[HN Gopher] Tonight we're gonna log on like it's 1979
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Tonight we're gonna log on like it's 1979
Author : zdw
Score : 94 points
Date : 2022-04-11 13:49 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (oldvcr.blogspot.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (oldvcr.blogspot.com)
| annoyingnoob wrote:
| In the 80s my dad worked in 'Data Processing'. I can remember
| taking the pickup truck down to his office on a Saturday a few
| times per year to recycle a truck load of continuous tractor feed
| paper. We recycled tons and tons of paper over the years.
| shakna wrote:
| > Messages to a single user were free, but every subsequent
| recipient of a message was a 15-cent ($0.59 in 2022) surcharge
| per message, per recipient. (Imagine the impact that would have
| had on spam and unsolicited commercial E-mail.)
|
| The dichotomy of the early Internet was astounding at times.
| Those strange beings who made things like WWW pages for free,
| just because it was fun, standing alongside corporations trying
| to make absolutely insane profits off everything that you did,
| where you were billed per minute by the ISP, the platform, and
| maybe the thing hosted by the platform as well.
|
| CompuServe and Minitel being only a single bill from your ISP
| might well have saved the networks from becoming the fad that so
| many originally saw them as.
|
| Though... The needle might be drifting back towards many bills
| from many providers, again. Maybe bundling will once again decide
| which corporations thrive, and which are lost... Probably not the
| ones that serve public interest.
| msla wrote:
| > (Imagine the impact that would have had on spam and
| unsolicited commercial E-mail.)
|
| Simple: The spammers would have bought contracts to send spam
| at a flat rate and spam blocking technology would have gotten
| people kicked from the service. Only the absolutely poorest
| scammers would have been blocked, so the service would attempt
| to stop the 419 scammers actually from Nigeria, whereas the
| penis pill peddlers would have had a clear line to everyone.
| BolexNOLA wrote:
| I highly doubt this will be new to anyone on HN, but _Halt and
| Catch Fire_ , at least to my layperson eyes, did a pretty good
| job of showing this era and the challenges/solutions that were
| cropping up.
|
| For those who are familiar I'm thinking of season 2 where
| Mutiny is trying to keep their service running and keeps
| running into issues, whether it be phone companies, server
| rentals, building and managing their own servers, etc. The
| amount of time they spent fighting companies or trying to find
| ways to keep their service from completely crashing - let alone
| stay even remotely solvent - as they were hit on all sides with
| costs was striking. I felt they did a good job giving a non-
| technical overview of the issues, as well as making it sort of
| exciting.
| Melatonic wrote:
| Great show and super underrated.
| BolexNOLA wrote:
| Probably my favorite show to have on in the background when
| I'm color-grading or doing other work where I can afford to
| be a tad distracted!
| Melatonic wrote:
| Babylon Berlin would probably be my go to for that
| (assuming I had already seen it)
| BolexNOLA wrote:
| That show has been out a while but seems to have picked
| up a lot of steam lately for some reason. I keep hearing
| about it. Guess it's time to start!
| joezydeco wrote:
| _" where you were billed per minute by the ISP, the platform,
| and maybe the thing hosted by the platform as well."_
|
| And don't forget the phone companies. The idea of unlimited
| all-you-can-eat on a POTS line wasn't implemented everywhere,
| and it only made sense when you were on for thousands of
| minutes a month. On top of that not every town had a local
| portal to Source, Telenet, Compu-Serve, etc so it was a crazy-
| expensive toll call to get connected in the first place.
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| "corporations trying to make absolutely insane profits off
| everything that you did, where you were billed per minute by
| the minute"
|
| At least in the case of The Source, it looks like they were
| leasing time from another company's minicomputers. We don't
| know their expenses so can't assume they were making insane
| profits. As I recall, some IBM systems cost hundreds of
| thousands of dollars to rent per month.
| shakna wrote:
| However, with the point I was trying to make, IBM was
| recouping their costs on those rentals within a year or
| two. They had a "disappointing" $2bn profit in a single
| quarter of 1979 [0] (very roughly, about $7Bn in today's
| currency), on $16Bn of revenue.
|
| They weren't exactly thin margins.
|
| [0] https://www.nytimes.com/1979/10/12/archives/ibm-net-
| falls-18...
| sokoloff wrote:
| I read your $2B in 1979 is $7B today and thought "that
| can't be right!" (Thinking that was much too high.) It
| turns out that it's almost $8B in actuality, making me
| far more wrong than I thought.
| classichasclass wrote:
| Near as I can determine, The Source never turned a profit.
| CompuServe eventually did.
| dleslie wrote:
| > Maybe bundling will once again decide which corporations
| thrive, and which are lost.
|
| Bundling is definitely a thing, here in Canada[0][1], and I
| expect that it will be a determining factor in services
| succeeding.
|
| 0: Telus and Prime https://www.telus.com/en/deals-and-
| bundles/optik-internet-am...
|
| 1: Bell and Crave https://www.bell.ca/Bell_Internet/Promotions/
| gotaquestion wrote:
| I can almost smell the static burn of the teletype paper, and
| that weird feeling of chemicals under your nails if you scratched
| it.
| zabzonk wrote:
| What? The paper on a teletype terminal was ... paper. No weird
| chremicals or static. A teletype was basically an impact
| printer (plus maybe a tape punch) with a keyboard and a serial
| interface. I've used not a few of them.
| classichasclass wrote:
| These are from Silent 700 thermal teletypes, so they're
| thermal-coated paper, not regular plain paper.
| zabzonk wrote:
| OK - there were a lot of weird printers around way back
| when. For example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZX_Printer
| and we had something similar from IBM (though much more
| sophisticated) connected to one of our IBM 4381s, which few
| people knew how to use (except me) or why you would want to
| (including me).
| thaeli wrote:
| The Silent 700 paper is the same stuff as thermal receipt
| printers we're all familiar with nowadays - I use thermal
| fax paper in mine. I understand that in the old days the
| paper was nastier than what we have now, though. Plus
| most workplaces probably bought the cheapest grade they
| possibly could, and I don't think they even _make_
| thermal paper that cheap anymore.
| smm11 wrote:
| The cost for a computer, the gear you needed to get "online," and
| the cost to do so is insane. It's crazy how we're buying $1K
| phones every year, and have Apple Studio computers or whatever,
| but this is NOTHING compared to what was spent before!
| blamazon wrote:
| I'm not old enough to know - how much did it cost in say, 1980
| vs 1990?
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| As one example, an Apple 2e in 1977 cost $1300 for a basic
| configuration that did NOT include a modem to get online. In
| 2022 dollars, that's $6086. Modems added probably another
| $300 (just a guess) which is $1404 in 2022.
|
| So you're looking at $7500 (in 2022 dollars) to get online in
| 1977. And that does NOT include long distance telephone
| charges, if you needed to connect to computer outside your
| immediate region.
|
| Maybe now you can see why being online was an elite
| subculture in the late 70s and 80s. It was later "discovered"
| by the rest of the world when prices dropped.
| hungryforcodes wrote:
| That's not true at all though. By 1985 any kid with a
| Commodore 64 and a modem could run their own Blue Board BBS
| for the price of a monthly dedicated phone line. Total cost
| just a few hundred dollars and with free local calling very
| inexpensive.
| russfink wrote:
| But that's assuming one-at-a-time connections, no? A true
| BBS would allow multiple connections. Plus, OP's
| timeframe was 1980, yours is 1985. A couple years back
| then meant _major_ differences in capabilities, costs,
| offerings. Not like now, where your iPhone from 2016 is
| only a little less capable than now.
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| > Plus, OP's timeframe was 1980. A couple years back then
|
| 1977 vs 1985 was an enormous difference in personal
| computing.
| Damogran6 wrote:
| Well yes, but also no. The smaller single line BBSs were
| great and you could get on them...frequently the multi
| line ones had a subscription or were constantly busy. As
| a teenager, I couldn't afford that...but I could afford
| to run a BBS from 6pm to 9am from my dormroom.
|
| Rumor had it the really BIG bbs's on the coasts had the
| COOLEST STUFF. But I couldn't afford to call California
| or New York back then.
| GrumpyNl wrote:
| My first pc with 2 yes 2 720kb floppy drives, a apricot, semi
| portable was around 4.900 dollar.
| don-code wrote:
| I'm impressed - but not necessarily surprised - by the amount of
| inline guidance that the system gave. These systems must have
| been cumbersome to wrap one's head around, more so when there was
| little precedent for using them. The designers, who likely were
| quite technical for their time, took those extra steps to
| understand the frames of reference of the users, and explain the
| system from that frame.
|
| Contrast to today, where user interfaces have largely lost the
| discoverability principle, and help is often asking someone else
| who's ridden the wave to where we are today.
| stakkur wrote:
| 1979 was the first year I touched a computer--a Decwriter
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DECwriter#/media/File:Decwrite...)
| that was the flagship of my high school's nascent 'Computer
| Club', of which I was a proud founding member.
|
| If you're unfamiliar with it, the Decwriter was basically a
| (very) wide-carriage printer with a keyboard attached, situated
| at desk height. It connected to our school district's RSTS system
| (resource sharing/time sharing) via an acoustic modem: you'd dial
| the phone, wait for the tone then quickly stick the receiver in
| the rubber cups and hope the connection was successful. A running
| 'joke' was to walk by and bump the phone out of the acoustic
| coupling, closing the connection and pissing off the user who
| just lost their process/place/progress and might not be able to
| log in again (due to resource/time sharing constraints).
|
| That's how I first learned BASIC; the true geek of the club had
| assembled printed manuals, and I plugged away learning exotic
| incantations like GOSUB. To be honest, the main activity on the
| Decwriter was playing Star Trek
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek_(1971_video_game)).
|
| I miss those days.
| dspillett wrote:
| _> With the search entered, the user chose to look at articles in
| reverse order for some reason_
|
| If yuo had a terminal that did not paginate, this would mean that
| assuming normal order was best-worst for the search results you
| didn't lose the best information from is scrolling.
| terran57 wrote:
| For some reason, I felt compelled to google the subject of the
| news article regarding the murder of Dallas Morning News
| photographer, Larry Provart, age 29. It appears that his murder
| remains unsolved to this day.
| classichasclass wrote:
| "Frederick Terence Baker. Baker was the man accused of the
| parking lot murder of photographer Larry Provart. On Halloween,
| in a series of incredible 'clerical errors,' Baker was released
| from jail and walked out scot-free - the most colossal legal
| blunder of the year. As of this writing, he has not been
| found."
|
| https://www.dmagazine.com/publications/d-magazine/1980/janua...
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(page generated 2022-04-11 23:01 UTC)