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Quantum Link Reverse Engineered
JeffLedger writes "A group of retro-geeks have rebuilt the old Quantum Link system to allow both emulated and real c64's to sign in over the Internet using the original software. Before it was called America Online, Quantum Link provided a pre-Internet online service to Commodore users."
Apple usesr and Windows users couldn't even communicate at first.
Insert witty sig here.
Impossible! Reverse engineering would destroy the quantum coherance. I just got one and$@^V4545FSBfbffgf+++ATH NO CARRIER
No, it isn't... JeffLedger's speech recognition software, caught him, doing his impression, of William Shatner.
Also a good time to try out that C=64 TCP/IP adapter: http://www.dunkels.com/adam/tfe/
I am not a crackpot.
damn it, I have to get this retro computer nerd a girlfriend before I can leap out!
Call me when you reverse engineer Quantum Leap.
Might as well ask, "Why do people go to Renaissance Fairs?" or "Why do people go to see the Rolling Stones in concert?" or even, "Why go look at all those old paintings and stuff in the museum?"
They think its fun... they like the nostalgia of it... they have money and time to waste for a hobby they enjoy... they think that maybe they can learn something from it...
Don't knock going back to something old, because sometimes if you go back to the past, you can gain new insight into the here and now.
Sig cancelled due to lack of interest
If we reverse engineer the Quantum Link, we might get enough power to emit a tachyon beam to disrupt the neutrino field the Cardassians are emitting.
Oh, oops, thought this sounded like some Star Trek technobabble.
Advice for my fellow geeks: before seeking out that threesome you dream of, you might see what a TWOsome is like first.
Back in the day, we complained bitterly about how inadequate Quantum Link was compared to the real Internet. Now, 10 years after the service was discontinued, we are willing to setup emulators to allow us to play with a reconstruction. Lol.
I certainly hope so. I still have my SuperQ disk around here. I know what I'm doing this weekend :)
I also wonder how many members of the old Q'mmunity will try this out. I'd love to get back in touch with some of my old Q-Link friends.
I'll also note that I submitted a story last year on the 10-year anniversary of the Q-Link shutdown. It was sadly rejected. I'll give a basic rehash here...
After several months of system degradation, overflows which allowed AOL and Q-Link members to converse, complete UNDERhauls of the Q-Link system to be per^H^H^Hconverted for use within AOL, and the incesant "Come to AOL" emails, Q-Link was unceremoniously shut down at the normal off time. Nobody from AOL showed up to say "Thank you for a spectacularly fun and eventful decade." Nothing. At the bottom of the screen:
THE SYSTEM HAS SHUT DOWN
This was the normal message you saw at shut down, but probably most fitting on this particular morning.
I first subscribed to QuantumLink in 1986 when I was 8 years old. Anyhoo, I was asked to join the "User Advisory Board." In exchange for 240 free "plus" minutes per month, I spent about 30 minutes in a People Connection room with several employees of QLink, one of whom had the screen name "SteveCase"
:-)
I wonder if they've reverse engineered Puzzler or Club Caribe...
Nothing of content to add. I just want to say that this is very, very righteous.
8-bits are still fun to use!
Wicked Friday night in the 8-bit era:
7-8pm Q-Link
8-9pm Play Airborne Ranger
9-10pm break for new Kids in the Hall episode
10-11:50pm Q-Link
11:50pm-12:00am Call local BBSs, make moves in Space Empire to initiate attack another system. Buddy/ally does same. (as do your slave accounts)
12:01am-12:10am Use fresh Space Empire turns for the new day to complete sneak attack. Double fists of fury!
12:10am-1:00am Play Test Drive
1:00am-2:00am Play California Games
2:01 turn on wardialer and go to bed
Any other Canadians use QuantumLink? As a young person without much of a concept of money and how usage fees can multiply, I was blown away by the first month's bill we received for QuantumLink. 20 hours of use -- after some bizarre internal long distance charges, access fees, and currency conversion -- worked out to about $200. Club Caribe was fun, but the bill (and my parents' reaction at the time) made it a service that I disconnected from quickly.
Like another poster above asked, has anyone been able to connect to the server and see if Club Caribe worked?
Whoever modded this "Offtopic" is a "moran" who needs to "get a brain". Errors in spelling or grammar in the summary or title are always "Ontopic" on Slashdot. So are personal attacks on the mods, who, I'm told by a "totally reliable" source, are "a bunch of homos".
If you can read this sig, you're too close.
Wow, that's what I call a cool hack. C64s used to be the funnest things to play around with. Years ago I built a servo control circuit board for a friend to plug into the back slot of a C64, to control exhibits in a coin-operated art gallery (later known as The Church of Elvis, Portland Oregon). Writing the control software in Commodore Basic and seeing the whole thing work was one of the coolest things I ever did.
You mean it doesnt help you to get laid when you whip it out at bars on Friday night?
Or that the printer was ready and waiting for stuff to print.
NZ Electronics Enthusiasts: Check out my Trade Me Listings
Huh? tcpser compiles fine for Linux... That's how I run it, and I wrote it. Of course, Windows users need cygwin, but I can't solve all the world's problems today. Jim
OK, why DO people go to Renaissance fairs?
I've been involved in the beta testing of the server for the past month so I know what kind of questions everybody has (since I've been asking most of them myself already).
Q: Will/Does the implantation support Super-Q, Rabbit Jacks Casino, Club Caribe, etc?
A: Right now, only the basic (Q-link 4.0) games work such as Hangman, Battleship, Chess, etc.. Since the hard part (the q-link & x.25 pad stuff) has been pretty much conquered, the rest of the lot should come with time. The only real exception to that rule is Club Caribe--it's not impossible that it can be supported, but it certainly is the hardest thing to implement and also last on the developers' list. Rabbit Jack Casino is on the top of that list I think. One of the developers has gotten Puzzler to work (part of super Q) but only independently since the server itself doesn't support Super-Q....but progress is being made.
Q: How many users does the system support? (Since the old service ran on a Stratus 200 with 8 12Mhz
68010's)
A: Well, we'll see after the slashdoting I suppose. I should be able to handle much more on modern hardware. Keep in mind when you automatically join the People Connection you are dumped into the lobby--the Lobby supports (as all rooms in the PC) up to 23 users, and when the limit is reached it creates a new lobby and dumps new users into it.
Q: What works so far? What works and what will cause the client to freeze?
A: Pretty much all of the People connection (that includes email, IM's, panels, and games that don't require super-q or cc), The Commodore Connection (only one download is available right now for testing), Customer Service (message boards are at about 90%). Most of the other areas 'work' but haven't been populated with content yet. Any old timer Q-linkers that may have saved stuff from these areas are encouraged to help us out. Oh yah, the "Let Q-Link pick my partners" when starting a game option will most certainly freeze your client.
Q: Does it work under Linux?
A: Sure does, although it's a bit more involved that doing it through Windows with our specially patched Winvice 1.6, or even just running TCPserve and connecting with a real C64/C128 via a RS232 adapter and null-modem cable. If your using Mac OS X (Like I am) your kind of screwed though.. unless you have the genius to compile the latest Vice with RS232 emulation for Mac OS X. Otherwise, the site has all of the tools you'll need, assuming it doesn't get Slashdoted.
Q: Got a mirror? (In case the main site get's slashdotted)
A: Sort of. http://www.circleofthunder.com/downloads.html
I have the Q-link v4 disk up there along with some extra goodies (games discs 1/2 + CC & Super-Q). I don't have the patched version of WinVICE 1.6 though.
Those are the biggies I can think of off the top of my head. If you have anymore questions (not spelling or grammar related), post em here.
"The Wright brothers were the first to fly with a heavier-than-air machine, but boy did they have a lousy plane"
Not to be picky or anything, but thats an ethernet adapter not an TCP/IP adapter ... TCP and IP being protocols and not physical things :-)
Quantum Link was America Online?
Oh god. I feel so dirty now.
First Star Wars and now this. You people just won't be satisfied until my whole childhood is ripped to shreds, will you?
Technoli
It's like Homo neanderthalensis, recognisable as a precursor to ourselves, but a completely different beast.
Sorry to be nitpicky, but you chose completely the wrong example to use as an analogy.
Homo Neanderthalensis . . . yeah, they used to be seen as a precursor to "humankind", but that was due in a large part to the fact that scientists, unfortunately for the accuracy of results and theories, are human . . . archaeologists and paleontologists inherited from their cultures a huge burden of preconceptions about what "human" is, and combined with some of the initial findings of the Neanderthals being actually terribly diseased and atypical examples, along with the misclassification of any artifacts left behind as instead being left behind by Homo Sapiens . . . well, it's only recently (relatively speaking) that the scientific community has started to wake up to the rather non-linear relationship of "us to them".
Now, naturally, conclusions are far from certain. At some point the Neanderthals diverged; but it's hard to argue that then the human race continued on and left them behind, the actual demise of the Neanderthals is a trickier business. Arguments range from interbreeding (we're all Neanderthals!) to ourbreeding (as in, humans moved into Neanderthal territory as climates changed, and like rabbits we just outpopulated them, pushing them away), to war (stone age style), combinations of all the above, and more. What is at least certain, though, is that the Neanderthals weren't, uhh, of the nature that you describe them as being.
Some random sources for cross-reference:
Descent of Man - Neanderthal
Even a random religous tract from 1998 notes that Neanderthals are "no longer thought to be lineal ancestors of Homo Sapiens".
There's also some in-depth information here and here, and etc.
Not sure why I spent that brief period of time dredging all that up, I'll probably either be ignored or modded (probably rightfully, though unfortunately it's a policy that squashes interesting tangential discussion) off-topic. Oh well!
I remember sigs. Oh, a simpler time!
12:33AM Central, and server is handling the load OK. Thanks /. for the stress test. Pics appear to be back up, but they are not on the QLink server anyway, so they are expendable.
I've been so hard at work on the code, I don't have much docs, but you can ask away.
You can also email me (looks pretty easy to Google and find my email, so I'll let that be the test) if you are having connect issues.
Jim
1) The Commodore community has always wanted the service back. It was more than a service, it was a community. 2) The exercise was worth more than years of classes in software development and error/runtime diagnosis. In my current vocation, I am often relied on to diagnose issues that are surprisingly like trying to decipher a communication between two parties I have little knowledge of. 3) It was a nice brain (pun not intended, for those who know who this is) exercise, trying to carry on a conversation with a piece of software when you only know one half of the verbs and nouns. At work, I do things in an insulated world of HTTP, SOAP, XML, etc., and one has to have a challenge to keep the brain cells working well. 4) It was there. So be it. 5) I wanted to be on /. (well, not really, but that's what everyone may think...)
Jim
Is the innocence. :)
:)
The social makeup of the online community 20 years ago was so much different than it is now. Even those of us who are left are 20 years older and different from whom we were then. It's a time and a 'place' that will never again be repeated, although seeing the UI again has sparked some very distant and pleasant memories.
Thanks for bringing it back, and it was interesting to read in the thread what hardware the service originally ran on, I had always wondered. If there are any more details I'd like to know. (how many dial in lines, how were they physically situated...any PHOTOS of the hardware?)
FOr those of you who are wondering about the AOL connection - Quantumlink was run by Quantum Computer Services in Vienna, Virginia. They later started a service for PC and Mac users called America Online, and that later became their entire business and business name. As mentioned earlier, they shut down Qlink and encouraged migration to AOL, and that was the end of that.
This coincided with the general decline of C=64s and 128s in lieu of newer machines. But yes it would have been nice to have Amiga support for it, because for the next 5 or 6 years I owned probably every single model of Amiga ever made at one time or another.
Before getting a shell account with a UUCP newsfeed in '91 or so, I was visiting local multi-line BBSs. (MajorBBS with lots of lines - 16 to 32 lines) and that's where I met pretty much everyone I knew at the time. Local boards are great, because you get to meet everyone eventually at local gatherings. Oh well, that's all gone too. Back to IRC where anyone you don't know is either a pedophile or a cop.