** Trisk ** you cracked me up. Thanks for that!
My first Baud was 1200. I will never forget my first time on a local bbs… I was hit on for a “hot chat” INSTANTLY. And soon learned that this was the primary interest of 90% of the men and boys online.
But I met Pump Action Gerbil on a BBS, so I will always have fond memories. We were playing TeleArena…anyone else ever play that?
I was poor and couldn’t afford the computer. Shoot me. 
Oh, and I was… 17 in 1985.
Oh, to be young again, eh Saint? 
Those halcyon days of unfettered flirting with the three females out of, say, 500 people… mmm
Oh HELL yeah. Starnet. First 8 node BBS here in the Central Jackson area. Everyone was either Gay, Lesbian, Perverted or leaving quickly. I ended up learning quite a bit. Starnet had about an even male:female ratio.
The second one we had, Mississippi Online, I helped sysop for awhile. Most fun I ever had was lurking, invisibly, trying to catch one guy flirting with his underage GF’s. I got him one night, but good. We used to call this guy “Sockboy”, because of a comment he made elsewhere.*
Those were the days. MO led to a few divorces, no marrages, and probably a lot of happy faces. People either fell into the sex starved or “l33t” teenage guys group. Being an older male, I jumped at the chance to flirt.
And one wonders why I have a dim view of teenage guys sometimes? Most of those guys wouldn’t have been able to seduce a wet paper bag, much less a live female. But I paid attention.
*[sub] This one is obvious, if you can think of an alternate use for socks on guys. New meaning to the term “sockpuppet”.[/sub]
Man… you’re all so… old.
I was but a babe in arms… (well, not quite)…
I generally reserve the “old fart” label for the REAL old farts like some Univac guys I know, and in return, they call me a young whippersnapper. I actually started very young, I was punching cards and writing FORTRAN when I was about 10 or 11 years old. I’m not that old, I’m only 42, I just happened to be lucky enough to attend jr. high right across the street from one of the largest computer facilities in the US, and a math teacher who was into computers. You know, I was once suspended from jr. hi for one day for sneaking out during recess to use the card punch machines next door…
I think I might have Chas beat, or at least tied.
My first online usage was a 110 baud Gandalf Driver connected to an old HP2000 mainframe, using an ASR-33. I learned to program on that, in about 1974. Later, I set up one of the first BBS’s in Alberta, in 1979. I was a member of a homebrew computer club, and I remember the heady thrill of getting our Rockwell SC/MP single board microcomputer to connect to a teletype and print ‘hello’. Whoo hoo.
Later, I started a company that produced BBS software, and ran that for 8 years. We made add-on software for a package called the MajorBBS, which was a great multi-user BBS system. We wrote adventure games, business software, an online poker game (beat the online casinos by about 10 years…), and a whole lot of other stuff, including custom software for outfits like the United States Government and Microsoft.
Hey, another oldtimer! You’re pretty close, but I’ve still got you beat. My university wrote much of the HP2000 OS and ISTR playing around on it sometime around 1972 or 73. I remember those old Gandalf boxes, we used em connected to clunky old Carterphone terminals, which were IBM Selectric mechanisms (remember the old golf ball printhead?) gussied up to be an interactive terminal. It was a total kluge, but it worked.
When I really want to trounce people over their first computer, I pull the Digicomp 1 out of my hat. It has a cult following now. I must have been about 7 years old when I played with that computer kit, it operated with plastic cogs and levers and could perform real binary math and run simple Turing Machine programs. I recall a friend and I pooling our allowance to buy it from Edmund Scientific, ISTR it cost us about $6. I traded my share to my friend for a few packages of firecrackers when I got bored with it. And now they’re worth hundreds of bucks. Damn.
But we’re really looking for BBS stuff, I suppose. And I still can beat most anyone, I used the old PLATO IV system around 71 or 72 which had the first BBS-like features, and was particularly notable for the first online chat system, Talkomatic. I’ve never seen anything that came close to Talkomatic for sheer practicality. It was a classic design, someday I’ll have to replicate it on modern hardware. And the PLATO IV system is a legend in its own right.
Been there, done that, co-sysop’d a board, and remembered when paying $800 for a 40 megabyte hard drive was considered the height of luxury.
Hell, my best friend and I even wrote our own BBS software in BASIC, after dissecting and cannibalizing code from a “commercial” BBS program. Doing it ourselves allowed us to put in new features, like justified messages in the bulletin boards, a user-credit system, and on-line “multiplayer” games (multiplayer in the sense that you logged in, made your moves, then logged out and let other people make theirs).
It was all rather geeky, but it beat doing drugs.
Bean Counter - if you’re still around -
Hubby (The Warden) and I (Blondie) ran The State Penn in Belleville, IL. Funny to find a mention of it online (even 17+ years later).
Thanks for the memories!
Aha, I did post in this thread before.
Kinda surprised, I would have at least expected one doper to have been on the Well. My nascent BBS days were limited to a couple of one line boards. I caught the buzz and at the time, computer prices had been coming down and I finally took the plunge and got my own telephone landline. Once I got on compuserve, I doubt I even looked twice at a BBS. Fidonet was cool though.
I do remember those days of external dialup BBS; mainly as long bouts of waiting. BBs were about the only way to contact others in the general public, and the email system did not exist in the same sense it does now. For the most part there were no cell phones, just clunky radio phones in my neck of the woods.
Of course the computer that I used had to be upgraded with self installed memory…I was able to get my Apple to actually run three programs at (sorta) the same time - again, slowly. And of course there was only text available, with no icons on screens to click on.
Every small advancement was celebrated, and adopted if possible. We sometimes felt we belonged to a very small number of users; I had no friends who were into computers, although I knew a math teacher that had a PC. But most folks did like to play Pong if possible (I didn’t have it on my Apple) and found it quaint that a few of us thought computers would become common and easier and even more fun. And they did.
I really don’t miss those days.
Been there, done that, owned a 300 baud modem.
We had two running out of student’s dorm rooms when I was at college (well – one was – not sure about the other). I ran one for a bit myself but it never really got any users.
Then we got one running on the school mainframe – I eventually got my boss to make my the sysop (I worked for computing services for a few semesters).
My first modem was 1200 baud and I used it to dial in to one of the two lines to the mainframe (there were more 300 baud lines), though getting a 9600 baud terminal wasn’t that long of a walk.
Not really on the BB, but we had occasional CB (like IRC) chat sessions on the mainframe.
Good times
Brian
I call BS. That is not the protocol described in RFC1149.
I ran a BBS in the late-1980’s for a Minnesota Governor candidate. Mostly it was a site where you could download his position papers on issues, and ask to be contacted by the campaign volunteers in your area. Not much actual messaging between people. (That was leading-edge technology back then.)
Used commercial Wildcat software, but somewhat modified (restricted).
Had to modify my house a bit for this. Ran extra power lines to the office (spare bedroom) + added phone wiring. (People still notice that and ask ‘why are there 8 phone jacks in that bedroom wall?’. We geeks overestimated how many voters would use the system – ended up never having more than 3 phone lines in use. (Probably most BBSers weren’t old enough to vote yet!)