Has anyone ever seen a toned silver bar before?

[Crohnos01]

there were no online boards in the 80s.

 

Actually, there were. I hosted one. They were dedicated computers running bulletin board software, which everyone with a screaming 300 baud modem (it was amazing at the time) could dial into and post messages. This was wwwwaaaayyyy before the internet when the operating system of choice was cpm and Bill Gates and Steve Allen were just starting to get excited about computers.

[Crohnos01]

Sorry. Typo. Paul not Steve Allen.

[Kamillion]

dang, i started with chatrooms on AOL before there were message boards, than progressed all the way to twitter . this was only over the past 10 or so years though.

 

didnt have a clue there was anything around pre-97ish besides AOL. sounds pretty interesting.

 

[comicdonna]

I never knew how to turn on a computer until the fall of 2002.

[Crohnos01]

It was indeed interesting.... I was the old man of the group at the age of 19. My friends and I did some "questionable" things ethically by setting up random dialing programs looking for mode connections at the other end and then logging that phone number to dial back later at our leisure to try and hack into whatever was at the other end. I should point out that security was much more lax back then and we were bored teenagers just trying to see what we could make these now things called computers do. However when we accidently hacked the phone company and got access to long distance calling card numbers, I hastely shut down my board knowing the authorities would make an example of me as I was the only one over 18. Sure enough, 6 months later the FBI busted up the group, confiscated equipment, and filed charges. I narrowly escaped. Of course all this was in Washington State, a couple hundred miles from where Microsoft got its start. Guess where all my friends ended up working....

[Kamillion]

very cool.

 

so i gotta ask, Window, Mac, or Linux ?

[MorganMan]

I also ran a 1200 baud modem Bulletin Board back in the early eighties. Believe it or not, the name was "Online America"

 

Boy, should have copyrighted that one.....

 

And like Chronos01, I also was involved in some maybe, maybe not ethical things. Back when HBO first scrambled, it was not even illegal to decode the satellite signal. But a while later, congress made it so, I then shut down the board along with all the hack files for Videocipher equipment. Boy, those days were fun!!!!

 

 

 

OOps, did we hijack noow's thread.......Awwwwww, so sorry....(snicker)

 

MM

[Crohnos01]

very cool.

 

so i gotta ask, Window, Mac, or Linux ?

 

... None of the above... I remember beta testing Windows 1.0. The operating systems back then were machine dependent. I happened to run a Heathkit machine had both an 8086 and and 8088 processor so I could run either CPM or ZDos (a forerunner of MSDos).... They were the glory days for sure....

 

And yes; my apologies also for hyjacking the thread I will stop now... I promise....Good to know there are still some "old hackers" out there though Morganman

[truthteller]

I was on the old FACTS coin network back in the late 80's, early 90's. It was a bulletin board of information. There was a section on the old CoinNET called "Talk" and the dealers would go back and forth with politics, dealer crooks, etc., and no moderator. Kinda like the old western shoot 'em up. Those were the days.

 

 

TRUTH

[coinman_23885]

Maybe I am the oddball (in fact, it surely is so ), but noow has never gotten on my nerves. But, I have a high level of tolerance.

 

I thought of Noow as a little kid who could perhaps benefit from the board, and he didn't bother me at first either. This changed when he openly defamed another member on this board on a NGC thread that started and was deleted within a few hours one night. He then began to criticize me for my responses (not related to his defamatory post). This is when I became bitter, and started to respond to his hostile posts. Until the cited incident, I had limited my response to Noow with hopes that he would give up. This strategy, while effective on other individuals, wouldn't be effective here. Not to throw flames, but I'm glad that he has been given a second strike, and I hope that NGC bans him permanently.

 

[jom]

Noow actually got on my nerves in a BST thread I had. I thought "who the hell is this guy?". But after awhile I just accepted him as the forum a$$-clown.

 

As to processors: I used to write code for Intel 8085's at Cal Poly...in MACHINE code. What a PITA.

 

jom

[Conder101]

didnt have a clue there was anything around pre-97ish besides AOL. sounds pretty interesting.

I started in the Compuserve in 1980 and they had a coin forum even back then. All text based of course like your typical BBS was back then. But it was still fun. Expensive too. long distance call to connect and they charged you ten cents a minute as well.

[Catbert]

Reminds me of BNB.......best ignored. Great forum software feature.

[James_OldeTowne]

there were no online boards in the 80s.

Yep, as others have mentioned, discussion forums have been around much longer (in relative terms) than many who have only ever used "the internet" would believe. I'm dating my teenage years WAAAY back, but I remember the days of using an ACOUSTIC modem to dial into Compuserve. Those were modems were you had to have the right kind of telephone - the kind where you picked up the handset and it had a cord attached ! You placed the handset on the receptacle of the modem, calibrated volume, and literally dialed the long-distance phone number for Compuserve (or whomever).

 

If memory serves correct -- no joke, it was something like 75 baud, or 150 if you were lucky. Long distance charges could add up to astronomical levels - especially if you forgot to hang up!! I remember when 2400 baud seemed blazing fast, and when 9600 / 19,200 came around, that was miraculous. You could actually download (small) images in a matter of minutes.

[brg5658]

The first time I ever experienced the "internets" was when I arrived at University my freshman year in 1997. BUT, I find all of this discussion extremely interesting. Thanks for making my day guys!

 

[jom]

I used Compuserve probably in 1995....the company goes back to 1969 believe it or not. They didn't offer internet use directly until 1989 evidently and they were the first to do so.

 

There were people who "connected" while I was at college in the mid-80s but technically it was not the Internet as we know it. But the effect was the same....

 

jom

[mtnstyne]

I was studying computer science in 1989-1991 and we worked mostly with dummy terminals networked to a mainframe. I don't remember when I first actually went "online" but I do remember it was at 2400 and had the same phone modem that James mentioned. Thanks for the flashbacks!

[Frank Provasek]

there were no online boards in the 80s.

 

I was on several online boards starting in 1983.

[Frank Provasek]

dang, i started with chatrooms on AOL before there were message boards, than progressed all the way to twitter . this was only over the past 10 or so years though.

 

didnt have a clue there was anything around pre-97ish besides AOL. sounds pretty interesting.

 

Here is how it was done circa 1983

 

 

[PovertyRow]

I remember those dayze well. I built my first computer around 1979 - S-100 bus with an Aztc Z80 chip, 64K ram (pricey then for the 4 16 k boards) and 3 hard sectored floppy drives.

 

I used BBS a lot. Remember SQZ compression? And then they made available LBR so you could take the individual SQZd files and pack them into a single download. Then you had to extract the compressed files from the LBR file and then unSQZ each one at a time.

 

Then they came out with ARC - which compressed and consolidated several files into one. One simple UNARC was all that was needed. Then ZIP came out and there were the legendary Zip/ARC wars (PKWare vs SEA as I recall) among BBS systems. And in the middle of ZIP and ARC came another compression/packing scheme I cannot remember - I believe by a Japanese programmer.

 

One of the cool things back in those days was that many of the BBS systems starting forwarding the message boards to each other. So I could be in Boston (when I lived there) and could have interaction with the message boards from every place the boards swapped to. I could exchange messages with people thousands of miles away with only a day or two lag.

 

And yeah - flaming was big even back then!