So…in my nonfiction book, I’m writing about the way that my grandpa had BBS service through Compuserv brought into the house in early 1988. This was in Minneapolis, and Compuserv had been advertising in the Star and Tribune for at least a year. I don’t remember anything about how it actually happened, though. I had just come home after months in the hospital after a horrible car accident, which probably has a lot to do with it, but I don’t know if I knew exactly how it was done then anyway. Does anyone know what the exact procedure would have been at the time? Thanks for any and all help…
Thanks. Did anyone from Compuserv (or wherever) actually come out to the house? Grandpa worked for Cray, so I don’t think he would have had any trouble with getting the modem…
There was not anything for anyone at Compuserve (with an e) to do at your house. If you had a computer, a modem, and a phone line, you were set. In the early days you needed to call a human at Compuserve to set up your account, but later you could do that directly through the service.
No, the c-serve disks, along with AOL and Prodigy, were pretty much given away at any computer type place. Load the floppy into A: drive and the software was installed. You launched the program and signed up for the account.
Modems themselves had come along way, it was no longer the 300 baud rubber thing you pressed the telephone reciever into, the majority of the modems came from the factory installed, 2400 baud for the most part. The move from 2400 to 56k was only a matter of a few years.
The hard part was really to find a local access point, so you were being charged with long distance if you were not careful, or like AOL, it automatically grabbed a number that was available, regardless if it was a local or not.
Back in the pre-USB days you couldn’t just plug new hardware into your computer. You had to open up the case and find an empty “slot”. There were also little metal strips in the back of your computer and you’d remove one of these that was next to the empty slot you planned to use. Your new hardware (like a modem) would have this plastic card with a bunch of circuits on it. You’d slide the card into one of the empty slots and the end of the card would have a plug that would line up with the hole in the back of your computer. You’d then put your case back on your computer and connect your modem into the new plug you had just installed.
A phone line. A computer with a thing called a MODEM (modulater/de-modulater), a program to dial-in to various BBS (Bulletin Board Service) who usually had phone lines available out of kindred spirit and community (such as the SDMB website which apparently developed from AOL. )
Pre-Official “Internet” like me involved dialing in to various BBS’s to peruse messages much like here.
Research FIDO, BBS, AOL. CompuServe, etc.
I am sure others here chime in as well.
Another point not to forget is that it was quite expensive. Local BBS’s were often very barebones operations with little to no content. Accessing the few bigger BBS’s was often via long distance numbers and it was billed as a voice long distance call @ x cents or dollars per minute when connected. CompuServe had some local access numbers for urban areas but the service itself was not cheap.
I used ExecPC BBS back in the day and it eventually went to the internet.
Back then, a BBS referred to an individual computer bulletin board – something like the SDMB, though with text-only software. You’d dial the BB via your modem (for older modems, you actually put the phone handset into the device, though by 1988 you either had a serial modem or a card.
You’d dial a local number. Some of the boards were local only, but some connected to a network; Fidonet was a big one. Thus you’d see posts from all over the world, and your posts would be sent to the various Fidonet BBSs overnight (when phone rates were cheapest).
The big difference between Compuserve and the BBSs was that Compuserve (and AOL and GEnie* and the Well) had you dial a local number that connected to their servers.
*GEnie used General Electric’s corporate servers, with a pricing structure that encouraged people to log on outside of business hours, thus using their down time.
I’m sure you did, but that’s irrelevant. RS-232 ports have been standard equipment since before CompuServe was around. USB didn’t show up until the late 90s. The overwhelming majority of people using dialup terminal services in the 80s and 90s were using external modems connected via serial port.
That wasn’t my experience. Most people I knew used internal modems. As I recall, they were cheaper, lower maintenance, and generally had higher baud rates.
By the days of Compuserve, you were dealing with an Internet Service Provider in the traditional. There was a lot of content that was still firewalled off and only available to Compuserve subscribers, but you could pull up a browser and type in a URL to get to web site.
A true BBS (the way I grew up with the term) was like dialing a phone number to connect to a particular website. It would be better to say you were connecting to “an extranet” not “the Internet.”
This was my experience in 1988. My first modem was a 1200 baud that connected to my Apple //c’s serial port. Man those were the days. Put the Proterm floppy disk into the computer and boot up, dial into the university unix system and archie/gopher/netnews/irc all night. Just you and text, that was it. Running a tcp stack on your home computer wasn’t even on the radar.
I remember later when I got my 14400 baud and my Amiga running ka9q I was in heaven. I could have netnews open in one window and irc open in another. !! wow !!
Most of the people I knew back then were using external modems that connected to an RS-232 port.
Did anyone from Compuserv (or wherever) actually come out to the house? Grandpa worked for Cray, so I don’t think he would have had any trouble with getting the modem…