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Stardate: 20200202.0951 | |
Location: Home Office | |
Input Device: AlphaSmart data.wireless connected to rpi2 via USB | |
Audio: Washing maschine, family waking up on a Sunday | |
Visual: Abundance of desk clutter | |
Energy: 90% | |
Mental: 90% | |
Emotional: Awake + coffee! | |
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I had posted this message below in response to a new user message on | |
SDF's bulletin board (bboard.) I kinda went on a ramblin' so I | |
decided to archive it here before it gets lost in the sdf archives. | |
This is probably one of the posts that is TL;DR for bboard, but since | |
I know that the gophersphere likes to read (or at least that is what | |
I tell myself) I am sharing it here. | |
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TACKER: xiled () | |
SUBJECT: .. First BBS Post | |
DATE: 27-Jan-20 03:38:56 | |
HOST: otaku | |
Welcome to all of the new SDF users!!! | |
I have decided to chime in on this post and write something. | |
I have only been on this system for a short while...especially in | |
comparison to its inception...1987 or something. But I do | |
remember SDF from the 90's but never had an account until my | |
recent frustruations with the Internet of today. | |
Ori, your post makes me chuckle! The timing of it reminds me | |
of the Xmas users of decades past. Back in the day, the | |
latter part of the year was when the BBS's would get an | |
influx of Christmas Users, basically new users who received a | |
modem for Christmas and were tying up the local BBS's | |
phone lines. Back then, most of the BBS's that I dialed in | |
to only had one phone line...sometimes even sharing the phone | |
line with their household's voice phones and only open during | |
certain hours. | |
A majority of the BBS's I called were run out of peoples | |
homes and ran Commodore 64s or 128s, since I had a C=64 (CNET | |
was the name of the commie BBS software that most people in | |
my area ran.). I wouldn't really dial in to the other | |
systems, just "commie boards." There was a pretty | |
decent sized commie community where I grew up. Most of them | |
were very amateur, handmade, unrefined...which actually | |
appealed to me...kinda like the geocities home pages from the | |
early web. | |
I remember I had a list of local BBS's that I would call and | |
especially during the Xmas season, I would get a busy signal. | |
My terminal program (EagleTerm or Phoneman) would dial | |
through the list until it connected. Sometimes it would take | |
a long time to connect and since the C=64 did not multitask, | |
all you had running was the term program dialing out. So I | |
would watch tv (which was also my monitor...just changed the | |
channel by turning the knob...no remote), play the radio, or | |
do something else while I waited for a connection, which I | |
could hear since there was a speaker in my modem and my term | |
program would play tones when connection was established. | |
My range of dialing out was only limited to my local area | |
code (216 4-evah!) since dialing outside of that incurred | |
long distance charges. Later on, there were other methods of | |
accessing other systems via dialing locally and telnetting to | |
a remote networked system without incurring charges. I | |
remember the first time I connected to some system in Germany | |
for the first time via the Cleveland Freenet (not commie), it | |
totally blew my mind! I'm in Germany now! I couldn't | |
understand the login screen, but I was in Germany! For | |
free!!! That concept probably seems pretty lame with the | |
whole global Internet and everything, but back then, it was | |
like, woah! | |
When you have only a limited time on the boards and you might | |
not be able to login again for a few days, you usually tried | |
to make the best of your time. Many boards would only allow | |
you limited connection time per day...like 3 logins per day | |
for a maximum of 60 minutes a day (or unlimited if you were | |
"elite" or a co-sysop...) So I had to choose what to | |
do...read the boards for the latest posts/flamewars/etc, play | |
the door games, leech public domain programs/warez/SID music | |
files...if I had credit...some boards had download/upload | |
ratios, check out the G-files (underground text files...see | |
textfiles.com/bbs/), etc.... | |
Actually, you might want to check out that whole | |
textfiles.com site. The creator of the site also made the | |
BBS Documentary (bbsdocumentary.com) which even has clips of | |
smj talking about SDF. That documentary pretty much distills | |
the spirit of those days. | |
There was also "questionable" content, which appealed to the | |
pre-teen/teen in me (Anarchist's Cookbook, Poor Man's James | |
Bond, "Adult" games, etc.) Stuff like this is pretty | |
accessible in today's Internet...not so much back then. They | |
were mostly found on the hack/phreak boards, which you could | |
access to if you were "elite" and not a "rodent" or "leech." | |
I think that some of the content back then seemed to have | |
more substance...or was just created differently. I'm | |
talking about user content, like forum posts or text files. | |
Today anybody can post stuff and there is a global web of | |
everybody...but not everybody does and if you do, it gets | |
lost in the noise of everybody else's content that they | |
want others to see or read. Sometimes you even get to the | |
point of why bother? Nobody is going to see it anyways... | |
And now these days, the web has gone so commercial that they | |
get most of the eyeballs and the user generated | |
content...like we had in the early days of the web...is only | |
fodder for the harvesters (of sorrow.) | |
Back then, if you were dialing locally, you would get to know | |
other users by reading their posts or seeing their activity | |
on the BBS...or even getting a message from them that was | |
stored locally on the BBS that you could only access when you | |
were dialed in. There was no email for the masses yet. | |
Most of the users were local to that calling area (as | |
mentioned in the thread previously) and so you got to know | |
the handles of the other users not only on that board, but on | |
the other boards as well, since we were confined to the same | |
calling area if we did not want be charged for calls. | |
So with this local community, we would have opportunities to | |
meet up, sometimes individually, sometimes in a group. The | |
BBS sysops would sometimes hold gatherings for the users or | |
someone would throw a barbeque and invite the other users. | |
It was probably much easier to have these kinds of gatherings | |
since the BBS users were usually local. | |
Ugh...I'm dumping too much into this post. Sorry... | |
Ori, thanks for taking a chance and posting! It makes me | |
happy to see all of the new users coming out of the woodwork. | |
It's also nice to know there are others like me that enjoy | |
this type of computing. | |
xiled | |
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