Long before the Internet....

[Onkel Neal]

This sure brings back some memories!!


BBS: The Documentary (2005)

Long before the Internet escaped from the lab, connected the planet and redefined what it meant to use a computer there was a brave and pioneering band of computer users who spent their time, money and sanity setting up their home computers and phone lines to welcome anyone who called. By using a modem, anyone else who knew the phone number of these computers could connect to them, leave messages, send and recieve files.... and millions did.

They called these places "Bulletin Board Systems", or BBSes. And their collections of messages, rants, thoughts and dreams became the way that an entire generation learned about being online.

When the Internet grew in popularity in the early 1990s, the world of the BBS faded, changed, and became a part of the present networked world.. but it wasn't the same.

[A Very Super Market]

2005! That's sooooo long ago...

[UnderseaLcpl]

What an intersting look into the history behind communities like this one. I must confess, I didn't really know any of that before.

Two cool things I learned from that video; I should buy my next computer from Crazy Eddie's, and now that I know a little about the substance material, I can post like I'm an expert and call people names. It's part of our heritage.


Thanks for the vid, Neal

[Letum]

Before internet?
Doesnotcompute.

[Overboard]

Internet ?

[bookworm_020]

I remember the joy of the old 28kb/s dial modem that seemed so modern back in the late 1990's

[SteamWake]

Originally Posted by A Very Super Market

2005! That's sooooo long ago...

I believe that is the date the documentry was made. The technology they are referring to is from circa 1970. I know because I'm one of those aincent relics whom ran / used BBSes with dial up modems and awsome Baud rates of up to 300 :rotfl:

Makes me feel like an anitique to see this discussed in this manner.

[Onkel Neal]

It's cool that some of you guys have that old school legacy in your background. I wish I had been more tech involved from the beginning. My best bud bought a TRS-80 in 1979, he worked at Radio Shack. We used to load the programs on it with a cassette player--the volume had to be set just right to work--and after 6 or 7 minutes, we could play Pharoh or Bedlam. I learned a bit of Basic to write a program that worked like a database, if you typed the name of a song, it would tell you the artist and album, etc. Eventually I bought a Timex Sinclair, but most of my computer experience up until DOS was on his TRS-80 and CoCo.

But we didn't get into BBSs until the early '90s. I worked with an old guy who had green teeth and smoked dope like a fiend. He had four or five caseless computers in his living room, his whole house looked like a techie's dream. He ran a BBS and I remember dialing in to it. It had door games of all kinds, and chat, very cool.

A couple years later I logged into this thing they called the World Wide Web and slowly left BBSs behind.

Check out video 2, the one about SysOps, really cool.

Neal