Anybody here date back to local, dial up bbs's or run one? (friendly, long distance)

[nightbird47]

I noticed a thread about forums, and thinking about it, am so happy we can find friendly ones again. But I started in the 80's, and was online at 600 baud on 300 baud bbs's you never needed to touch when reading it scrolled so sloooowwwwlllly. I was a cosysop of one and was secretary of the sysops group we formed. I learned how much I loved them then and was very dissapointed when the "internet' arrived and the forums got deserted.

I'm just not into facebook and the like either. Don't ask me to list name and all and my life so old friends can find me. I'm private and rather introverted and what Nightbird47 likes to discuss I might not if it got personal.

So were you in the early bunch where you had really speedy home computers which you'd only use for word proccessing now, and lightening fast 1200 baud modems with one person at a time on the board?

I still remember how people would get this wow your really smart look when you talked about computers since for most then they were as familiar as space aliens.

[PAhippo]

what's a baud?
what are bb's (I used to have a bb gun but don't that applies here)

never needed to touch….what?

cosycop? sysop? cyclop?

I've been off dial-up a little over a year, if that answers your question. Also pretty non-technical and for the most part alphabet soup is lost on me, to state the obvious.

I'm curious what your post means.

[ReachTheBeach]

I remember them well, but I am not as nostalgic about them. It was early in my career as a software developer. My hobbies were floating rivers and fishing. I did find a few people with common interests but mostly it was about building systems, Apple versus CP/M, word based adventure games and utilities. When CompuServe came along, I really welcomed that. Except for the cost; I couldn't justify it at home. We just had a shared account at work. I get a chuckle thinking back to when I joined AOL. A few months later they hit a big milestone - 50,000 users - and it became a place that I could actually find like minded people to discuss things with. A development board with a dozen or so active participants was a godsend. You could post a problem and someone might give you a helpful suggestion within a few days. Amazing! I still monitor that email address almost 25 years later.
The first modem I had was a 300 with acoustic couplers. I used a terminal program on the TRS-80 to dial into BBS systems and my office mini computer. Later I upgraded to a Franklin (Apple clone).

[Deelighted]

I remember how excited I was when I upgraded to a 1200 baud modem! My Epson Apex could not run windows but it sure could connect to the bb's lol

I remember teaching myself DOS so I could set up and run my own batch files

[1AngryTaxPayer]

AOL lol

[GeoffD]

I briefly worked at BBN Labs as "Staff Scientist" back when they supplied the routers, called "interface message processors" for the early internet when it only had a small number of universities, military bases, and corporations on it. I was working on a "packet radio" project for the military that looks like today's cellular data network. If you bombed a radio tower, the network re-routed the packets.

I was always corporate so I had a terminal/workstation on my desk at the office. In the late-1980's, I had a connection to the real internet and never needed to bother with the home-hobbyist Compuserve and early AOL "internet-lite" stuff. Since I had a workstation or Macintosh and later a Windoze laptop and always dialed into the corporate network once I had the laptop, I never messed with any of the non-internet stuff home user stuff. The first time I bought my own PC was in 1998 when I took a couple of years off. I had dialup to a mom & pop ISP for my internet connection.

[ReachTheBeach]

Originally Posted by 1AngryTaxPayer

AOL lol

Funny thing is, I was a nerd for getting it back then. There were just around 30,000 users when I joined. It was the cheapest way to get a true internet email address at the time. When the user count got up into the millions, I had switched to the free account model with no dial up access just because I wanted to keep the address. I got another email address only because of the perception of what it meant to have an AOL address at that time, but I didn't drop the AOL account. I still occasionally get emails from people I have not seen or heard from in several years. It drives me nuts when people change their email addresses more often than their tires.

[Serious Conversation]

Back in the early 90s, my aunt had a 386 with Prodigy internet service I liked poking around on. I really don't miss the days of old, slow technology itself, as there were some many limitations that even very routine functions now could simply not be done, or were so unbearably slow as to be unusable.

[Hemlock140]

I remember spending $800 for a 1200 baud modem that went into the trash as useless and worth nothing years ago. Where I worked, about 1982 I was among the first to use the IBM PC when it first came out, as well as an Apple "Fat Mac"
about 2 years later. None had hard drives yet, I remember buying one at work that was 10MB for several hundred (external). At the time I already had a computer at home, it was a Micropro with only 64k memory, a televideo green screen monochrome monitor with built-in keyboard, two 720k 8" floppy disk drives and an acoustic modem (had to place the telephone into it).

[boater1]

I remember them well, started with a 300 buad modem, upgraded to 2400 baud, then screaming at 56K
(I still have my 2400 and 56K modems in my attic) (might come back someday)

Always played with download protochols, X-modem, Y-modem, Z-modem, Q-modem ...
always fighting a dirty phone line

Always downloading BBS phone directories, for my Procomm
Wanting to download a 1Meg size file, program says it will take 2 hrs (sorry no)

Long distance phone rates changed at 11pm, waited waited dial !
My wife was always wondering who I was calling in a state 1500 mi away at 2am.