Yeah it’s great watching this and reliving a large portion of my teenage years. Especially since I was the only one of my friends who knew anything about BBSs and the like.
Random nostalgia:
C64 BBS’s running on C-NET 10.0 featuring “MCI” codes in messages that allowed cursor animation and colors. CCGMS was my terminal of choice.
Editing C-NET BBS software for all sorts of fancy mods since everything other than the actual modem code was written in BASIC.
My parents bought me my own phone line after returning from a vacation where they were never able to call home to reach us due to me being on BBS’s all the time.
A publisher of a local hacker zine in Minneapolis distributed it by recording his 300 baud modem on his answering machine. You’d call up, flip on your modem, and you’d start seeing the zine.
I ran my FidoNet BBS on my Amiga 500 decked out with 2 hard drives and 4 megs of ram. It was great as a precursor to my Usenet days.
I miss TAF meetings and conventions. I also miss being able to read more than ten monthly ST magazines, not including the ones dedicated to gaming.
I remember getting up early in the morning before school to get in my LoRD adventuring quota. The clock must have reset during the day while I was at school, because I was able to adventure again when I got home.
What kind of porn was available online in those days? I remember digging around through folders on our XT clone until I came across some digitized pics of nekkid women and there was also an animated one where you could hit + or - to adjust the rate of jiggling breasts. Kind of underwheliming, really. I ended up sticking with my dad’s stash of Playboys instead.
Does anyone remember their AT commands? The dialer my dad used on the ST didn’t save any settings, so I always had to program them in before dialing so I wouldn’t (or would) get disconnected when someone called in.
I was 9 or 10 at the time, and I remember being able to recall all the commands in high school, but I can’t remember them at all now…
I remember a handful of AT commands, but what stands out most was being amazed that the Courier HST had built in AT command HELP! Full screens listing what each command did. It was helpful because they had a lot of esoteric commands (like AT&K) that changed HST compression settings.
What was ATS0=1? Turn on sound? For some reason I remember that one and ATZ.
Man, remember posting to Fidonet and it would take a day for your message to get out, and then someone would respond and you’d see that two days later? It was like slow-mo conversation.
Off the top of my head I only remember ATDT(number) and +++/ATH0. All of the terminal emulation programs I used had macro capability so there weren’t any other sequences I’d manually enter on a regular basis.
There were a handful of large BBSs that would hire models to create their own adult content. I didn’t subscribe to them, but a few of the BBSs I visited either had access to that adult content or it was just plain stolen.
The images were 14k friendly, 640x480 or smaller. Image quality wasn’t great, they were grainy. The images were very tame by today’s standards usually a lone model posing or rarely two models. Fetish stuff was very rare.
My wife and I maintained a forwarding line for local BBS in exchange for free accounts. One of the denizens that knew about phone hardware came over & wired it for free, then we just had to have the phone company activate it & pay the monthly bill. It was set to forward all calls to another number, which in turn forwarded them to the BBS, so there was an extensive free calling area.
At our wedding reception, we had a table or two of just BBS people. They were kind of different from the rest of the guests, as you might imagine, and it was really difficult to explain how we met them to the other guests.
NSFW (just language) comic I always think of when people talk about the early days of Internet porn: bonequest: dipping into admiral krag It is fun to see who reacts to mentions of Admiral Krag these days.
That’s the hang-up/disconnect if I remember correctly. I think the ATS0=1 is sound, because you didn’t want the dial-tone/dialing/connection sound going out loud all the time.
AT&F (factory default reset)
ATZ (soft reboot)
ATH (hang up)
ATDT (+phone number) for touchtone
ATDP (+phone number) for pulse dialing if you mom was too cheap to pay for tone.
AT&V (view config)
ATM0 (speaker off)
ATM1 (speaker on)
14.4K Practical Peripherals (the white tower model with the LCD screen!) on IBM AT clone.
28.8K IBM AT.
Sometime during the 2400 baud phase, I launched my BBS, which lasted for about 10 years, running on various BBS packages along the way: PCBoard, WWIV, Vision-X, Liquid “something or other”.
Yep, plus as an above poster just mentioned, you could get a discount as a SysOp. I knew someone that did that, and it wasn’t an instant discount. Someone from USR actually logged into his BBS to ensure that he wasn’t putting up some kind of front just to get the discount.
