[ih] Chat room and forum archives

[Andrew Walding]

John, you have this BBS stuff fairly correct. I dispute, however, the "less
technical" statement.

I ran the Techknowledge BBS from roughly 1985 using RyBBS to 1999 using
Wildcat!  - I can't remember the dates I changed.  My BBS was known as
"Protocol Heaven" as I supported almost every known transfer protocol -
just some I remember: X-Modem, Y-Modem, Z-Modem, Q-Modem and probably 20
more transfer protocol variants.  We were constantly testing and retesting
transfer rates on large files and exploring the maximization of bandwidth.
As I recall Q-Modem was one of the fastest.  I did not support pornography
sharing.  I started with one very expensive at the time 2400 baud modem ( i
knew people that owned 300 baud acoustic couplers) and finished y BBS years
with three lines using USRobotics 56/64K modems with the BBS itself running
on an 8088 PC with 2, and then 4 40MByte drives that were filled to
capacity with shareware and freeware and message board content.  The true
techies were always hunting the fast BBS connection points.  We were highly
motivated by costs.  Some people had to pay for calls by the minute, so if
you could cut transfer time down, you could end the call earlier and that
was savings in your pocket.

I was a Fidonet Relay point from the beginning.  Fidonet ran worldwide
essentially on hundreds if not thousands of BBS systems.  You could post a
message to a colleague in London on my BBS in California, and at most wait
24 hours for a reply.  As a relay we ran the Fidonet exchange every 8 hours
as did most of the other bigger relays.

We were all hobbyists with normal full time jobs in the tech industry, at
least the people I knew were, and we would spend the second 12 hours of
each day working on the BBS'es and the protocols.  When the TCP/IP stuff
started to emerge and be accessible to us, no one cared about what we had
been doing at the binary or Layer 1 level.  Which was fine.  As we all know
now, what those ARPA, DARPA, and University folks had been working on was
broader and bigger and along with most of my BBS colleagues we jumped on
board and abandoned the BBS years quite quickly.  I could go on, but will
stop there.  I hope this helps.

On Thu, Sep 1, 2022 at 2:15 PM John Levine via Internet-history <
internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:

> 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
>
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