Yesterday was the 25th anniversary of the first BBS. A BBS, if you aren't familiar with the term, is like a modem driven version of the internet. You dialed a number with your computer/modem to connect to a local or long distance BSS. Once connected (most BBS's only had one phone line) you could join discussion boards, up/downloaded files, maybe view pictures or news or weather, and bath in the beauty of ASCII generated interfaces. My first BBS ran on a Commodore 64 with a 300 baud modem and two, count them, TWO floppy drives (hard drive...are you nuts?). This was in Rapid City, SD around 1982 or so and it was called The Electric Fence, as in the electric version of the fence you and your neighbor exchange pleasantries over (I know, lame). It featured a burgeoning list of great files which I painstakingly downloaded during off hours (long distance charges) from larger BBS's like CBBS and one in Fargo, ND which escapes my memory.
With only two 160k floppy drives the downloads couldn't all be available at the same time, so folks would leave a message and I'd arrange to swap in the appropriate floppy so they could download the file at an arranged time. Most of my efforts were spent playing with ANSI/ASCII characters and trying to fashion cool, semi-graphical user interfaces. A few years later I bought an original IBM PC (still no hard drive, 10meg drives cost a thousand bucks) and ran RBBS software. Bigger floppies, more download space, plus the move to the speedy new 2400 baud modems. Fat city.
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Ah, the good old days! I ran a BBS on an Epson QX-10 for a couple of years in 84-85. Here's the listing, found with a Google search:
Sugarbush EpsonNet .. (802) 496-4123
Ted Jerome, (3B;??) Epson Computers, CP/M, TPM, Valdocs, communications, Turbo pascal. Users auto-validated on 2nd call.
After using the RBBS software, I decided to write my own in Pascal that ran under the QX-10's TP/M OS that
visually emulated the Epson's VALDOCS visual interface, and it caught Rising
Star Industries'(publisher of VALDOCS) attention, but they never
actually purchased it. I SysOp'ed it for two years anyway. It was so much fun to watch calls come in from all over the country!
Hey! I remember getting on the Electric Fence way back when, from my own c-64. It was, in fact, on a bbs, the hpbbs from Oregon, that I first met the web in the early 90s. One day when I connected, they announced the bbs would be running new software, called Lynx, and all you had to do was get your cursor on a [link] in brackets, and you would get another document. The rest was history.