma whore, it's a single line, with a single link.
I'm not really complaining though, so don't think I'm a troll or something. It's just good to have a sense of humour about ourselves every once in a while.
that those damn people at Blizzard not only killed all my social skills by releasing Diablo and Diablo II, but now I learn that they got me hooked even earlier! Damn all those BBS's I used to visit!!!
-my other sig is your mom
In the late 80's my parents took away the monitor to "ground" me from playing Tradewars 2002 on the local BBS.
Of course I could blindly launch telemate from DOS and knew how to turn on the printer log and start the dial-up.
The printer didn't even have ink! We had to read the carbon copy.
You kids now with your fancy monitors and colors.
Right is wrong when left is right.
Oh man, I remember how great those days were. Sitting for hours on end chatting away, playing door games, downloading shareware, adn :)(&(& )_& (*
*&_(P&*
(*()*+ *A+S)(*D+)( *
I(_A)SD*_)Id
+++
NO CARRIER
Everyone is entitled to their own opinion. It's just that yours is stupid.
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.