[ih] Chat room and forum archives

[John Levine]

According to Michael Kjörling via Internet-history <michael at kjorling.se>:
>On 1 Sep 2022 07:35 -0500, from internet-history at elists.isoc.org (Haudy Kazemi via Internet-history):
>> If all this is supposed to be set in 1995, there may be a timing issue with
>> referencing Visicalc and Apple II. They would be around 10 years old at
>> that time, with both dating to the mid-1980s. All depends on the context.
>
>Wikipedia puts the original Apple II at a 1977 release, and the
>original VisiCalc for Apple II in 1979, which sounds about right; so
>by 1995, the combination would be more like 15 years old, and woefully
>out of date. 

When the IBM PC and 1-2-3 came out in the early 1980s, they wiped out
VisiCalc. Lotus wrote 1-2-3 specifically for the PC so it used all of
the keys on the keyboard and the features of the PC's display, while
VisiCalc was written to be ported to all the random little computers
people used in the 1970s so it assumed a fairly minimal configuration.
It was a lucky accident that VisiCalc worked so well on the Apple II.

There were a lot of local and regional BBS which I think would have been
more appealing to less technical users, since all you needed was a terminal
program like the ubiquitous PC-Talk.

Fidonet linked BBS via phone calls, usuallyy late at night and
arranged to make maximum use of local free calling areas and
discounted night toll rates. If your character's BBS was on Fidonet,
that would allow exchanging messages with people in other parts of the
country, albeit not very quickly.

-- 
Regards,
John Levine, johnl at taugh.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies",
Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. https://jl.ly