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Things your kids will never know - old school tech!

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zridling:
CRT monitors? My last one was a 110-lb. NEC 21" that lasted for 15 years. I gave it away to some poor sap who didn't want it either.

40hz:
BBS (bulletin board service) predated the internet and back in the 80s, it's how we downloaded porn. At least some of us.

(Not me, of course.*)
-zridling (October 22, 2008, 06:20 PM)
--- End quote ---

OMG! Forgot about those little buggers - and I used to run a Mustang Software Wildcat! BBS that was linked into FidoNet!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fidonet

Wikipedia Wildcat BBS

What an amazing hack! All those little 128K DOS machines (with their state-of-the-art 9600 baud modems!!!) passing e-mail messages back and forth every day during "fidonet hour" so that members could have free e-mail outside their long-distance area. Then when the radio amateurs got their solder-burned hands on it - and started wedding it to their ARRL network to provide teletype services and slow-scan video... ahh, those were fun times! Nobody had a clue about what they were doing. They just went out and did it. But somehow it created a lot of neat stuff we're still using today, along with the public demand to create what has now become known as the Internet.

I remember when a screen like this was once as exciting as webbing out to Donation Coder or Eve Online...



First there was antique radio . Now there is antique software! :Thmbsup:

BTW - there are still some BBSs out here if you want to play with them.
To fire up the time machine and see a living fossil in action, try telenetting out to:

shadow.skeleton.org

Use ASCI terminal or VT100 emulation on default port-23.
 Login as bbs with no password.
 Enter a ? to get help using the system.

(Set your terminal to display green or orange text on black for that true "DOS vibe". )

CWuestefeld:
Fidonet was a remarkable achievement for the day.

I first had a 300-baud direct-connect modem for my Atari 800 (a MPP-1000C). When connecting to an identical modem, it had the unique capability of negotiating a connection up to 450 baud. We were flying!

Once, in college, my modem died and I had to borrow an acoustic modem. Living in a fraternity house, it was frequently noisy enough to interfere with this modem. I used to make the connection, and then wrap up the modem-and-phone-receiver in a towel to block out the noise.

Remember waiting ages for a 100KB download? And when you finally got it, it was corrupt because the checksum in the XModem protocol wasn't very good? Finally they came out with ZModem, and you got better error checking plus batching files.

40hz:
Finally they came out with ZModem
-CWuestefeld (October 23, 2008, 10:17 AM)
--- End quote ---

And all was right with the world. ;D

BTW: I just downloaded a copy of RBBS-PC.EXE from a web archive. I'm going to have to see if I can get it running in DOSBox. Should be fun, if I can get a minute free any time soon... :)

Deozaan:
3. Analog "anything"
-40hz (October 22, 2008, 09:17 AM)
--- End quote ---

What I find very interesting about Analog vs. Digital is that for many years the controllers for videogame consoles had only digital buttons (on or off) but when the analog joystick(s) came along (and eventually even analog (pressure-sensitive) buttons), it was one of the greater innovations brought to videogaming.

It's the only case I can think of where digital came first and analog is actually considered superior technology.

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