Was anyone active on a BBS? Any good stories? I lived in Hollywood CA and subscribed to US Pompeii. That system operator had parties in her home, meetings for moderated forums, live online games, pot lucks, and dinners out. Some of us still communicate via Facebook. I miss it.
The ones I went on weren't nearly that active but yeah... There was a couple. They were some of my first experiences with online gaming. If it can be called that. I do have a certain nostalgia for it.
i was on bwms (backwater messanger service) and the bit bucket (along with a couple of others who's names slip my mind, back in those 300 baud dial up days) in portland oregon in the pre internet early to mid 80s. a majority of members of all of them also belonged to PorSFiS (the portland (oregon) science fiction society) which also overlapped with tfod (the friend of the doctor, i.e. doctor who fans), the s.c.a. kindom of an tir, and o.s.f.c.i. (oregon science fiction conventions incorporated, the not for profit that organized and ran OryCon and occasional other events, generally elected yearly at their regular bi weekly PorSFiS meetings)
bbw means big beautiful woman, so i assume bbs means big beautiful sasquatch. i'm sure there's a million worse places to live than hollywood. at least there's shit to do there.
I can't afford to live in a nice place in Hollywood. If I lived there it would be a slimy little studio. I went there last weekend and admired some of the high rise apartments they have on Vine. The ones above the Trader Joe's... I might like that, but I'd know it's overpriced.
There are parts of Hollywood that are pretty nasty though. Certain areas between Larchmont and 101 can be sketchy. One night I was driving along, minding my own business and saw a homeless guy masturbating in an alley near Templo Santa Muerte. And Santa Monica in Hollywood after dark? Eff that. The surrounding are fine--WeHo's great! As is Silver Lake and East Hollywood, but Hollywood itself is kinda nasty. But, in daylight, certain places can be fun. It has its charms, but I'm glad I live in a different area
you ninja'd me to it. i mean seriously, do people not remember this, or are they just being silly to claim not to? (or am i just really that old, to remember as obvious things that most people have been born too recently for them to be?) (i guess there are now, multiple generations who were not born yet to know a world before the internet) for those who were born too recently to be acquainted with such things, before there was an internet, though only a decade before it went public, there were what were called dial up bulletin boards. and at first, the phone company wouldn't let you physically connect a modem, unless they provided it, rather expensively, to their monopolistic land lines, which were what there were, so we used acoustical couplers which were limited to 300 baud, a term which has probably been forgotten along with its meaning as well. this led materially to the break up of the bell system. which resulted 2400, then 4800, and so on speed modems. but still no internet. only computers that everyone could connect theirs to over the phone line. often, those created and maintained by hobbyists, as most were, only one user at a time could connect to them. as personal computers started getting more popular and finding a market beyond the nerd world, there also came to be mass servers such as compuserve, the well, and the dow. but until arpa net went public, there still wasn't yet the internet we have now. all these changes happened within a very few years. before 77, if you wanted a computer and weren't super rich, you had to build from a kit. before 68 or so, even the parts to build one from, the first cpu's on a chip did not yet exist.
I was born in the 80s. Literally never heard of this before. I got online for the first time in the late 90s
I am on an Air Rifle BBS that has 42'000 members with over 5'ooo'ooo posts at this moment there are 556 members online ( just Checked )
When I think of BBS I'm thinking of what was described by @themnax ... Dialing in at a sweet 2400 baud rate. Took a couple seconds just for a page of text to load up. I remember thinking it was really awesome when someone had a server that two people could connect to at once. Whoa! Someone else 'online'! I still remember some of the games on them... ANSI ... Was that the name of the type of graphics used? Something like that.
same basically. i have heard of bbs before, now that these posts are jogging my memory. never actually used one though, and didn't hear of it until years after it was a thing.
amazing thing about that, you see how basic it is, when it was new, it was something beyond the budget of low income or even many middle income people at the time. the idea was absolutely fascinating when there was nothing more advanced available to the public. the digital wrist watches in the move 2001 a space odesy were a big deal when that movie first came out too. i seem to remember there was one watch making company that came out with a digital watch about a year later, and i think they wanted something like 300 bux for one of them. i don't remember now what year pong was new, it was some time in the 60s, possibly around 65. later more likely then earlier, just not sure. anyway i never had one, and i'm guessing i would probably have gotten bored with it pretty quickly.
It was developed by Atari back in the 70s but I was first introduced to the game as a kid in the1980s
ach, you're right. now i remember. by then i was building paia (analog synth) modules form kits, because i couldn't find the parts to make the kind of power supplies computer kits needed. by then i'd been in and out of the air force and knew about the 8008 and later 8080 chips. read electronics magazenes and knew about computer kits, and wanted one badly, but couldn't even afford an elf. i remember the first issues of byte, the mitz altair kits and later imsai. there still wasn't, well there still wasn't a lot of things. i don't know what made me think pong had been around after sputnik but before the first moon landing. i guess i was thinking about the first large scale ic's still being exparimental.
213 BBS List or http://bbslist.textfiles.com/213/213.txt would provide the dialup numbers for your modem to use. Once you were in, you'd just type in your user name and password. When I became more sophisticated (i.e., had an internal modem) I'd access them via telnet.
