Subj : Re: SSH on BBSes
To   : tenser
From : boraxman
Date : Wed Apr 20 2022 19:43:34

 te>  bo> The Timesharing system would be more suitable in say a work environme
 te>  bo> an academic environment, somewhere where people are working together.
 te>  bo> If the systems are workstations, linked, it makes more sense.  You ca
 te>  bo> work on the machine and communicate at the same interface.  Indeed, t
 te>  bo> was the original intention.  Talk wasn't added to unix just so that
 te>  bo> people could use a terminal only to talk, it was for people sharing t
 te>  bo> computing resources to talk.
 te> 
 te> This is a take I don't really understand.  A BBS-style captive user
 te> interface can be built on top of a timesharing system, but doing the
 te> inverse is much, much harder.
 te> 
 te> To quote Dennis Ritchie:
 te> 
 te>    "What we wanted to preserve was not just a good environment
 te>     in which to do programming, but a system around which a
 te>     fellowship could form.  We knew from experience that the
 te>     essence of communal computing, as supplied by remote-access,
 te>     time-shared machines, is not just to type programs into a
 te>     terminal instead of a keypunch, but to encourage close
 te>     communication."
 te> 

Not disputing at all you can do this with Unix, though this is in the context of a working environment where people can also collaborate.  Some people when they connect to a system, are not looking to do work, but purely communicate.

 te> In other words, time-sharing systems provide a platform for
 te> communications.
 te> 
 te> Workstations, of course, were a reaction against timesharing
 te> systems, and `talk` was for network communications; `write`
 te> predates that significantly.
 te> 

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

It is subjective, but my opinion is based on having used both, and finding the BBS system more amenable specifically for chat and messaging and threaded discussions.  I haven't seen a counter example.  I know someone (you?) provided an example, but I was unable to access it.

That being said, if I were walking at home, and wanted to work on my machine and send a message to my kids, or "chat online" while they were working on their machines, it would be via the unix tools, definitely.

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

.