And I had hair back then!!! That S-100 bused Vector Graphics box is sitting next to my rack of Unreal Tournament servers holding up the UPS's now. My apartment is down from 18 fone lines (fone company would send investigators out every few months to see if I was running a bookie joint) to just 4 lines and a T1.
More than 3/4's of the 8 inch single sided floppies we sent out with the source went to European contries the first few years. Mostly Scandivian countries, but a few to England and Germany. Those were the days of Demon Dialers and call packs. First 300 baud modems, then 1200 to 2400. 2400's were the mainstay. After 9600 modems came out, the Internet started in ernest and BBS's started to fade. Remember the Telebit Trailblazer and 19200 baud downloads for news feeds? That was heaven.
Actually, Chinet was the first public access unix system. It was up in 1982 on a compaq lunch box portable with a pair of 300 baud modems. It was called wlcrjs then (no domain names, just ! paths) after randy sues and ward christensen, the inventors of the first BBS, CBBS, first up in Feb 1978. It then went to a pair of Altos 586's worknetted together, a 3b2/300/310/400, a few 386 machines and its current dual p2. Been up continuously since 82. It was the major news and email feed for the chicagoland area. Had a full news feed from ihnp4, the bell labs machine at Indian Hill. Used a trailblazer modem for the news feed. A single 70 meg drive held a full week's worth! Many of the owners of former and current ISP's in Chicago started off as kids on chinet, learning unix and hacking away. For a while, chinet even had its own resident FBI agent. Before the fall of the Berlin Wall, Polish agents were using chinet as a mail drop for communicatin to their government. Up until the wide spread use of the Internet, chinet would have up to 300 users at any one time, all hammer-dialing on the 12 dialup modems. A majority being Eastern European, Indian, Pakistani people with no other way of getting email and news. M-net was a much more heavily used system because of the local Univirsity, but chinet was the first.
Well, as the co-inventor of the original BBS, CBBS, I can say that the BBS concept is still alive and well, just moved from dialup to Internet based ones. I shut down the original about 8 years ago when the Internet became standard. The spirit is still alive everywhere, including at the home of the original. It was nice getting rid of the 12 fone lines and modems and instead having a conferencing system available via SDSL. My partner, Ward Christensen, has basicaly got out of the on-line community thing, but CBBS still lives on the conferencing system I still run and its small core of regulars.
Slashdot Mirror
Probably a nice system, but no where NEAR the oldest. http://chinet.com was started in 1982 with m-net following soon afterward.
And I had hair back then!!! That S-100 bused Vector Graphics box is sitting next to my rack of Unreal Tournament servers holding up the UPS's now. My apartment is down from 18 fone lines (fone company would send investigators out every few months to see if I was running a bookie joint) to just 4 lines and a T1.
More than 3/4's of the 8 inch single sided floppies we sent out with the source went to European contries the first few years. Mostly Scandivian countries, but a few to England and Germany. Those were the days of Demon Dialers and call packs. First 300 baud modems, then 1200 to 2400. 2400's were the mainstay. After 9600 modems came out, the Internet started in ernest and BBS's started to fade. Remember the Telebit Trailblazer and 19200 baud downloads for news feeds? That was heaven.
Actually, Chinet was the first public access
unix system. It was up in 1982 on a compaq lunch
box portable with a pair of 300 baud modems. It was called wlcrjs then (no domain names, just ! paths) after randy sues and ward christensen, the inventors of the first BBS, CBBS, first up in Feb 1978. It then went to a pair of Altos 586's worknetted together, a 3b2/300/310/400, a few 386 machines and its current dual p2. Been up continuously since 82. It was the major news and email feed for the chicagoland area. Had a full news feed from ihnp4, the bell labs machine at Indian Hill. Used a trailblazer modem for the news feed. A single 70 meg drive held a full week's worth! Many of the owners of former and current ISP's in Chicago started off as kids on chinet, learning unix and hacking away. For a while, chinet even had its own resident FBI agent. Before the fall of the Berlin Wall, Polish agents were using chinet as a mail drop for communicatin to their government. Up until the wide spread use of the Internet, chinet would have up to 300 users at any one time, all hammer-dialing on the 12 dialup modems. A majority being Eastern European, Indian, Pakistani people with no other way of getting email and news.
M-net was a much more heavily used system because of the local Univirsity, but chinet was the first.
Well, as the co-inventor of the original BBS,
CBBS, I can say that the BBS concept is still alive and well, just moved from dialup to Internet based ones. I shut down the original about 8 years ago when the Internet became standard. The spirit is still alive everywhere, including at the home of the original. It was nice getting rid of the 12 fone lines and modems and instead having a conferencing system available via SDSL. My partner, Ward Christensen, has basicaly got out of the on-line community thing, but CBBS still lives on the conferencing system I still run and its small core of regulars.