Subj : Re: SSH on BBSes
To   : boraxman
From : tenser
Date : Wed Apr 20 2022 06:18:46

On 15 Apr 2022 at 01:52p, boraxman pondered and said...
 
 bo> The Timesharing system would be more suitable in say a work environment,
 bo> an academic environment, somewhere where people are working together. 
 bo> If the systems are workstations, linked, it makes more sense.  You can
 bo> work on the machine and communicate at the same interface.  Indeed, this
 bo> was the original intention.  Talk wasn't added to unix just so that
 bo> people could use a terminal only to talk, it was for people sharing the
 bo> computing resources to talk.

This is a take I don't really understand.  A BBS-style captive user
interface can be built on top of a timesharing system, but doing the
inverse is much, much harder.

To quote Dennis Ritchie:

   "What we wanted to preserve was not just a good environment
    in which to do programming, but a system around which a
    fellowship could form.  We knew from experience that the
    essence of communal computing, as supplied by remote-access,
    time-shared machines, is not just to type programs into a
    terminal instead of a keypunch, but to encourage close
    communication."

In other words, time-sharing systems provide a platform for
communications.

Workstations, of course, were a reaction against timesharing
systems, and `talk` was for network communications; `write`
predates that significantly.

 bo> But if the access to the terminal, the machine is intended ONLY for
 bo> communication, the BBS is better.
 bo> 
 bo> I've used both, the BBS extensively, but also a shared public Unix.  The
 bo> former, in terms of usability is light years ahead (and in some ways,
 bo> ahead of even Social Media)_.

This seems highly subjective, and moreover, with a suitable
facade over the command line, it'd be indistinguishable.

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A47 2021/12/24 (Linux/64)
 * Origin: Agency BBS | Dunedin, New Zealand | agency.bbs.nz (21:1/101)

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