TACKER: macpro (melvin ahching)
SUBJECT: .. Did you BBS?
DATE: 19-Aug-05 23:57:32
HOST: sdf
Long ago in the mid to ear
ly 1980s I bought a Macintosh Plus. After running
the thing with only 2 floppy drives, I eventually got a hard drive and then
a 2400 baud modem. I knew I wanted a modem for the longest of time as I had
heard about BBS's and the things that were availa
ble on them.
Living out here in the middle of the Pacific Ocean (Honolulu HI) finding a
local BBS was not very hard after ini
tially finding 2 or 3 actually listed
in the phone book. I remember my first login at a place called "Rat's Nest
BBS" which I
found a bunch of strange online conversations (posts),
software that I could not run on my Mac, a picture format called GIF t
hat
never displayed well on my Mac and a list of about 50 to 70 other BBS's in
town. That was the goldmine.
After screencapt
uring that list, I dialed into just about everyone of the
listed BBS's (all a local call) and eventually became a regular memb
er of
about a dozen or so of them. I used to enjoy the BBS's that ran on the old
GT Power software as those featured something calle
d "echomail" and "echo
messages" (similar to fidonet) where we could participate in long distance
online discussions on a var
iety of topics. I remember each night at around
1 or 2 AM, people were not allowed to call into certain BBS's because that
is
when they did their mail and message runs, which was cool. The next day
on login we'd get a bunch of new mail and discussion
messages.
I used the Mac Plus for about 5 years before moving on to a color Macintosh
IIsi and a Supra 14.4 modem. This was a
round 1991 and BBS's were still very
popular in Honolulu. I think by 1991 to about 1994 there were about 100 to
150 local BBS
's people could dial into. Most had CLI interfaces similar to
what we have here at SDF. I grew to like some of the BBS interfa
ces over
others... RB Connect, Wildcat, others. From those I always fell back to GT
re many in Honolulu.
Soon graphical interfaces were made available. By 1990 or so I was on GEnie
Star Services.... for $5 a m
onth you could call into during the night and
peruse some of their message areas without incurring the per-minute
charges. Th
at was cool because around 1994 or so they provided me with my
first internet address: macpro@genie.geis.com or something like
that.
GEnie had a GUI but it was only for PCs. Most Mac users remained with the
CLI which wasn't all that bad. Someone in tim
e had a Hypercard GEnie GUI
that kind of worked some of the time.
Probably the best of the Mac GUI's for BBS's was and is Tel
efinder. We had
at its peak about 3 or 4 Telefinder BBS's in Hawaii. Telefinder offered
users a nice Mac-like GUI that had a
familiar look and feel for Mac
users... folders, windows, icons, etc. Very nice.
In time after I got in the internet with m
y Mac IIsi and the ol' 14.4
modem, I was using Mosaic to cruise the web and Telefinder allowed us to
S's that were at one time plentiful through
the internet. I remember logging into Telefinder BBS's in the Virgin
Islands and
Austrailia... those were cool.
As we all know the WWW quickly eclipsed the BBS's and in short time during
the late 1990s man
y and nearly all the local Honolulu BBS's closed down.
Everyone it seemed had migrated to the web.
Tell you guys the truth,
I miss the little online communities we used to
have on the small BBS's. Here in Hawaii some of the BBS operators and
members
had real life get-togethers which were cool as you got to meet
other members face to face.
Another thing about BBS's was th
at most of them were hobby boards and users
almost never got spam email through the local system. That was nice.
Times have c
hanged and I guess we all grew up and now live in the rough and
tumble world of the internet. So much for the old days.
S.1.2> [ to follow thread, (R)EPLY or (Q)UIT ] CONTINUE
TACKER: macpro (melvin ahching)
SUBJECT: .. Did you BBS?
-Aug-05 00:22:03
HOST: norge
Forgot to mention another great thing about the old BBS's were the online
door games... Trade
wars, Fishing, Card Sharx, etc.
A note on Telefinder... there is one telefinder BBS that I know still
operates... www.headga
p.com. They still run their Telefinder BBS where
there are lots of old Mac, Commodore, Amiga and I think some PC files to
dow
nload. Check them out at the URL I just listed.
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TACKER:
smj (Stephen Jones)
SUBJECT: .. Did you BBS?
DATE: 20-Aug-05 01:59:13
HOST: mx
macpro -
You're definately welcome here
. There are quite a few BBSers here amongst
the newbies. When I first saw TeleFinder in action I thought it was
amazing. A
very powerful concept.
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TACKER: apelogic (Santiago Mainet
ti)
SUBJECT: .. Did you BBS?
DATE: 20-Aug-05 15:13:54
HOST: ukato
wow, I feel so new..
arround 1996 when I got into MUDs
there was a few of them that you had to access by dailing in to certain
BBSs, and if I rem
ember correctly, I think I read something about there
being some muds within this one.
I guess you could also consider each mu
d its own BBS.
oh yeah, my first internet connection was through AOL, GUI BBS.. if that
counts..
I haven't been arround to lon
g in the world of BBSs, but I've actually
notice the difference on how things used to be then compared to the now,
and I real
ly miss the networks of 90's
_I'm one of those so called newbies hehehe..
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)UIT ] CONTINUE
TACKER: fkasner (Fred Kasner)
SUBJECT: .. Did you BBS?
DATE: 20-Aug-05 17:30:05
HOST: otaku
The high p
riests never allowed me to get close to the UNIVAC at the U. of
Chicago. I couldn't even load the input for stuff I wanted to
run. We did
it on coding sheets where all the data and commands were binary inputs. I
ne. Even so it was down half
the time anyway. When I did the six months of calculations for my doctoral
thesis I sent out the
data and equations (a weighted chord based least
squares fit of data to a power series - usually quadtratic but sometimes
cu
bic) to first Minneapolis Honeywell. A colleague and friend worked there
and then to Oak Ridge Nat. Lab. The latter screwed th
e equation but when I
straightened out both computer folks they confirmed my hand calculated
results.
I used a BBS to convin
ce myself that the Apple ][+ actually ran about as
fast using floating point as did various CP/M boxes and the early IBM
boxe
s. Also got lots of interesting software via this route. And this all
started with a 300 BAUD modem on the Apple. When I got a
n IBM clone model
it graduated to 1200 bps then 2400 bps and then 9600 bps. Wow was that
fast (NOT). I presently use a 300 KB
/s DSL line but when I have to download
through this venue it frequently doesn't come close to that speed. But then
l character is what we all dreamed about as being available
in the BBS days. Thanks, smj for keeping such things alive.
FK
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TACKER: fkasner (Fred Kasner)
SUBJECT: .. Did you BBS?
DATE:
20-Aug-05 17:47:42
HOST: otaku
Now that I am reminded of this by the comments above, I do miss the
community of the sm
all BBS. We had one in the Chicago area and had a couple
of dozen very active members who were willing to get together every n
ow and
then. It was run by the book editor of a Chicago newspaper and as he was
hearing impaired he never seemed to be willin
g to join our occasional
lunches and other kinds of get-togethers. He lived just a few blocks away
from me but I actually nev
er met him personally. I suppose those who are
totally deaf become rather shy about the difficult communication with
stranger
s. I had a friend in college who was deaf from birth and spoke
had
no basis for correction) and also my uncle (by marriage) had a totally deaf
sister so I was used to connecting with the
hearing impaired.
We used CP/M OS then for that BBS. And he used WordStar (I used it on an
Apple and then on a IBM clone) and
I wrote for him using C a program that
counted words, sentences, paragraphs, and pages for both WordStar and for
ASCII text.
It was my thanks to him for the kindness of his hosting the
BBS. Shortly later he retired from his job and moved to the upper
peninsula
of Michigan. Miss that lot. The only one who appears to still be around is
a guy who is on a major AM radio statio
n as both a food critic and business
reporter. Others, not old farts like me, are probably still around but have
faded into t
he anonymity of users of the internet. Sad.
FK
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TACKER: m
acpro (melvin ahching)
SUBJECT: .. Did you BBS?
DATE: 21-Aug-05 08:37:55
HOST: norge
n "oldie but a goodie" like me.
As the dialup BBS's were dying out, some of the old BBS's and perhaps
several new ones made
their way to the internet as either ISPs or BBS's
that users could dial into or telnet to with a terminal interface. Kind of
something like what we are using right now at the SDF shell. After all this
conference is called BBOARD so I guess its origins
go back to the old BBS
monicker of days gone by.
I always find it a challenge and a learning experience to get myself with
a
new BBS, especially the ones with mostly a CLI interface (think DOS, think