I used an online BBS in 1985. My modem ran at 300 bps. We had email, a single topic forum, and a chat mode with up to 15 people at once typing away (like AOL chat).
It was interesting being part of a world that most people didn't know existed. It did feel special. Then came the internet... and the masses... and commercialization... and it all died.
I was born in the 60's and I think our generation has seen the most amount of technological advancements. I remember seeing my first computer in the early 80's. They weren't much different from the one shown here. Thank you for posting this, you brought back some nostalgia.
My Great-grandmaw was born in 1875, Jefferson Davis was still alive and the Indian wars were still going on in the west. She lived until the early seventies, a time of satellites and space exploration. I remember her well. The past is closer than we think.
Same here, 1983 TI 99 4A, 16 K, color, cartridges, a cassette player or disk drive, educational, financial and game software. BASIC programming. Car Wars, The Attack, Frogger, and QBert! Great books came with it.
I have to agree. Being born in 2000 I’ve seen some incredible shifts in tech, but in the 60s people saw us go from computers being the size of warehouses and the storage being hand stitched together, to carrying that entire room worth of computers 5000x over in their pocket which we use to send funny memes to each other. We went from single lines of text to interactive games in the space of a few years, and now we have artificial intelligence writing our reports for us. We truly are in the age of wonder.
Another cool thing about dialing in to a BBS is that if you needed to talk to the sysop (the guy who setup the BBS), you could both just pick up the handset and have a normal conversation over the phone and then put the handset back into the modems and continue with the computer. Those old modems didn't really have any kind of handshake so they could start and stop without any problems.
To someone born in late 1992 this video looks like something straight out of a retro futuristic sci-fi movie. I had my first pc in 1999/00, i don't remember the hardware specs but it was a Win 98 SE machine with a PCI 56 kB/s modem. The good ol'days
Got my first computer about 3 years after that, a Tandy Color Computer with 16k of RAM, a floppy drive for storage, and a 110 baud modem. I remember being so excited when I saved up enough money for a 5.25" floppy drive, and later doing my first soldering on a 64k RAM upgrade (wow! 64k!). And that little computer set the course of my life - I've been programming professionally for 30+ years.
Hey that's a really neat story! I'm kind of the same in this situation...well I'm a RailRoader by heart and trade BUT I did take on many challenges in the PC world since my first 486 I bought at Radio Shack and the next the Pentium 1 released lol so I begged the store to allow me a return to upgrade and they did! WOW...I was so excited!
I used to telnet into all sorts of collegiate libraries just to look around. It was all text and all I could do was view things, but absolutely fascinated me.
I can remember in 1973, 3rd grade I think it was in Weekly Reader and article about how some day we would have a phone that we could see who we were speaking to. I am happy that prediction came true in my life time. Unfortunately, so did $3+ loaves of bread and gallon bottles of milk.
In 1991 our teacher asked us to draw a picture of something that we thought would exist in the future. I drew a landline phone with a little screen on it so you could see the person you were talking to. It didn't happen quite the way I predicted, but it did happen!
This brings back a lot of memories, because I worked at Radio Shack in 1979, and sold a lot of these in 4K, 16K or with a 32K ram. We couldn't even keep these in stock.
This looks like fun and the slower pace of semi-anonymous communication feels refreshing compared to the everything-all-at-once and current events of modern social media. A good deal of what I get out of social media (presuming I'd simply meet up with my friends offline instead of just tweeting at each other) would be more...my speed like this.
I miss those days too. Spending hours messing with jumpers on every board in the computer. Diagnosing IRQ and DMA conflicts. Accidentally blowing the 16 bit side of an ISA slot so only 8 bit cards would work in it. Well this is a bit after 1979, but it's still history. My first computer was a Commodore VIC-20, and I never opened it up. I didn't start messing with the insides until I was 8 when I got an IBM XT with a whopping 20MB hard drive!
I ran a BBS in 92-95 and it was a lot of fun. Games started getting bigger and at the time, 60 minutes was the usual time allotted to give the users at 56k baud. When Doom was released, and I saw someone was downloading it (an hour wasn't long enough), I would boost their time so they could finish the download. I was a member of FidoNet and local users were very chatty with each other.
if you stayed for shut down options menu just in few seconds, the background turns into black & white. love from: owen wilson & larry the cable guy in nick KCA
You should have also mentioned that "back in the day" long distance rates in the day time were anywhere from $0.50 PER MINUTE to $2 PER MINUTE. (Not adjusted for inflation!). That, and in 1982, CompuServe's night time rate was $6 per hour at 300 baud and $12 per hour for 1200 baud. Great video
From 1988 to 1992 I ran a single line BBS using Wildcat! on a PC-XT clone. Initially it had a 2400 baud modem, but later upgraded to 14,400. We exchanged nightly packages of forum messages with other BBS’s around the country over RelayNet. It was a totally free service I ran as a hobby. Had to shut it down when Indiana Bell decided I should be paying a business rate for the phone line. Couldn’t afford that. But, to be fair, I see their point, since the line was busy 75% of the time around the clock. We fielded 50,000+ calls in its 4 years of operation.
So I fot my 1st modem in 1988 using a Commodore 64 to call up my local BBS. I purchased it used from the head of our High School Computer Club. It was a Direct Connect 50 Baud Modem. Back then I chatted with over a 100 people who had never even seen or heard of a 50 Baud Modem. You seem to know your stuff, so I was wondering if you had ever seen or heard of a modem that slow?
My forray with BBSes started as a sysop using a WWIV board. It began as a single system at first (XT 5160), then 2 more a year or two after. Later after we upgraded from a 286 to 386SX systems and a colleague joined in, we started a multi line WorldGroup BBS and things were going well until they convinced us to go off-board and dabble with the "internet" for people to do local access. Big mistake! The fees from AT&T were *astronomical* and we had to revert back to this and shut down the internet completely, because we were drowning in debt and free or paid users alike could not sustain this. I think after about a few months that was all we could do until things changed and prices came down exponentially. Different times they were...and testing the waters with everything, but let me be real clear that the debts were still the same! lol
@@knerduno5942 I should have thought of that since I’m a Bell system alumnus. I worked in the downtown Nashville CO in 69 and 70 right after I got out of USAF.
Roland drum machines could "talk" to one another. You could store tons of memory in a cassette and reload later. I sent a drum track to a buddy over the phone. Neat. 1989
Granted this sort of 'social media' was pretty much local, usually confined to a single city or cluster of towns. You have to remember long distance calling (which this is no different than a normal voice-to-voice phone call) was horrendously expensive.
@@thomase13 i don't think there is generally a distinction between long distance and local calls in the US and Canada anymore, as far as i know as long as it's not an international call the cost is the same (international calls are probably are charged extra but I've never tried so i can't say by how much) But i barely ever use the "phone" part of my phone plan and my memory only goes back a decade so i'm probably not the best person to speak on this
Couldn’t I make a BBS with a 900 number that is relatively cheap and then have it sink with other systems by making its own long-distance call automatically throughout the day? Couldn’t that be a lot cheaper to the user than dialing in to one system and making a long distance call?
@@askhowiknow5527 There was FidoNet, which is essentially what you are describing. Apparently it still exists... but I don't know how many BBSes there are left.
@@askhowiknow5527 those were called message relay systems. they had to use a common way to talk to one another so didn't become popular until the later part of the 80s. essentially just local bbs but they had a backend part that dialed in upload/download message packets. it was a relatively cheap way to get national/global communications through email and shared interest groups (forums). it was not real time and sometimes severe lag could happen so you wouldn't get fresh messages until a week after they were authored. but it was usually free for the end-user and worked well enough. the only other options that time were commercial services such as Compu$erve which was horrifically expensive to use, or if you were an academic person you may have had internet access allowing usenet to be utilized.
1979 was an *incredible* year! I remember it as though it were yesterday. I also remember the rotary phones. I envied my neighbors who had touch tone phones. They were so hi tech! I felt like my house was the only one that was still using rotary phones. We did finally get touch tone phones, thankfully.
I have one of these keyboards and it feels and sounds just like it's from the 1980s, like as if it was built by a bricklayer. m.media-amazon.com/images/I/61ftwezFrGL._AC_SL1000_.jpg
That was my first computer! It also brought back memories of fidonet. Computers would call each other and pass an email through local calls. That way you could email someone far away. I used to correspond to someone in California USA from Ontario Canada. Back then it was amazing. Today, not so much!
I was active on BBSes in the 80s/early 90s using a Commodore computer. I was running at 1200 baud and we actually had text in color. BBSes were actually a lot more enjoyable than modern social media, people online were just different back then.
Yeah, they were usually mature and smart. Once the internet turned into a huge flashing colorful billboard, all the normal people joined and ruined everything.
TRS-80 was the first computer I used. I remember the programs came on cassette tapes, which were quite slow to load and finicky to the point they might not even load the first time you tried.
I worked at a computer dev shop in the early 80s which specialized on hard drive integration with TRS-80 Mod IIs. We ran a FORUM-80 BBS on a Mod II. I still have my original Mod I in storage.
I'm impressed your phone company still supported rotary dial phones in 2018. I remember those acoustic modems but I never got one, by the time I got a modem you could plug them in directly. BBS's were a thing into the mid 90s and I miss them sometimes.
I bought a modem shortly after getting my Commodore 64 in the summer of 1983 and started connecting to BBSs right away. It was so much fun. And for the first time in my life I started making a lot of friends since, with a few exceptions, all the BBSs were local. I also expanded my software collection by at least a hundredfold. 😉
Thanks for the demonstration. This was actually a while before my time and I'm rapidly becoming a geezer as it is. Still I find old tech increasingly fascinating as time goes on and this type of video always brings a smile to my face.
I used to use a 300 baud modem with a Commodore 64 six or seven years after this. At that point, you could connect a phone line directly to the modem and it could dial and answer. Fun times on BBS's! But the term "social media" wasn't around. I hesitate to call it that now. Just like back then, I was "calling up BBS's to check for something new to download, new posts, maybe upload a file or post something..."
I'm proud to be part of this era of telecommunications. Running a BBS from 1982 to 1998 was the best. Today's kids have no clue what it was really like to actually converse, share, and contribute.
Social media in the age of disco! That's pretty incredible looking back on it! 😂 Maybe I'm just a big old nerd, but I think I'd like today's social media better if it was more like this. This seems like a fun hobby rather than an overwhelming headache inducer like today's social media.
One thing finally clicked with me today. This was just the telephone network, not the internet. In 96 my University provided 'free internet dial-in access'. Sounded cool, so I got my fathers work laptop, and went to the computer lab to ask for help. I was given a giant stack of documentation, including instructions on, how to dial-in and get internet access using SLIP/SLIRP, and a list of MUD-like telnet addresses, etc. After you dialed in, you could use the service as a 'telenet', I think, and have it forward calls to other numbers. That was interesting, but I couldnt figure out how to use it. The Internet already existed by this time, and AOL, Compuserve, etc were everywhere. 28.8 baud was the new hotness... but most the dial-up banks were still using 14.4 or slower. I do everything from building computers with TTL logic, to coding with assembly, but having never been exposed to the pre-intenet era, it just never clicked with me that there existed an era of ...something different.
I love this video for one reason... I actually am familiar with the TRS-80 shown here. Growing up as a kid in the 80s, my father bought a TRS-80 Model II for our house's first computer. It was severely out-of-date when he bought it, but he was still proud of it. We had a line printer with it, and yes, the "huge" 8MB hard drive. So this is a total blast from the past for me. Thanks for posting it. We never went online with it though, but had the equipment to do it.
Back in the 80’s we had a Radio shack color Tandy computer key board, data was stored on a tape thru a tape recorder. Our tv screen had a converter switch which attached at the back, which served as the ‘computer screen’. We had a fat book full of codes. What ever we wanted to see on the screen had to be coded exactly as read.
Wow. I forgot how quickly the connections were made on those old modems. (It helps when it doesn't have to spend time trying to negotiate a faster speed - it just immediately started connecting at its one speed.)
@@AnonymousFreakYT That's funny. I remember listening to Polish pasta (just like any other copy/creepypasta on TH-cam) about hacker group called Sendbajt (bajt - byte in Polish) it was about friends and thier wifes from church choir. The husbands were able to decode the 0's and 1's and one of them knew every assembler commands. I'll send u the link in the next comment
I learned BASIC on my school's PETs. And played Lemonade Stand. I loved the heavy, clicky sound of the keys. Unlike the PET in this video, our PETs had external cassette-players & disk-drives, and large, black keys.
Long before 1979, telegraph operators chatted with one another and even used abbreviations not unlike what was later used in IRC, twitter and FB. There are still lists of these that can be found online.
I remember reading about the various feature charges on the phone bill in the local phone book when I was a kid. We had touch tone dialing for as long as I could remember. I was born in Dec. 1969, and I always remember seeing touch-tone phones at home, but my grandparents had both touch-tone and rotary phones in their houses. I got my first modem in 1983, and it was 300 baud and direct-connect with automatic dialing, but I do remember seeing the acoustic couplers in the Radio Shack catalogs. I got a 2400-baud modem in 1987 because a BBS I liked to call was going to stop allowing 300-baud callers.
In 1988, I was sick from school one day so I hooked up my 16 bps coupler and logged into my computer science class. We learned machine language and c++.
I don't know about the US, but in Europe some BBS's used the Videotex standard (8 colours, 40x25 characters). The modem was 1200 baud downlink, 75 baud uplink.
I used to use Amateur Radio BBSes over something called Packet Radio, where the connections were made over VHF two-way radios through a Terminal Node Controller. It looked very similar to this. We had 1200bps speeds, however. Messages could be sent all over the world and we didn't even need a phone line.
There were dozens of BBS in Moscow in late 90s. I used 2400bps Zoom modem lend from my coed to play VGA Planets on BBS of another coed. Spent all my nights ringing all around the city, exploring other people warez. Very similar to what is in this video. But with better performance. Found some new friends and one of them gave away to me 14400 noname modem. That was a giant leap of speed boost! 6 times faster! Only two times later I been that fascinated about comm speed upgrade again: when ADSL came and later with ethernet.
I was born in 1985 and even in school I never saw one of these. This thing is so cool!! You have no idea how bad I want to try this thing out. I love nostalgic tech.
In French class circa 1997 (so the internet was around a known, but hadn't quite blown up yet) we watched a video in French class. We were supposed to listen and answer questions, but at one point the characters used a sort of text-phone thing with a monochrome screen to send an email. Most of the boys immediately switched over to "Cool! What is that thing? Does every house in France have it?"
In 1982, we were asked to draw a picture of how we will communicate in the year 2000. I simply drew a square with little squares inside how we can touch screen. Pretty close, ipad came not long after year 2000.
I remember getting online at Maryville University (Missouri) and connecting to Columbia University. The biggest "thrill" was the fact you didn't have to pay long-distance prices to communicate. I remember freaking out the instructors because I knew ASCII code, so I would send "invisible" characters and BELLs -- it was so easy making it look like the computer for having a meltdown. That was probably 1980.
@@Vichu. A lot of that is taken care of with the programming nowadays. They used to be control codes for the screen and/or printer. The ones we "see" the most today are the return characters.
@@archangel_one and the thing we "see" are not displayed in every device. That same invisible ASCII code is not visible on other device. Also take flag emoji for example where the flag is not visible in PC but instead two alphabet pieced together
My high-school had a room full or TRS 80's. They were the silver single form units with the monitor and keyboard in one. Also a reset button was right on the keyboard in a very inconvenient place. I remember hitting it a few times after finishing my work. Not fun.
Same with me, I went to high school in the '80s. We also had a whole room full of model 3 TRS-80s. Friday was video game day. Remember playing asteroids on that thing? How about that stupid dancing demon demonstation? lol! The first class was basic computers, but then I took a second class where we learned how to debug our discs lol. I remember debugging (editing) the asteroids program so that instead of little graphical asteroids floating around, it would say words like s*** and f*** haha
In the late 1980’s I recall my computer science teacher using an acoustic coupler in front of the entire class. He was trying to show how the world would communicate online in the future. I recall everyone clutching their pearls back then. I always enjoyed using my TRS-80 - dang the sound of those keys clanking! I recall my TRS-80 being one combined terminal. I know they probably had several models. Would you say AOL streamlined the process of dial up in 1995? Making it more widely available. Oh the good ole days of dial up! By the way I still have my black rotary phone 📞 issued from Pacific Bell. Memories! Excellent video!
I was going online 1986 and it was still the same - at least here in Western Germany. i have checked 2 to 5 different BBS per day with my Atari ST and my 300 Baud acoustic coupler.
@@Jiggeer86 mir spuckt da gerade was von 8 bzw. 12 Minuten für 23 Pfennig im Kopf herum (West-Deutschland - Haupt/ Nebenzeit im Ortsnetz.) „Ferngespräche“ habe ich vermieden ... Wobei Westberlin bis Anfang der 90er keinen Ortstakt hatte - also für 23 Pf innerhalb von Westberlin ohne Zeitbeschränkung. Manche hatten das auch als Standleitung missbraucht - als 27DM für die Grundgebühr und 23 Pf für den einen Anruf. im Monat. als ich 1987 nach Westberlin zog hatte ich schnell einen Doppelanschluss (2 Leitungen mit 2 Nummern) weil ja die eine immer mit Akustikkoppler und später Modem besetzt war und man mich sonst nicht mehr tel. erreichen konnte. ISDN kam dann später in den 90ern ....
@@Jiggeer86naja - an manches erinnert man sich gern ....und der ein oder andere Name von damals taucht heute auch noch auf Twitter oder in der Tagesschau auf. "Einmalige Erfahrungen" machen wir doch auch gerade ... wer hätte den vor 10 Jahren gedacht das hier nur 700 km entfernt wieder richtig Krieg herrscht wegen eines Irren aus Moskau?
Very interesting! I use to have one desktop as that at school! All my software was stored in a normal audio tape , connected to the desktop. Time Ago! Thaks for sharing
It's all very good-and-well to look back now and say "wasn't it quaint? nowhere near as easy as it is today", but believe me...back then, it was mind-blowing!
Nostalgia overload! My 1st computer was a TRS-80 model II! We had a modem using compuserve in 1979😁 btw I learned BASIC in TRS-DOS with model II😁 quite different than MS-DOS back then😋 Tandy incorporated the MS-DOS, effective killing TRS-DOS
No, you just arent using it right. Facebook is pretty just family photos. Printing photos is expensive and hard drives corrupt sometimes. Or a natural desaster hits and you lose your whole damn pc.
In 1979, I was graduating high school. Computers were limited at that time to the library as a reference for material only. I remember learning how to use a microfiche to look up books, authors and subjects for class reports. Everything was eather hand written, or typed. I didn't see another computer until 1990 when I got a job at the same school I graduated from.
I'm old. I've done that. Even on a DECWriter. You need to clean the dust off the bezel of your nice Model II. Thanks for enlightening the Millenials though! With all the idiocy on the Internet these days, conspiracy theories, and people that never learned critical thinking able to spew their inner ignorance or madness by the virtue of just owning an iPhone, I sometimes wish computers were as hard to use as they were back in those days.
I grew up with a Trash-80, but I lived in a small town with no way to identify what a BBS even was. I didn't get to go online until I got my first DOS/Windows 3.1 PC in 1994. I remember my first BBS had the full version of Legend of the Red Dragon (L.O.R.D.) This one girl would raid me and kill me every single night; I'm pretty sure she was the sysop's girlfriend. I miss those days.
It's paradoxical in today's world, but I think this "social media" of 1979 was actually created by an introvert. Think about it: who hates making phone calls? Introverts! Who would rather communicate via text? Introverts!
In general, as an "introvert", I actually prefer calling if I need to talk to someone. Best get it out of the way in a few minutes rather than have someone texting you constantly and blowing up your phone, in my humble opinion. 🤷♂️
@@Kaleidoscope_Instructor see, as an introvert myself, I'm the exact opposite. Texting allows me time to gather my thoughts and decide what all I want to say. I definitely don't want to have to call back because I forgot to say something.
Exactly! When I first started calling BBSs in 1983 I was not only introverted (still am) but also naive and pretty sheltered. BBSs gave me a way of making friends that I never had before. Later, I told a friend that once BBS-like messaging became common that the telephone would become extinct. Years later I finally learned that many (most?) people actually enjoy talking on the telephone. 🤯
Anyone Remembers this??? "Big Blue Disk was a monthly DOS disk magazine that was published by Softdisk Publishing between 1986 and 1998 (also as "On Disk Monthly" and "Softdisk PC".) It carried various games and applications for DOS as well as reviews and various extras. Some of them were freeware or shareware, or demo versions of commercial programs, but other material was original to the disk magazine." We had a TRS 80, or 386SX with Deskmate! I thought it was a video game, but it was a "HOUSE" Interface system to control aspects of the house... ""DeskMate is a software application that provides a graphical operating environment. It originally was for Tandy Corporation's TRSDOS Operating System for their TRS-80 line of computers, but eventually shifted to MS-DOS. Like GEM from Digital Research, it is not a full operating system, but runs on top an existing system. Initial ports only ran on Tandy's PCs such as the Tandy 1000, but later became available for true IBM PC compatibles and competed with early versions of Microsoft Windows. Some non-Tandy software uses DeskMate to provide the user interface via a runtime version of the operating environment for those without it. This includes Activision's The Music Studio[1] and a version of Lotus 1-2-3.[2]""
I still do this stuff over amateur radio. Standard VHF speed for local work is 1200 baud. For High Frequency links, it's from 200-3600 bps. I can use old computers or new ones for it. I do remember linking to a local BBS over a 2400 bps landline modem in the mid-80's before Compuserve and AOL became popular, but there weren't many in the local call area, and my parents weren't going to go for LD charges.
Being online in the 90s was a far superior experience with regard to social networking. Back when you had to know something in order to get online. Today, everything is done for everyone and most people don't know anything about computers or how it works. They are the absolute worst.
I had a lot of fun running a BBS in the early 90's, but the internet slowly shut them all down. The BBS allowed me to interface with others that i had never met and learn about new technology as i became available. Also made a lot of good friends!
It got a lot easier pretty quickly after that though. I had a modem for my Commodore 64 and the phone line connected directly into it and I just opened the terminal program and typed "ATDT18009999999" or whatever the phone number was and, that's it! The BBS starts sending the welcome message and login.... Although.... I hated it when you got this error: BUSY
I remember downloading my first color bitmap image of a tree from a BBS. Took about 15 minutes, but it was a beautiful tree.
Yep, you could go out and mow the lawn and when you got back your image was downloaded.
LOL I was only 13 so I doubt my first one was a tree :)
lol that was my second image. @@cbdude
Were you a nature Starved Office Worker
lmfao. very powerful, thanks
I used an online BBS in 1985. My modem ran at 300 bps. We had email, a single topic forum, and a chat mode with up to 15 people at once typing away (like AOL chat).
And we have online RPG games like LORD
Did you have a real bloody name, coward?
Must have been so cool back in the day. I was -3years old back then😅
long distances phone calls were like 25 cents/minute which was several times of common wages.
@@whatever_else Legend Of the Red Dragon! MEMORIES! Tradewars 2002, Global War, Barney Splat lol, Bordello, Virtual Sysop. Man, those weer good times.
Instead of posting cat pics, arguing with bots, and unwittingly giving away our souls in data, we just enjoyed this form of social media.
i too remember talking to real humans on the internet... a lot like this i guess
We? How old are you dude?!
I’m so old, I know the name of that group Paul McCartney was in before Wings!
Madness! Pure madness!
honestly, does anybody post cat pics anymore? i miss THAT time of the internet, when it was truly blossoming in the early 2000s.
It must’ve felt so special to be able to do this back in 1979. The whole process must’ve been so fulfilling. Thank you for this magical video.
Like messing with HAM radios but way more cutting edge.
@CallOfDrewthulhu Same. People were a hell of a lot nicer too!
It was interesting being part of a world that most people didn't know existed. It did feel special. Then came the internet... and the masses... and commercialization... and it all died.
@@Non-dual-mind1 Especially ones offering free candy! :v
The domestic spies would have been using this or something a little more pumped up - coupled with RTTY.
I was born in the 60's and I think our generation has seen the most amount of technological advancements. I remember seeing my first computer in the early 80's. They weren't much different from the one shown here. Thank you for posting this, you brought back some nostalgia.
My Great-grandmaw was born in 1875, Jefferson Davis was still alive and the Indian wars were still going on in the west. She lived until the early seventies, a time of satellites and space exploration. I remember her well. The past is closer than we think.
Same here, 1983 TI 99 4A, 16 K, color, cartridges, a cassette player or disk drive, educational, financial and game software. BASIC programming. Car Wars, The Attack, Frogger, and QBert! Great books came with it.
I have to agree. Being born in 2000 I’ve seen some incredible shifts in tech, but in the 60s people saw us go from computers being the size of warehouses and the storage being hand stitched together, to carrying that entire room worth of computers 5000x over in their pocket which we use to send funny memes to each other. We went from single lines of text to interactive games in the space of a few years, and now we have artificial intelligence writing our reports for us. We truly are in the age of wonder.
LOVE the sound of that keyboard!! Why can't I find a keyboard that sounds nice anymore..
You can. A mechanical one
google keychron
Another cool thing about dialing in to a BBS is that if you needed to talk to the sysop (the guy who setup the BBS), you could both just pick up the handset and have a normal conversation over the phone and then put the handset back into the modems and continue with the computer. Those old modems didn't really have any kind of handshake so they could start and stop without any problems.
To someone born in late 1992 this video looks like something straight out of a retro futuristic sci-fi movie. I had my first pc in 1999/00, i don't remember the hardware specs but it was a Win 98 SE machine with a PCI 56 kB/s modem. The good ol'days
Windows 95-98 we had both. We used to chat in chat rooms and the time would go so fast, like today lol
Got my first computer about 3 years after that, a Tandy Color Computer with 16k of RAM, a floppy drive for storage, and a 110 baud modem. I remember being so excited when I saved up enough money for a 5.25" floppy drive, and later doing my first soldering on a 64k RAM upgrade (wow! 64k!). And that little computer set the course of my life - I've been programming professionally for 30+ years.
Hey that's a really neat story! I'm kind of the same in this situation...well I'm a RailRoader by heart and trade BUT I did take on many challenges in the PC world since my first 486 I bought at Radio Shack and the next the Pentium 1 released lol so I begged the store to allow me a return to upgrade and they did! WOW...I was so excited!
Every decade or so, I connect with a BBS over the Internet just so I can wonder why it's still there.
I used to telnet into all sorts of collegiate libraries just to look around. It was all text and all I could do was view things, but absolutely fascinated me.
I can remember in 1973, 3rd grade I think it was in Weekly Reader and article about how some day we would have a phone that we could see who we were speaking to. I am happy that prediction came true in my life time. Unfortunately, so did $3+ loaves of bread and gallon bottles of milk.
In 1991 our teacher asked us to draw a picture of something that we thought would exist in the future. I drew a landline phone with a little screen on it so you could see the person you were talking to. It didn't happen quite the way I predicted, but it did happen!
This brings back a lot of memories, because I worked at Radio Shack in 1979, and sold a lot of these in 4K, 16K or with a 32K ram. We couldn't even keep these in stock.
This looks like fun and the slower pace of semi-anonymous communication feels refreshing compared to the everything-all-at-once and current events of modern social media. A good deal of what I get out of social media (presuming I'd simply meet up with my friends offline instead of just tweeting at each other) would be more...my speed like this.
That was just great. Computers were so magical back then, I miss those days. Subscribed.
Really? That was total crap.
I miss those days too. Spending hours messing with jumpers on every board in the computer. Diagnosing IRQ and DMA conflicts. Accidentally blowing the 16 bit side of an ISA slot so only 8 bit cards would work in it. Well this is a bit after 1979, but it's still history. My first computer was a Commodore VIC-20, and I never opened it up. I didn't start messing with the insides until I was 8 when I got an IBM XT with a whopping 20MB hard drive!
I miss many of the games from those days.
Even as a gen Z I'm still fascinated at how people can implement such features with analog devices.
Its even more magical now, we just don’t notice it anymore
I ran a BBS in 92-95 and it was a lot of fun. Games started getting bigger and at the time, 60 minutes was the usual time allotted to give the users at 56k baud. When Doom was released, and I saw someone was downloading it (an hour wasn't long enough), I would boost their time so they could finish the download. I was a member of FidoNet and local users were very chatty with each other.
if you stayed for shut down options menu just in few seconds, the background turns into black & white.
love from:
owen wilson & larry the cable guy in nick KCA
I love these old tech vids. Brings back so many cool memories.
I think we need to go back to this form of social media!
Hell yeah
*Gemini* might be a bit like that
You can be the first, like getting off the Internet and stop watching TH-cam videos. Oh wait, you won't.
How about just meeting and talking to people. That's real.
You should have also mentioned that "back in the day" long distance rates in the day time were anywhere from $0.50 PER MINUTE to $2 PER MINUTE. (Not adjusted for inflation!). That, and in 1982, CompuServe's night time rate was $6 per hour at 300 baud and $12 per hour for 1200 baud.
Great video
From 1988 to 1992 I ran a single line BBS using Wildcat! on a PC-XT clone. Initially it had a 2400 baud modem, but later upgraded to 14,400. We exchanged nightly packages of forum messages with other BBS’s around the country over RelayNet. It was a totally free service I ran as a hobby. Had to shut it down when Indiana Bell decided I should be paying a business rate for the phone line. Couldn’t afford that. But, to be fair, I see their point, since the line was busy 75% of the time around the clock. We fielded 50,000+ calls in its 4 years of operation.
So I fot my 1st modem in 1988 using a Commodore 64 to call up my local BBS. I purchased it used from the head of our High School Computer Club. It was a Direct Connect 50 Baud Modem. Back then I chatted with over a 100 people who had never even seen or heard of a 50 Baud Modem. You seem to know your stuff, so I was wondering if you had ever seen or heard of a modem that slow?
I started with TAG and went to wildcat. Must have started 94/95ish. 4 lines. And I cringe at saying this at my age but I was running 3w33t board.
My forray with BBSes started as a sysop using a WWIV board. It began as a single system at first (XT 5160), then 2 more a year or two after. Later after we upgraded from a 286 to 386SX systems and a colleague joined in, we started a multi line WorldGroup BBS and things were going well until they convinced us to go off-board and dabble with the "internet" for people to do local access. Big mistake!
The fees from AT&T were *astronomical* and we had to revert back to this and shut down the internet completely, because we were drowning in debt and free or paid users alike could not sustain this. I think after about a few months that was all we could do until things changed and prices came down exponentially.
Different times they were...and testing the waters with everything, but let me be real clear that the debts were still the same! lol
You could of gotten around that with an Alarm Line
@@knerduno5942 I should have thought of that since I’m a Bell system alumnus. I worked in the downtown Nashville CO in 69 and 70 right after I got out of USAF.
Roland drum machines could "talk" to one another. You could store tons of memory in a cassette and reload later. I sent a drum track to a buddy over the phone. Neat. 1989
I remember the Roland 808
@@hondotoo I used a 505 ... I did alot of post production effects to it though. Later I used it as a sequencer to drive my keyboard.
I did this in 88 or 89 with my KORG DDD-1. I loved that thing.
Lol what can you specify which one ima have to get that
@@noaharkadedelgado oh god, i should not have read this, as now i have the urge to get one of those. The dark side of being a nerd i guess
1986 I was Sysop for Compu-Tech in NYC. I was using an Apple IIe with a 310bps Modem and a 5 megabyte Hard drive that ran ProDos. - the bionic arm.
Granted this sort of 'social media' was pretty much local, usually confined to a single city or cluster of towns. You have to remember long distance calling (which this is no different than a normal voice-to-voice phone call) was horrendously expensive.
I don’t know about the USA, but I think long-distance calling is still very expensive in most places!
@@thomase13
i don't think there is generally a distinction between long distance and local calls in the US and Canada anymore, as far as i know as long as it's not an international call the cost is the same (international calls are probably are charged extra but I've never tried so i can't say by how much)
But i barely ever use the "phone" part of my phone plan and my memory only goes back a decade so i'm probably not the best person to speak on this
Couldn’t I make a BBS with a 900 number that is relatively cheap and then have it sink with other systems by making its own long-distance call automatically throughout the day?
Couldn’t that be a lot cheaper to the user than dialing in to one system and making a long distance call?
@@askhowiknow5527 There was FidoNet, which is essentially what you are describing. Apparently it still exists... but I don't know how many BBSes there are left.
@@askhowiknow5527 those were called message relay systems. they had to use a common way to talk to one another so didn't become popular until the later part of the 80s. essentially just local bbs but they had a backend part that dialed in upload/download message packets. it was a relatively cheap way to get national/global communications through email and shared interest groups (forums). it was not real time and sometimes severe lag could happen so you wouldn't get fresh messages until a week after they were authored. but it was usually free for the end-user and worked well enough. the only other options that time were commercial services such as Compu$erve which was horrifically expensive to use, or if you were an academic person you may have had internet access allowing usenet to be utilized.
1979 was an *incredible* year! I remember it as though it were yesterday. I also remember the rotary phones. I envied my neighbors who had touch tone phones. They were so hi tech! I felt like my house was the only one that was still using rotary phones. We did finally get touch tone phones, thankfully.
Star Trek The Motion Picture came out that year.
@@MonsterHobbiesModelCarGarage Yes, it did! So did Steve Martin's "The Jerk". That movie was so funny that it redefined what comedy is.
There's something that feels so right about the sound of a big clunky keyboard.
I have one of these keyboards and it feels and sounds just like it's from the 1980s, like as if it was built by a bricklayer.
m.media-amazon.com/images/I/61ftwezFrGL._AC_SL1000_.jpg
I remember all of this like it was yesterday! It certainly wasn't easy, but at least it wasn't spying on us 24/7!
They're always watching and listening. I would if I could.
That was my first computer! It also brought back memories of fidonet. Computers would call each other and pass an email through local calls. That way you could email someone far away. I used to correspond to someone in California USA from Ontario Canada. Back then it was amazing. Today, not so much!
I was active on BBSes in the 80s/early 90s using a Commodore computer. I was running at 1200 baud and we actually had text in color. BBSes were actually a lot more enjoyable than modern social media, people online were just different back then.
Yeah, the barrier of entry was definitely a plus for maintaining the sanity of users.
People weren't any different, the population was just self-selecting to only be other white men like yourself.
@@AureliusR .... don't do that...😒
@@AureliusR imagine being born black woohahaha
Yeah, they were usually mature and smart. Once the internet turned into a huge flashing colorful billboard, all the normal people joined and ruined everything.
TRS-80 was the first computer I used. I remember the programs came on cassette tapes, which were quite slow to load and finicky to the point they might not even load the first time you tried.
Ran a Wildcat BBS for years back in the day. Brings back memories.
I worked at a computer dev shop in the early 80s which specialized on hard drive integration with TRS-80 Mod IIs. We ran a FORUM-80 BBS on a Mod II.
I still have my original Mod I in storage.
I'm impressed your phone company still supported rotary dial phones in 2018.
I remember those acoustic modems but I never got one, by the time I got a modem you could plug them in directly. BBS's were a thing into the mid 90s and I miss them sometimes.
I bought a modem shortly after getting my Commodore 64 in the summer of 1983 and started connecting to BBSs right away. It was so much fun. And for the first time in my life I started making a lot of friends since, with a few exceptions, all the BBSs were local. I also expanded my software collection by at least a hundredfold. 😉
I started in 1982 with a Radio Shack Model 3. My setup was just like this one. Good memories.
Thanks for the demonstration. This was actually a while before my time and I'm rapidly becoming a geezer as it is. Still I find old tech increasingly fascinating as time goes on and this type of video always brings a smile to my face.
I used to use a 300 baud modem with a Commodore 64 six or seven years after this. At that point, you could connect a phone line directly to the modem and it could dial and answer. Fun times on BBS's! But the term "social media" wasn't around. I hesitate to call it that now. Just like back then, I was "calling up BBS's to check for something new to download, new posts, maybe upload a file or post something..."
I'm proud to be part of this era of telecommunications. Running a BBS from 1982 to 1998 was the best. Today's kids have no clue what it was really like to actually converse, share, and contribute.
Social media in the age of disco! That's pretty incredible looking back on it! 😂
Maybe I'm just a big old nerd, but I think I'd like today's social media better if it was more like this. This seems like a fun hobby rather than an overwhelming headache inducer like today's social media.
One thing finally clicked with me today. This was just the telephone network, not the internet. In 96 my University provided 'free internet dial-in access'. Sounded cool, so I got my fathers work laptop, and went to the computer lab to ask for help. I was given a giant stack of documentation, including instructions on, how to dial-in and get internet access using SLIP/SLIRP, and a list of MUD-like telnet addresses, etc. After you dialed in, you could use the service as a 'telenet', I think, and have it forward calls to other numbers. That was interesting, but I couldnt figure out how to use it. The Internet already existed by this time, and AOL, Compuserve, etc were everywhere. 28.8 baud was the new hotness... but most the dial-up banks were still using 14.4 or slower. I do everything from building computers with TTL logic, to coding with assembly, but having never been exposed to the pre-intenet era, it just never clicked with me that there existed an era of ...something different.
I love this video for one reason... I actually am familiar with the TRS-80 shown here. Growing up as a kid in the 80s, my father bought a TRS-80 Model II for our house's first computer. It was severely out-of-date when he bought it, but he was still proud of it. We had a line printer with it, and yes, the "huge" 8MB hard drive. So this is a total blast from the past for me. Thanks for posting it. We never went online with it though, but had the equipment to do it.
When I was stationed in South Korea in 1991, I set up a BBS in my dorm room. At the time, I think there were only about a dozen BBS there.
Back in the 80’s we had a Radio shack color Tandy computer key board, data was stored on a tape thru a tape recorder. Our tv screen had a converter switch which attached at the back, which served as the ‘computer screen’. We had a fat book full of codes. What ever we wanted to see on the screen had to be coded exactly as read.
Wow. I forgot how quickly the connections were made on those old modems. (It helps when it doesn't have to spend time trying to negotiate a faster speed - it just immediately started connecting at its one speed.)
Oh the tones and handshaking of 300..to 1200...to2400...to 9600...to higher.....I think I still can decode the handshaking of two modems negotiating.
Linda Doune I used to be able to whistle the right tone to convince a modem I was a 1200 baud modem.
@@AnonymousFreakYT That's funny. I remember listening to Polish pasta (just like any other copy/creepypasta on TH-cam) about hacker group called Sendbajt (bajt - byte in Polish) it was about friends and thier wifes from church choir. The husbands were able to decode the 0's and 1's and one of them knew every assembler commands. I'll send u the link in the next comment
@@AnonymousFreakYT Sadly the original was deleted, but there"s alot of reuploads witg the OG lector - th-cam.com/video/Fv82EnCbKWM/w-d-xo.html
I learned BASIC on my school's PETs. And played Lemonade Stand.
I loved the heavy, clicky sound of the keys. Unlike the PET in this video, our PETs had external cassette-players & disk-drives, and large, black keys.
Long before 1979, telegraph operators chatted with one another and even used abbreviations not unlike what was later used in IRC, twitter and FB. There are still lists of these that can be found online.
Ahhh IRC. Those were the days.
Or cb radios...
Dude. I had both of those phones! I remember all of this!
I remember reading about the various feature charges on the phone bill in the local phone book when I was a kid. We had touch tone dialing for as long as I could remember. I was born in Dec. 1969, and I always remember seeing touch-tone phones at home, but my grandparents had both touch-tone and rotary phones in their houses. I got my first modem in 1983, and it was 300 baud and direct-connect with automatic dialing, but I do remember seeing the acoustic couplers in the Radio Shack catalogs. I got a 2400-baud modem in 1987 because a BBS I liked to call was going to stop allowing 300-baud callers.
You were definitely ahead of the curve. I remember the switch-over from rotary to touch phones in the mid-80s in Europe.
I am inpressed how can it still work after all this years 🌞
That Was Really Cool! I Got Started In The Early '90's & Remember Calling BBS's With Telix Using DOS.
OMG, I remember that program! IIRC, Telix was commercial software and I made it a point to buy it. If so, worth every penny!
And I used BlueWave for mail packets :)
Loved my TRS-80 CoCo! As a 12 year old playing a text adventure game on Compuserve, to me, was the equivalent of men landing on the moon!
Ah the memories. I started calling BBSs when I got my 1200 baud modem.
For those who were not there and didnt live through this at the time, you'll never truly understand what you missed
Now do a video about influencers in 1979's social media!
In 1988, I was sick from school one day so I hooked up my 16 bps coupler and logged into my computer science class. We learned machine language and c++.
The TRS-80 setup is very professional-looking. Must have cost a fortune in the early 80s
I love the sound of that TRS-80 keyboard!!
In ASCII text :
"Your car warranty is about to expire. Type Y to accept"
I'm 63 my parents had one of the first Radio Shacks. I remember the Tandy 2000
🤣 I dialed the number just to annoy my dogs! They were very interested and confused; totally worth it.
Thank you for archiving and documenting this bit of digital history
I don't know about the US, but in Europe some BBS's used the Videotex standard (8 colours, 40x25 characters). The modem was 1200 baud downlink, 75 baud uplink.
This is seriously fascinating.
wow , that thing is still working !!
I used to use Amateur Radio BBSes over something called Packet Radio, where the connections were made over VHF two-way radios through a Terminal Node Controller. It looked very similar to this. We had 1200bps speeds, however. Messages could be sent all over the world and we didn't even need a phone line.
I just bought new equipment to do this within this past year!
Wow, a real live TRS-080. Lots of memories there.
There were dozens of BBS in Moscow in late 90s. I used 2400bps Zoom modem lend from my coed to play VGA Planets on BBS of another coed. Spent all my nights ringing all around the city, exploring other people warez. Very similar to what is in this video. But with better performance. Found some new friends and one of them gave away to me 14400 noname modem. That was a giant leap of speed boost! 6 times faster! Only two times later I been that fascinated about comm speed upgrade again: when ADSL came and later with ethernet.
I was born in 1985 and even in school I never saw one of these. This thing is so cool!! You have no idea how bad I want to try this thing out. I love nostalgic tech.
In French class circa 1997 (so the internet was around a known, but hadn't quite blown up yet) we watched a video in French class. We were supposed to listen and answer questions, but at one point the characters used a sort of text-phone thing with a monochrome screen to send an email. Most of the boys immediately switched over to "Cool! What is that thing? Does every house in France have it?"
That thing was called a Minitel 😀
Yes, referenced by the character “80’s Robot” in the Muppets movie
In 1982, we were asked to draw a picture of how we will communicate in the year 2000. I simply drew a square with little squares inside how we can touch screen. Pretty close, ipad came not long after year 2000.
That clunky keyboard sound really takes me back.
Imagine being cancelled in 1979
Maybe if you insulted religion too much but i think that by that time they already loosened up.
Nostalgic. I got on my first BBS with a TRS-80 Model 16b (closely related to the Model 2) and a 300 baud modem. Pure exhilaration at the time!
I remember getting online at Maryville University (Missouri) and connecting to Columbia University. The biggest "thrill" was the fact you didn't have to pay long-distance prices to communicate. I remember freaking out the instructors because I knew ASCII code, so I would send "invisible" characters and BELLs -- it was so easy making it look like the computer for having a meltdown. That was probably 1980.
today people will just copy paste the invisible ASCII text
@@Vichu. A lot of that is taken care of with the programming nowadays. They used to be control codes for the screen and/or printer. The ones we "see" the most today are the return characters.
@@archangel_one and the thing we "see" are not displayed in every device. That same invisible ASCII code is not visible on other device. Also take flag emoji for example where the flag is not visible in PC but instead two alphabet pieced together
the keyboard sounds so satisfying
My high-school had a room full or TRS 80's. They were the silver single form units with the monitor and keyboard in one. Also a reset button was right on the keyboard in a very inconvenient place. I remember hitting it a few times after finishing my work. Not fun.
Same with me, I went to high school in the '80s. We also had a whole room full of model 3 TRS-80s. Friday was video game day. Remember playing asteroids on that thing? How about that stupid dancing demon demonstation? lol! The first class was basic computers, but then I took a second class where we learned how to debug our discs lol. I remember debugging (editing) the asteroids program so that instead of little graphical asteroids floating around, it would say words like s*** and f*** haha
Thanks for the trip down memory lane!
Amazing video featuring computer tech from an era when computer tech was fun! I remember the TRS-80 well though never owned one myself.
In the late 1980’s I recall my computer science teacher using an acoustic coupler in front of the entire class. He was trying to show how the world would communicate online in the future. I recall everyone clutching their pearls back then. I always enjoyed using my TRS-80 - dang the sound of those keys clanking! I recall my TRS-80 being one combined terminal. I know they probably had several models. Would you say AOL streamlined the process of dial up in 1995? Making it more widely available. Oh the good ole days of dial up! By the way I still have my black rotary phone 📞 issued from Pacific Bell. Memories! Excellent video!
I was going online 1986 and it was still the same - at least here in Western Germany. i have checked 2 to 5 different BBS per day with my Atari ST and my 300 Baud acoustic coupler.
Weist Du noch, was da die Minute gekostet hat? War bestimmt nicht ganz billig.
@@Jiggeer86 mir spuckt da gerade was von 8 bzw. 12 Minuten für 23 Pfennig im Kopf herum (West-Deutschland - Haupt/ Nebenzeit im Ortsnetz.) „Ferngespräche“ habe ich vermieden ... Wobei Westberlin bis Anfang der 90er keinen Ortstakt hatte - also für 23 Pf innerhalb von Westberlin ohne Zeitbeschränkung. Manche hatten das auch als Standleitung missbraucht - als 27DM für die Grundgebühr und 23 Pf für den einen Anruf. im Monat. als ich 1987 nach Westberlin zog hatte ich schnell einen Doppelanschluss (2 Leitungen mit 2 Nummern) weil ja die eine immer mit Akustikkoppler und später Modem besetzt war und man mich sonst nicht mehr tel. erreichen konnte.
ISDN kam dann später in den 90ern ....
@@dl8cy Danke, das waren bestimmt einmalige Erfahrungen von damals.
@@Jiggeer86naja - an manches erinnert man sich gern ....und der ein oder andere Name von damals taucht heute auch noch auf Twitter oder in der Tagesschau auf.
"Einmalige Erfahrungen" machen wir doch auch gerade ... wer hätte den vor 10 Jahren gedacht das hier nur 700 km entfernt wieder richtig Krieg herrscht wegen eines Irren aus Moskau?
@@Jiggeer86 Ortsgespraeche in Berlin waren 30 Pfennig pro Anruf - egal wieviele kB Du uebertraegst :)
Great nostalgia --- takes me back to those days. I say 300-baud acoustic coupler today, and no one knows what I'm talking about!!
Back in the day when only nerds with no friends had computers.
Very interesting! I use to have one desktop as that at school! All my software was stored in a normal audio tape , connected to the desktop. Time Ago! Thaks for sharing
Oh man I need that T-shirt
Kevin Phillips in what T-shirt are you talking about?
@@kattrakee ATDT No Carrier
I'm getting major ASMR vibes from the typing.
It's all very good-and-well to look back now and say "wasn't it quaint? nowhere near as easy as it is today", but believe me...back then, it was mind-blowing!
Nostalgia overload! My 1st computer was a TRS-80 model II! We had a modem using compuserve in 1979😁 btw I learned BASIC in TRS-DOS with model II😁 quite different than MS-DOS back then😋 Tandy incorporated the MS-DOS, effective killing TRS-DOS
This is so much better than twitter and Facebook combined. We’ve undergone devolution
No, you just arent using it right. Facebook is pretty just family photos. Printing photos is expensive and hard drives corrupt sometimes. Or a natural desaster hits and you lose your whole damn pc.
In 1979, I was graduating high school. Computers were limited at that time to the library as a reference for material only. I remember learning how to use a microfiche to look up books, authors and subjects for class reports. Everything was eather hand written, or typed. I didn't see another computer until 1990 when I got a job at the same school I graduated from.
I'm old. I've done that. Even on a DECWriter. You need to clean the dust off the bezel of your nice Model II. Thanks for enlightening the Millenials though! With all the idiocy on the Internet these days, conspiracy theories, and people that never learned critical thinking able to spew their inner ignorance or madness by the virtue of just owning an iPhone, I sometimes wish computers were as hard to use as they were back in those days.
I met one of my best friends this way in 1985. Sadly, he passed away earlier this year.
Sorry for your loss, he must've been awesome. 😔
I grew up with a Trash-80, but I lived in a small town with no way to identify what a BBS even was. I didn't get to go online until I got my first DOS/Windows 3.1 PC in 1994. I remember my first BBS had the full version of Legend of the Red Dragon (L.O.R.D.) This one girl would raid me and kill me every single night; I'm pretty sure she was the sysop's girlfriend. I miss those days.
How did you know it was a girl? You got catfished.
Ahh memories. Thanks for this trip back in time. The good old days. As long as you had the time to spare.
It's paradoxical in today's world, but I think this "social media" of 1979 was actually created by an introvert. Think about it: who hates making phone calls? Introverts! Who would rather communicate via text? Introverts!
In general, as an "introvert", I actually prefer calling if I need to talk to someone. Best get it out of the way in a few minutes rather than have someone texting you constantly and blowing up your phone, in my humble opinion. 🤷♂️
@@Kaleidoscope_Instructor see, as an introvert myself, I'm the exact opposite. Texting allows me time to gather my thoughts and decide what all I want to say. I definitely don't want to have to call back because I forgot to say something.
@@JackLoyal93 there's certainly merit in that.
Exactly! When I first started calling BBSs in 1983 I was not only introverted (still am) but also naive and pretty sheltered. BBSs gave me a way of making friends that I never had before. Later, I told a friend that once BBS-like messaging became common that the telephone would become extinct. Years later I finally learned that many (most?) people actually enjoy talking on the telephone. 🤯
Anyone Remembers this??? "Big Blue Disk was a monthly DOS disk magazine that was published by Softdisk Publishing between 1986 and 1998 (also as "On Disk Monthly" and "Softdisk PC".) It carried various games and applications for DOS as well as reviews and various extras. Some of them were freeware or shareware, or demo versions of commercial programs, but other material was original to the disk magazine." We had a TRS 80, or 386SX with Deskmate! I thought it was a video game, but it was a "HOUSE" Interface system to control aspects of the house... ""DeskMate is a software application that provides a graphical operating environment. It originally was for Tandy Corporation's TRSDOS Operating System for their TRS-80 line of computers, but eventually shifted to MS-DOS. Like GEM from Digital Research, it is not a full operating system, but runs on top an existing system. Initial ports only ran on Tandy's PCs such as the Tandy 1000, but later became available for true IBM PC compatibles and competed with early versions of Microsoft Windows.
Some non-Tandy software uses DeskMate to provide the user interface via a runtime version of the operating environment for those without it. This includes Activision's The Music Studio[1] and a version of Lotus 1-2-3.[2]""
Unfortunately, I remember most of those things.
FozzTexx: it is 1979
Me: I wish!
This piece of hardware still looks and sounds cool.
I still do this stuff over amateur radio. Standard VHF speed for local work is 1200 baud. For High Frequency links, it's from 200-3600 bps. I can use old computers or new ones for it. I do remember linking to a local BBS over a 2400 bps landline modem in the mid-80's before Compuserve and AOL became popular, but there weren't many in the local call area, and my parents weren't going to go for LD charges.
Being online in the 90s was a far superior experience with regard to social networking. Back when you had to know something in order to get online. Today, everything is done for everyone and most people don't know anything about computers or how it works. They are the absolute worst.
I had a lot of fun running a BBS in the early 90's, but the internet slowly shut them all down. The BBS allowed me to interface with others that i had never met and learn about new technology as i became available. Also made a lot of good friends!
A rather involved procedure but somehow quite satisfying!
It got a lot easier pretty quickly after that though. I had a modem for my Commodore 64 and the phone line connected directly into it and I just opened the terminal program and typed "ATDT18009999999" or whatever the phone number was and, that's it! The BBS starts sending the welcome message and login.... Although.... I hated it when you got this error: BUSY
I remember back in the day when Radio Shack was THE most awesome spot for any electronics. I miss those days, life was so much simpler.
Always loved the term Trash 80 because of the actual cult following it has. Always looked like a fun computer.