Twit the new BBS | The Coffeehouse

staceyw
Before C# there was darkness...

Funny how everying old is new again. So many people think twitter is soo new. They must not be old enouph to remember CompuServe or other bulletin board systems (i.e. WildCat BB). Fairwell CompuServe -RIP. Proably never heard of 300bps modems either.

SlackmasterK
I write my OWN blogging engines

That was before things like V.32Bis and fancy compression to emulate 53000. Thus, at 1 bit per baud, didn't we just use "300 Baud" back then?

I wouldn't know, I started off with a 2400.

Dodo
I'm your creativity creator™ :)

In reply to SlackmasterK

#Jul 3rd @ 1:23 PM

Man, I'm just 20... but I always got all the old corporate stuff (which was still better than the newer consumer stuff)... that brings back weird memories... memories of when Matrox made the best graphics cards for example... but enough of the nostalgia...

joechung

In reply to Dodo

#Jul 3rd @ 1:53 PM

I remember CGA monitors and green-screens, kid. Wink

figuerres
???

Or Genie ... the poor brother of compuserve....

heck I remember huge phone bills for dialing up from california to NJ -- there used to be a programmers board that had huge archives of free code, Cliffside DBBS multi-line and multi server ... back in the day.

in my home town of stockon there was "the wrong number" yeah that was the name of the system Smiley

here it is today: http://www.kcuhc.com/

I see CHuck is still around...

staceyw
Before C# there was darkness...

In reply to figuerres

#Jul 3rd @ 3:20 PM

Think I vaguely remember using ZModem sw for downloading small dos programs on my IBM PCXT with a green screen. How far we have come.

figuerres
???

In reply to staceyw

#Jul 3rd @ 3:24 PM

and ymodem ??

staceyw
Before C# there was darkness...

In reply to figuerres

#Jul 3rd @ 3:29 PM

Smiley and xmodem

Yggdrasil
Pour me a cab, 'cause I can't drink no more.

And what do these have to do with twitter? Just because you could leave short messages doesn't make it into twitter. Twitter's interesting uses come from the fact it's updated everywhere via SMS or mobile internet, and the fact that memes spread virally via RTs and hashtags. That's twitter, the social aspects, not the technical.

staceyw
Before C# there was darkness...

In reply to Yggdrasil

#Jul 3rd @ 4:57 PM

yggdrasil, post was no intended to be taken so literal. Smiley

Minh
WOOH! WOOH!

In reply to Yggdrasil

#Jul 3rd @ 4:57 PM

Hey... old geezers are reminiscing... haha

Anyone remember Q-Link on C-64? They eventually became AOL...

brian.shapiro
things go on as always

I hate how the news media was crediting Twitter with all of the information coming out during the protests in Iran. Ten years ago, that would have just happened on some other technology, like IRC.

Not that Twitter isn't cool in itself. That type of reporting just feeds into all the buzz and trends and delusions of self-importance you have in the tech evangelist side of the blogosphere.

blowdart
Peek-a-boo

In reply to brian.shapiro

#Jul 3rd @ 9:25 PM

And the news on twitter was generally wrong to boot. But then that's been glossed over. A lot.

SlackmasterK
I write my OWN blogging engines

In reply to Dodo

#Jul 3rd @ 1:53 PM

Hmm, all I recall was S3 and Voodoo.

figuerres
???

In reply to Minh

#Jul 3rd @ 7:53 PM

Yep, i did that also.... vic-20, c-128

Voodoo i recall havin the dual voodoo rig back then...and Vesa-Local-Bus graphics cards and IDE controller cards from Promise Tech.

Bas
It finds lightbulbs.

You're not cool unless you've been on Sierra's The Realm.

exoteric
I : Next<I>

Oh those were the days. US Robotics and ZyXEL modems. 300- or was the 1200 Baud and Max'sBBS on a CA1200. Some 313373 BBS's were off-limits for anything under 9000 Baud modems. That was after reading in some C64 demo text scroller about someone using/accessing a BBS on the C64. Someone else attached a multi-gigabyte harddive to a C64 at some point - that was coolness. Back then some people were bragging about 100 MB harddrives to the extent that at one BBS, I forget the name, the sysop had spelled out the capacity - "one hundred and twentyeight megabytes". Better stop before someone links to a certain Monty Python sketch...

PaoloM
Hypermediocrity

In reply to exoteric

#Jul 4th @ 3:16 PM

My first computer had an overall storage capacity of 170KB. My current setup is just shy of 4TB.

23.5 million times in 24 years.

Scary when written like that, eh?

blowdart
Peek-a-boo

In reply to PaoloM

#Jul 4th @ 5:25 PM

170k?

I wonder how much space was on a C15 tape.

littleguru
<3 Seattle

In reply to joechung

#Jul 3rd @ 3:13 PM

They still had one of these green screens at the math institute at my university a few years ago... it was the device you needed to use to sign you up for an exam. It had a weird screensaver running... There the screensaver had a real purpose, I guess. It's gone now. I wonder what happened to it.

spivonious

Heh, while we're reminiscing, let me fire up my Apple II/C and play some Space Rogue (which is oddly similar to the current Eve Online, but not online).

My first internet experience was with Prodigy over a 1200baud modem on a 386sx 16MHz with a 10MB hard drive. My username was BWX54E (the first five were the account, and I was the fifth member of the family).

As far as the thread's topic goes, I agree. All the popular sites nowadays are just fancy newsgroups/chat rooms.

W3bbo
The Master of Baiters

In reply to PaoloM

#Jul 4th @ 5:25 PM

My first, a 1996 Dell, had a 1.52GB HDD (oh yes, 3 significant figures) and 16MB of RAM.

My computer has 1.5TB of HDD, and combined my 4 most recent computers have 16GB of RAM (6/2/4/4).

Thousand-fold increase in 13 years, not bad.

PaoloM
Hypermediocrity

In reply to blowdart

#Jul 5th @ 2:16 PM

Apple Disk Drive ][

DCMonkey
Monkey see, monkey do, monkey will destroy you!

In reply to PaoloM

#Jul 4th @ 5:25 PM

Our first family PC had not one but two floppy drives! That was like 320K storage alone! And then we got a Iomega Bernoulli Drive with 5MB and 10MB cartridges the size of a coffee table book!

I never got into the whole BBS thing, though I do remember downloading a game patch from some BBS once. My fist Internet experience was via a Netcom shell account. I contented myself with Usenet for about a month before my friend convinced me to install TIA and Netscape and check out this "World Wide Web" thing.

blowdart
Peek-a-boo

In reply to PaoloM

#Jul 6th @ 1:23 PM

You were spoiled. Disk drives indeed.