BEFORE the Internet, there were BBSs

[John Rogers]

Wayne's post about his "internet life" got me to thinking about mine and I can remember (although it gets harder at my age) before we could just d-click an icon on the desktop and the world was open to us. There were Bulletin Board Systems or BBS computers where you could fire up up your 300 baud modem and dial in to grab computer projects homework, reference materials or even x rated pictures! Since I was going to school for my BSCS in 1985 and 86 I used them an awful lot to get CP/M help, Pascal and C code examples! There were dozens of them in the San Diego area and new ones sprouted up all the time and would be talked about at meeting of the San Diego Computer Society! The most notorious was one called San Diego After Dark and was really hard to get into at times!

Anyways that was having to FTP files to and from the BBSs, waiting for 20 minutes for the file to get here, etc, etc!

The big break came when General Electric started a dial in service named GEnie which had local access telephone numbers so no toll calls AND for the first several years it was FREE!!! Hard to find and thing like that today and sadly after being taken over by corporations, GEnie shut down for good.

Anyone else go that far back by any chance??????

[slodave]

I ran a small BBS for a while. Very small.

[masraum]

I guess I was just a couple of years behind you John. I started college in '88 and got a Tandy 1000TX with 3.5" and 5.25" floppy drives, 286SX, 640k of RAM and the special Tandy 320x200 16 color resolution which was so much better than the regular CGA that was 320x200 4 color. I was lucky enough to never have to work on a screen that was monochrome. I can't remember if my first modem was a 9600 or 14.4k. I had several BBSs all over the Tampa area that I used to dial into. I remember you could chat with the Sysop, and on some boards that had multiple lines you could chat with other members. I remember there were story boards and games in addition to the file areas.

I remember editing the autoexec.bat and config.sys to try to squeeze every bit of memory and speed out of the computer so you could run those old DOS games.

The first version of DOS that I used was 3.23, from there it was to 4.01 with the GUI, then 5, then 6. "Windows 286", Windows 3.0, Windows 3.1.

My first hard drive was a 32MB hard card (drive and controller built onto an 8bit ISA card).

My first VGA video card was Boca card with 512k of memory. I upgraded to a full 1MB by purchasing 4 memory chips that fit into sockets on the card.

Yeah, lots of memories. It's crazy to imagine that most phones these days have far, far more memory, processing power and graphics capabilities than the most expensive PCs did.

[campbellcj]

You guys are young'ins. What are these hard drives and color displays you speak of? LOL.

I got into this stuff around '77 and was heavily into BBS's, later Delphi (IIRC) an early text-based ISP that let you do Gopher and FTP on the internet, did a bit of war-dialing and amateur hacking, etc. Largely thanks to Dad, who has always been a techie/math/science guy, I had the opportunity to play with a lot of the early micro/personal computers: Vector Graphics, Apple II+, Commodore PET & 64, Osborne, TRS-80, Atari 800, IBM & Compaq PC's, etc. I did some paid programming work as a high school kid on PC's as well as mainframes. I remember being one of the only kids in college with my own PC - this was right before the tipping point when they became ubiquitous for students.

[masraum]

Originally Posted by campbellcj

You guys are young'ins. What are these hard drives and color displays you speak of? LOL.

I got into this stuff around '77 and was heavily into BBS's, later Delphi (IIRC) an early text-based ISP that let you do Gopher and FTP on the internet, did a bit of war-dialing and amateur hacking, etc. Largely thanks to Dad, who has always been a techie/math/science guy, I had the opportunity to play with a lot of the early micro/personal computers: Vector Graphics, Apple II+, Commodore PET & 64, Osborne, TRS-80, Atari 800, IBM & Compaq PC's, etc. I did some paid programming work as a high school kid on PC's as well as mainframes. I remember being one of the only kids in college with my own PC - this was right before the tipping point when they became ubiquitous for students.

Yeah, when I was 11 or 12 we got a Commodore 64. When we bought it they hadn't quite released the floppy drive so we spent about 2-3 months using the cassette tape drive. For me it was mostly a game machine. I saw the programs in the manuals. It seemed like you would spend days typing thousands of lines of code and the results of all that typing (and then the debugging for typos) were very anticlimactic, maybe a "ball" (round blue dot) would bounce across the screen.

[GH85Carrera]

BTDT.

I ran a couple of Wildcat BBSs. Fido net and all. On a 4.77 MHz PC.

[LakeCleElum]

I was into a few BBS's back in the '80's....My neighbors daughter was getting a Master Degree in being a Librarian....She tells me about this Internet thing......Sez I can dial the local County Library, go thru a long menu and finally get onto a BBS for the: "Library of Congress".

From there, on the internet.....Text only, but it opened an whole new world for me.......

[Rusty Heap]

First Computer, $2500, screamin' NEC 10 mhz cpu (compared to 4.77 mhz IBM first PC) cga 4 color graphics.

yup, only took 3 files on a 360K floppy disk to boot the computer, config.sys, sys.ini, and autoexec.bat

[dennis in se pa]

1968, Mercersburg Academy in PA. - acoustic coupler that you attached to a regular phone. It connected to a computer in Harrisburg, PA. You wrote binary code onto a paper tape and a machine read it over the phone to a computer there. If your code was correct you got an answer a half hour or so later.
Much later I used CompuServe.

[Jim Richards]

This thread makes me feel old.

[azasadny]

My 1st PC was an IBM Model 5150 with dual floppies and 32k or RAM and a Hercules graphics adapter. I upgraded it with a 8087 math chip (remember those?), and a 20MB Seagate MFM hard drive. I then moved up to a 80286-based PC with a 60MB SCSI hard drive and EGA video!!

[HardDrive]

We had a Commodore PET in the late 70's. My dad was an elementary school principal in a one stop light town in MI, and he set up a computer lab in his school. Pretty forward thinking for the time. My first exposure to any sort of networked computing came when I went off to college in 1988. Michigan State had a excellent computer sciences department, and there were labs all over campus.

Yes, the programs were stored on analog tapes:

[fxeditor]

Originally Posted by HardDrive

We had a Commodore PET in the late 70's. My dad was an elementary school principal in a one stop light town in MI, and he set up a computer lab in his school. Pretty forward thinking for the time. My first exposure to any sort of networked computing came when I went off to college in 1988. Michigan State had a excellent computer sciences department, and there were labs all over campus.

Yes, the programs were stored on analog tapes:

When I was a kid I wanted a Commodore Pet soooo badly. I thought they looked much more like "the future" than the TRS-80's did!

[Joe Bob]

In '91 I participated in a few 911 and 914 BBS sites. Started on a then state of the art IBM clone ,,,,, 286, in 1988, somewhere in that time frame?

[RWebb]

no one has mentioned Pfans yet???

[szyzygy]

I remember this stuff.

My first computer was 1984 or so, tandy 1000 with 128K.

[krystar]

BBS Door games. oh yea. Barren Realms Elite, Solar Realms Elite, Legend of the Red Dragon.

[stealthn]

Ah Compuserve how i miss the

[VincentVega]

Yeah, when I was 11 or 12 we got a Commodore 64. When we bought it they hadn't quite released the floppy drive so we spent about 2-3 months using the cassette tape drive. For me it was mostly a game machine. I saw the programs in the manuals. It seemed like you would spend days typing thousands of lines of code and the results of all that typing (and then the debugging for typos) were very anticlimactic, maybe a "ball" (round blue dot) would bounce across the screen.

That was me. I remember copying the code from books before school. After spending tons of time on a skiing game I gave up. It's funny to think a cassette tape was external storage at the time.