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Where Are The Founders Of The Dial-Up Revolution?
RIMBoy writes "The Atlanta Journal-Constitution recently tracked down the founders behind the dial-up modem revolution. The founders of Hayes Micromodem set the standard with their AT Command set. While Dennis Hayes finds himself inducted into the Computer Industry Hall of Fame, at the same time he is broke (with a stop as a bar owner) and trying to find the next big thing. Dale Heatherington cashed out early and has dedicated himself to several projects, including ham radio."
They're waiting patiently for the web to load.
They are working at AOL.
Blogzine
Fortress of Insanity
Where are the founders of the broadband revolution?
Working in bars, claiming benefits etc. etc.
"It's not your information. It's information about you" - John Ford, Vice President, Equifax
what would our world be like this technology wouldn't of been explored and helped along the way. i highly doubt the internet would be where it is today let alone any other form of technology.
Where are the founders of the dial-up revolution? They're still trying to connect with their 2400 baud modems. Be patient, they'll be here and contributing to the conversation by the end of the day, once the carrier screech indicates handshake.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
the revolutionaries never make any money. they care too much about their ideas to be hardassed enough to profit. its always the people who come around later that just see a business opportunity.
turn up the jukebox and tell me a lie
for everyone who is broke after doing net related buisness, I wouldn't be broke.
at least at first, but then we remember stories like this one and realize maybe it ain't as bad as it could be.
slashdot: where everyone yells sarcastic metaphors to themselves to understand the issue
I'd love $20M over 10 years. I'd quit, too, and go do something more personally rewarding.
But some people are the Hayes and can't imagine what they'd do if they weren't doing what they're doing.
Not me, $20M and out sounds good to me.
Certainly, hooking up on a modem was one of the things that made my computer cool compared to other people that didn't have one. Those were the days when you would dial up some BB and hear EEEEE aaaaaa iiiii shhhhhh oooo bong bong bing (you get the point....)
I remember cruising along with my 1200 baud modem why others were stuck with 300 baud! Too bad that these guys are now out in the cold (figuratively speaking, though maybe for some, literally) because it was modems that people used to first connect to the internet, not DSL or cable. Modems unfortunately will become nothing more than a tale that we can tell our grandkids about many years from now.
"Back in my day, we didn't have these fancy wireless petabit connections. We had to use 300 baud modems over the telephone (uphill, both ways by the way!) and we liked it!"
No trees were harmed in the composition of this; however, numerous electrons were inconvenienced.
Why 56k seems to be the limit on dialup speeds. I remember a good deal of speed ramping in the late 80s early 90s having used everything from a 300 baud KayPro modem to 1200 baud, 2400, 9600, 14.4, 28.8 and 56k but then nothing much since then. Diamond MM had a "shotgun" modem with two 56k connections, but that wasn't practical.
So, if anyone knows, why 56k and not more, and is there any research into anything beyond 56K for dialup?
-dameron
I remember sitting eagerly in front of my 386, waiting for a single GIF from the adult door of the BBS to download at 1200bps. Then it always turned out to be something crappy that I wasted 5 minutes to download. Porn in those days was so difficult!
That damn callback verification feature always woke up my mom in the middle of the night when I was cruising the BBS's for porn... Thank god for these "always on" connections!
--
Rate Naked People at FuckMeter! Not work safe (unless your boss likes pr0n)
Just look at:
1. Hayes: Dennis Hayes stays with company, guy who did the technical work, Dale Heatherington, leaves
2. Microsoft: Bill Gates stays with company, guy who did the techincal work, Paul Allen, leaves
3. Apple: Steve Jobs stays with the company, guy who did the techincal work, Steve Wozniak, leaves
So seems like techies have all the fun: start a company, keep a low profile, get rich, and then quit. That way the techie gets to spend the rest of their lives with enough money to just hack!
Sweet.
The story was meant to be a sad reflection on Hayes-the-man, ended up making me feel good about being a geek.
John.
It's been covered on slashdot many times so I'm sure people will remember, but there is a BBS Documentary in the works.
The history of such revolutions should be documented for future generations to learn from.
..Jeff Keegan
seven syllables explain TiVo: kee gan dot org slash ti vo
I remember reading that the 56K limit was legal, not technical (and that this legal limit is actually something like 53K:
"In the U.S., the FCC places a power ceiling on phone lines of -12dbm average per 3 second interval. X2 modems work within this by restricting throughput to 53kbps in the U.S. X2 modems can theoretically work at 56k, although they are constrained to operate 5% slower than this in the U.S. (Some users have reported occasional connections past 53kbps.)"
(from this page
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Do you mean the great girl bands of the past? The Supremes, the Ronettes, or even the GoGos?
Check "VH-1 Where Are They Now?" to find out the fate of those great Broad Bands of the past.
I know about "Heart". They look like Roseanne Barr now.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Relive the good ol' days at textfiles.com
If the dot.com bust taught us anything, it's that taking a company public while trusting professional managers is the quickest way to get yourself a big fat tax loss.
"My God, this must be a truly remarkable corn chip, to be so widely and confidently touted."
Everybody who knows Hayes remembers Ward Christensen's Xmodem file transfer protocol.
This was Ward in 1980. I wonder where he is now?The inventers of the Buggy whip are also looking for the next 'big thing'
Granted... this statement is not to belittle those that created the AT command set and Modulation/demoduation protocols, but rather to illustrate that technology marches on....
I know people like to gloss over this stuff but it needs to be restated.
Gates and Jobs were both programmers in their own right. Just because they didn't STICK with the hardcore tech side doesn't mean they were never there to begin with.
Gates coded early versions of Basic software/DOS and Jobs coded Atari games and helped manufacture the first Apple's.
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
I'm proud to initiate the Xmodem vs Kermit flamewar.
Let's get ready to RUMBLE!
Extra points for anyone who can segue smoothly into an Anti-Bush/Anti-US rant.
I bought two Smartmodem 300s when they first came out. I remember when I called the distributor they had never heard of them. Before we were using Universal Data Systems line-powered modems. These didn't have dialers so being able to dial from a terminal or application was like magic. Hayes also made a Smartclock which was just a clock with a RS232 interface but it was simpler and cheaper than anything else on the market.
This is somewhat off-topic, but I think the honor of that particular title should be "The World" http://www.TheWorld.com operated by Software Tool & Die. Since 1989, the first public dialup Internet Service Provider (ISP) on the planet. And we're still proud to be the best. These other guys may have set up the technology, but "the revolution" is another matter. Its like crediting K&R for starting Open Source. Not quite.
There are still a few BBS's local in my area so I use my analog modem sometimes just to give it a workout. Lots of telnet BBS's these days at places like telnet://toga.cx.
Your design to a real part online: Big Blue Saw
And you might notice: the chief engineer left early with hundreds of millions of dollars, while the CEO got stuck with the headaches and the big empty bankrupt company.
That's my kind of happy ending!
David Schaeffer is still CEO of Cogent Communications. Broadband for the corporate client.
Back in 1995/1996 when 56K modems were becoming the rage I also folded shop and sold my mid-sized ISP that was serving 2 cities. Hayes modem cards in a 19 inch rack chassi were the standard then, 33.6 was the MAX you could get on a good day and ISP's like me that spent the long dollar for the real modems instead of a pile of crap sportsters like one company I remember you could get that speed. (I started as an ISP when 14.400 was the fastest you could get.)
56K killed it for most of us... T1's required for incoming lines as well as horribly priced interfaces for the 56K dial up side made it impossible for the medium/small guy to survive. the Small towns I was going into and started out with 3-4 modems now had a minimum of 24 incoming lines because of the T1 requirement. each dial in node now doubled all it's costs for operation and quadrupled it's costs for equipment.
Dial-up died when 56K came around.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Who's down for developing a ppp-centered, kermit-over-IP protocol for places communicating by telephone only? I wrote a whitepaper on this and sent it to the Redhat/K12 newsletter.
Does anyone have easy to decipher conversion specs for baud xfer and UART? I've speculated most of the work is in hardware translation at the local level (send/receive from users end). I'd say bring in existing codes but projects like CKermit are too encumbered by Columbia elites or whatever school it is with their own agenda. Engineers and phreakers alike drop me a line. I'm in NW U.S.
I was in that bar once.
To get his attention, you'd to yell: +++
That 56K killed the dialup star?
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Steve Jobs never in his life did any tech woprk Woz was the one..
Don't Tread on OpenSource
it really did
*sniff*
After reading some of the pompous replies in the recent Linux Certification topic, it's worth pointing out that Heatherington was not a 4-year CS major:
The company was recruiting people with master's degrees and Ph.D.s. Heatherington had a two-year degree from a technical college. "I think he felt funny having that kind of horsepower looking to him for guidance," Hayes says.
Keep that in mind when you sit there complaining about all us 'pseudo-engineers' that didn't have the cash to get a degree, but had the brains to make a difference in computing.
If that's the kind of things that happened at computer companies in the 1980's, I can totally understand why all the engineers were trying so hard to build smaller computers.
This is America, damnit. Speak Spanish!
He's not a millionaire anymore with ex-wives taking most of his income. Kind of sad. No wonder people aren't getting married anymore.
The university I was at had a perpetual shortage of terminals on campus for their VM/SP system. After the usual tricks of removing the fuse from a terminal or putting the terminal into some mode where it appeared to be broken stopped working, I got got my own microcomputer at home and started dialing in. It soon turned out that cheap-ass U had only 5 dialup lines and contention was FIERCE. If the line dropped on my acoustic modem I sometimes had to dial for an hour to get another line. Enter Hayes and their wonderful autodial modem; I made a MS Basic program to continually dial and to immediately redial if the connection was lost. This worked beautifully and I practically had a home VM terminal for 2 years. Thanks again Hayes! (Posted anon 'cause I made a LOT of enemies doing this).
Uma, oprah? Uma, oprah? Umo, oprah?
Hey,
.
.
I have worked for GPN (formarly NDC) since 1998 and moved in to Denis's old office last year. Yes while he was teamed up on all this he sat in this office and looked out this window! Funny thing is I now run the network over here and connectivty is still a core value. .
Now if only I could score some cash on the side. .
Ian Griswold
Director WAN/LAN Engineering
GlobalPayments Inc.
Sure dial 1200 or 2400 is up is slow, but back then we made good use of the stuff, mainly by doing direct host dial up rather than IP (not that there were a lot of ISPs back then). First up, no IP wrapper overheads. Second, you used text terminals - no graphics. Real work was more than just a theoretical possibility.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
I didn't have a computer (yet), but it was a joy to type the appropriate AT commands from my MIME I video terminal (complete with lower case character set!) instead of having to dial the phone.
Before I had a real computer (a homebrew SWTPC 6809-based clone running Flex), and WAY before I had an IBM PC clone, I built a 6809-based SBC with 4K EPROM, 2K RAM (IIRC, it may have been more, but not much), and three serial ports. I wrote a monitor program for it so I could enter code, in hex, by hand (later, I would write a cross-assembler on Concordia University's CYBER 835 mainframe in Pascal, that spewed out S1S9 records that the monitor could read).
One of the first programs (hand assembled at the time), was a "RAM-dialer": it would control the Hayes Smartmodem to repeatedly dial one of a set of numbers until it got a data connection -- see in those days most BBSes had one phone line. Bliss!
Ah, the nostalgia of the early to mid 1980s.
You could've hired me.
Actually in europe they have E1 (~2 mbit as apposed to ~1.5mbit total), not a T1(aka DS1) with 30 channels and they can and do run something they call "E1 PRI" over those for 29 B channels and a D channel.
What you described is US PRI T1 which is 23 B channels with a D channel in the US at 64K each(this is what isdn service is based on, you can also run standard telco calls over them). US also has the standard T1 which is 24 channels as you described.
In Japan they call theirs a J1 (or PRI J1) and its based on the US standards, only in the yellow alarm generation/detection and the crc-6 calculation methods.
More importantly, as I've mentioned Ward, with Randy Suess, also INVENTED THE BBS when this very same Dennis Hayes sent them one of his original 300 baud autodial/auto-answer modems.
Ward will tell you fun details like why CBBS looks for the modem's RING result and then sends the ATO to make the modem answer. CBBS never puts the modem into auto-answer mode.
Why? So that if the CBBS program wasn't running happily, the caller wouldn't waste money on an answered phone call to a BBS that wasn't working.
Ward takes more credit for CBBS than the MODEM* protocol because MODEM was written quickly to fix a problem (sending program files to Randy over the modem-modem link) but CBBS was planned. Ward says MODEM was a response "like a sneeze" He doesn't like taking credit for a sneeze.
* - The real name of the protocol is MODEM. Ward's original MODEM comm program had an option to auto-receive files,. XMODEM was MODEM with the option. When you're the first you don't put in version qualifiers.
Ever dream you could fly? Get up from the Flight Sim. I Fly
So, they are the men who invented the weird connections sound!!!
Why that sound need to be so strange?...
Actually I messed up a bit, E1 PRI is 30 B channels and 1 D channel, not 29 B channels.
+1, FP!
The pioneers get the arrows, the settlers get the corn.
All I remember about Hayes is that the one and only item I purchased from them came with a manufacturers rebate that I never received. The only time ever that I've not gotten a rebate back.
Of course that was back in the early 56k days when Hayes was about to go under. And it's no wonder if they treated their customers like that!
The ratio of people to cake is too big
I got into the computer buisiness through hacking RS ModI for ham radio and eventually got into IT fulltime doing dialup for phone companies and credit card systems because I saw the similarity in radiocommunications and dial up. Please to hear the current status of these fine gents.
A Nony Moose CW key-banger RTTY key-puncher
http://www.woz.org/letters/general/91.html
Everyone's reminiscing about 80's BBSes, so I'll throw in a word about my resurrected dial-up Commodore 64 BBS. (except over Telnet).
:-)
You can call it with a real 64, and there are programs now that support "ATDT 209.151.141.59" and so on. Call it Hayes 2.0 maybe?
--
Call Negative Format BBS - Hosted on a real C64!
Telnet to c64bbs.no-ip.com or 209.151.141.59 Port 23
http://home.ica.net/~leifb/bbs/
I think there's a LOT to be learned from analyzing this combination of personalities.
While it's true that the techies seem to "have all the fun" in these scenarios - it's also equally true that the techies needed the business-oriented/business-building personalities of their partners, in order to get themselves into a situation where their contributions became valuable enough to allow them to leave with a big "wad of cash".
Really, after reading the Hayes/Heatherton article, it appeared to me that Hayes' biggest reason for eventual disaster was a lack of any inventive/R&D motivated people working for him after Heatherton bailed out. Certainly, Hayes achieved all the brand name recognition and marketplace respect a tech. company could ever want. Properly run, his company could have been building, say, the #1 most popular DSL and/or cable modems used today.
I think Apple Computer thrives for exactly this reason. Steve Jobs is acutely aware that his company has to innovate -- never imitate. He may not be the mastermind behind any of the ideas, but he hires the types of people who can create cool looking and working devices/software.
The trick is, if you're going to be a "Hayes", keep hiring new "Heathertons" as your earlier ones get burnt out or want to move on.
To get his attention, you'd to yell: +++
I tried that and they cut me off!
(AT H0 gets you cut off too)
We're suppose to feel sorry for a guy who married a couple of bimbo's who promptly took his money in the divorce settlement??
Instead of hangin' with his socialite trophy wife, maybe he should have started an IRA account.
Hey owm me money too. bastards
Video killed the radio star...
Broadband killed the dialup generation...
But then reality TV killed MTV...
Ya gotta figure something will come along and wipe out broadband. My bet is on litigation...
What does "defining the Hayes command set" have to do with the dial-up revolution? The invention and development of the modem seems like the key part, not any particular command set. See here for a brief history of the modem. Of course, Hayes's company drove down prices, but they would have come down anyway.
The Dial-Up Revolution?
The AJC reporter writes about Hayes and Heatherington, "making it easier for millions of people around the world to connect to the Internet." Perhaps the reporter didn't know there was anything before the 'net.
With all deference and due respect to their accomplishment, if we frame the discussion as a "Revolution"... "around the world", then Hayes and Heatherington did build the revolutionary weapon, but the trigger was squeezed by a fellow named Tom Jennings and a few of his friends. That was the shot heard 'round the world.
Hey! How many here can tell us their nodelisting? Hands?
Cheers!
Reports of my deaf have been greatly exaggerated.
a few years ago he settled with his second wife for 6 million ?? so how is that broke ?
I have a couple of S-100 300 baud Modem Boards of yours that needs service.... It isn't even clear to me if it *ever* worked being serial numbers below 50.
Where shall I send them?
-- Multics
It's not like it's that much different today, actually.
Today you download whole movies in Kazaa instead of single images in BBS, but the concept is the same. You waste some time, just to find out that it's something crappy.
Today the modem sounds are no longer heard and don't wake anyone, but Skyping with people for hours can.
Just think, a few years from now, you'll say "Voice\Video-on-demand in those days was so difficult!"
Please click on my .sig for further evidence of Linux's gayness...
Proof of the gay-linux conspiracy!
Sheesh. Before we bought Hayes modems, the company I worked for had some big honking UDS units with attached telephones. We also had a couple of acoustic couplers; in the Atlanta area, wet lines sometimes meant you only connected at *110 baud*. Slower than snail snot in July at the South Pole.
And there was no way I could buy a real modem one for home - way too many bucks.
Then came the Hayes. I used a 2400 baud Hayes for years, well into the 28K revolution (IOW, past the 19.2K glory days of Trailblazers), until lightning took it out. But guess what? The U.S. Robotics 28.8K I bought was based on the command set Hayes popularized.
I was mildly disappointed my Ascend ISDN router didn't understand AT commands. 8^/ I'm thinking of upgrading to rither cable or DSL, whcih means something much faster and cheaper must be about to break out!
You did see where Dennis Hayes burned through 2 wives? Alimony and child support are expensive, that's where his money went.
/judgemental Christian
The lesson here is don't sleep around on your wife, he did this twice. You can't afford it.
http://www.wa4dsy.net shows the data modem he constructed, and also has pages of info on his robots.
Here. Mmmm, vacuum-fluorescent. I still have one in my basement.
I have read that the code in the Tandy Model 100 (built in word pro, etc.) was Bill's.
When I was young and poor and stupid, I used to buy the cheapest equipment I could find, and then I would frequently berate myself when the quality turned out to be lousy and I needed to replace it shortly after buying it.
When I wanted to replace my old 14.4 modem, I decided I wasn't going to fall for that trap again. I wasn't going to buy a cheap clone. I was going to buy a brand name. I was going to pay extra for the security of knowing that it wasn't a compatable, it was the original. I bought a 56k internal Hayes modem. It cost a lot more, but it had a good guarentee and the brand name.
The modem was built before the 56K standard was offical, and they promised an upgrade to make it compatable when the eventual standard came out. The company folded before that happened.
Now I have a very expensive 56K modem that can only connect at 33.6 to any standard servers.
I hate it when I make a joke and I get modded "+5 insightful". Mod the stupid comments "funny", not "insightful", pleas
ATDT1312528-5020T DT1312528-5020T 1312528-5020
BUSY
ATDT1312528-5020
BUSY
A
BUSY
ATDT1312528-5020
BUSY
ATD
CONNECT 2400
Login:
I doubt it will be disappearing anytime in the near future. One a lot of people are still on dialup for various reasons (yours truely). Two with all the issues that broadband has (we all know the ones). So save those modems. They may come in handy in a post-apocalyptic world.
Actually, I've heard that when Jobs was at NeXT, he would actually go around and inspect the code being written, and PULL THE PLUG ON THE MACHINE if he didn't like what he saw! What a nutjob!
Getting ZModem was the coolest.
Being able to resume downloads rather than starting from scratch made life _soo_ much easier.
But you tell kids about XModem, and they'll nawght believe ye!
Xix.
"Everything is adjustable, provided you have the right tools"
You kids and your fancy auto-dial modem whatzitz.... Back in my day, the modems didn't have a command set. They didn't even do the dialing. You had to pick up the phone yourself, listen for a dial tone, dial the number yourself (yes, on a REAL ROTARY DIAL), listen for the carrier, then FLIP THE SWITCH!!! (D00d, I'll be up all night to flip the switch if you decide to call)
It didn't matter how good the porn was when you got it, you were just grateful there were no CRC errors.
To comment on those commenting that "it figures", or that the revolutionaries never make it....see BASF. Their slogan says it all: "We don't make the things in your life, we make them better". Nothing like settling for second best, eh?
Moral of the story: don't get married if you're rich and successful.
Slashdot requires you to wait longer between hitting 'reply' and submitting a comment.
The hayes command set is like the Windows API, an accidental and hardly optimal interface that succeeded out of sheer chance, and which used creative and new (at the time) interpretations of intellectual proprty law to try to skewer their opponents.
The Hayes patent was, eventually, rendered obsolete. It can't happen too soon for Microsoft either.
..after all the long chats with my parents and "DO NOT PICK UP!" post-its failed. Nothing like 4 or 5 wraps on an old-school block of a phone to keep that handset down =D
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley
Heatherington is definitely an uber-geek extraordinare, but the whole second-grade-teacher thing, purely for the goodness of it, still puts Steve Wozniak at the top of the all-time greatest h4x0r list ever.
Seriously...how many of you would teach little kids for the sheer joy of it if you were affluent enough to really not work, and skilled enough to find a much more lucrative job if you did need one?
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley
If everyone was like Heatherington and split with the cash as soon as they forced it out of someone's greasy mitts, the economy would suck ass. Heck, the stock market would probably cease to exist.
You need people who keep creating companies and lusting after wealth. It doesn't always work out great for them, but the people who had jobs under them, and the wealth that was created, keeps a capitalist economy going.
People who spend, spend, spend, do a lot better for the economy than the people who hoard.
mogorific carpentry experiments
Well, it seems to me that was his right - crazy or not. The developers were getting paid for their time, whether or not he wiped out their work....
It's no big secret the "old days" of computing were full of hostile work environments though. I remember reading about the old Atari corp. actually keeping their programmers locked up inside their buildings when they were nearing release of major game titles on cartridge. They were afraid of information leaking out and a competitor using it against them, so programmers became prisoners.
in the pr0n industry...
Yeah, but the original poster implied that Jobs had no involvement with technical operations. That was the real point of my post. My opinion of his mental state was just "for free." :-)
Sounds remarkably like a tiny version of Fidonet. Fidonot had many zones, regions, nodes, and points. It standardized the serial interface via FOSSIL (Fido-Opus-Seadog-Serias-Interface-Layer), which many early BBS software used (such as the Maximus package I used), and the mail programs.
;)
Through it, you could have message echoes, file echoes, you could offer files for remote login (I had BBSes from Texas dailing in to my Saskatoon BBS and requesting libraries I'd written, it was cool), and request files from remote BBSes. You could also send them via file echoes, so they'd be scheduled and sent between the nodes when the optimal time to call was (I used BinkleyTerm as my front end, it handled all that).
Towards the end, the technology was really advanced. Maximus version 3 ran on NT, OS/2, and DOS. It had a complete VM and language you compiled to byte code, as well as the MECCA display language. Using it, you'd make MECCA files that were like templates. It could insert anything, and would be tranlated on the fly to ASCII, ANSI, AVATAR, or (thanks to v3) RIP (remote image protocol) -- which was a very fast remote EGA-like display. Mecca itself was internally similar to Avatar.
The VM language (similar to Pascal and Basic) allowed you to automate it further. Naturally, none of the local teenaged sysops who barely understood computers used Maximus; they were all busy using Renegade with some ansi pack to be leet. I "tricked out" my BBS by having it send long and pretty ansis at the users as much as possible, since this noticably increased my callbacks. People always seemed surprised at what I could do with Maximus
Anyways, that's my trip down memory lane for the day.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
I was 1:140/137 (I think 137 .. it's been 4 or 5 years now).
:)
I'm surprised I can still find webpages for Fidonet and Binkley term, but they're there.
I makes me wish Maximus run under Linux. Then I could have it setup so that you could telnet in and register an account, and it'd be like a really cool version of the webforums -- more interactive, pretty, and less garbage. I've never really liked web forums, except for a few (Slashdot, Kuro5hin) which have decent layouts and threading of comments
Oh, what's this? Looks like someone did release it... it's Maximus, and Squish message format, and more.
Maybe we should organize a real, online BBS setup? Not the old Fidonet, but something new?
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
How true. See baud vs bps for a good explanation.
So much to do, so little bandwidth.
--
Try Mozilla
They act like somebodies Grandpa, "when I was a boy...".
I'm really sick and tired of tech people being nostalgic. Shut up already. It's a boring subject and it's all been talked to death.
I don't care if you started on a 386 or had a Tandy computer. I really don't. How about talking about the subject which isn't you.
Correction - the 2nd sentence should have read: "We just need people who work honestly."
I clicked the link. Now why would I want quality free phone calls?
Who is John Cabal?
" It standardized the serial interface via FOSSIL (Fido-Opus-Seadog-Serial-Interface-Layer), which many early BBS software used (such as the Maximus package I used), "
As in, Binkley Term, Opus, Maximus, Seadog, Fido BBS, and many other pieces of software used it. FOSSIL was an integral part of Fidonet, although Fidonet was created after the start of FOSSIL (IIRC).
It was sad watching the number of daily callers get smaller and smaller. By the time it was one or two a day, I stopped. No point, really.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
Maximus for UNIX.
Hella cool, I say. I found this last night!
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.