[HN Gopher] An old photo of a large BBS (2022)
___________________________________________________________________
An old photo of a large BBS (2022)
Author : xbryanx
Score : 272 points
Date : 2026-03-12 19:41 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (rachelbythebay.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (rachelbythebay.com)
| bigwheels wrote:
| Would these machines have been networked with CAT-3? Daisy
| chained phone cords?
| icedchai wrote:
| It's also possible they used coax, either ethernet (10base2) or
| Arcnet.
| reaperducer wrote:
| Depends on the exact date.
|
| I never worked with DOS BBS systems, so I can't say about this
| photo specifically, but the ones I did work with had between
| one and four dialup modems hooked up to each machine, depending
| on its capabilities. They did "networking" through a store-and-
| forward messaging system. It wasn't networking as we'd
| recognize it today.
| petra303 wrote:
| More likely coax. 3com 509c network cards. Much less
| infrastructure to have a lan that way.
|
| IBM had a network that ran over phone cords that were
| daisycbained from one node to the next.
| mcculley wrote:
| I am surprised by the assumption that each box could only handle
| one modem. I seem to remember that some DOS BBS packages could
| handle multiple modems/users concurrently and only needed
| multitasking operating systems for "door" programs. Am I
| misremembering?
| icedchai wrote:
| I'm fairly certain you are correct. I remember the MajorBBS
| could handle multiple lines on its own.
|
| I knew a couple of local DOS BBSes that ran multiple lines with
| PCBoard under DESQview.
| ghewgill wrote:
| MajorBBS could handle multiple lines on its own, but you had
| to handle ALL of the lines with one box. That meant a serial
| port interface like DigiBoard which provided some number (8
| or 16 or more) of serial ports that you would connect to
| modems.
| icedchai wrote:
| I remember DigiBoard from my early ISP days. We attempted
| to turn a mid 90's-era Linux system (Slackware) into a
| terminal server. The Linux drivers for DigiBoard weren't
| quite up to it so we wound up going with Telebit
| Netblazers, I think.
| kstrauser wrote:
| I think we used RocketPorts for a while until switching
| to Livingston Portmaster 3s, which you plugged a T-1
| into.
| icedchai wrote:
| Portmasters were very popular. Later on the ISP I worked
| with moved on to Ascend boxes which had digital modems
| (T1 / PRI lines.)
|
| PRI was a huge step. The "individual modem" days were a
| mess. Each modem had a serial cable, phone line, and
| power brick. I remember doing some maintenance in one of
| the POPs. There were at least 100 modems, stacked on a
| cheap plastic shelving unit. The shelving unit was
| sagging from the weight and heat of all the modems.
|
| This early POP was haphazardly built, so no cable
| management. I remember a river of phone cables coming out
| of the wall. The power bricks were also crazy. We had
| power strips 2 or 3 levels deep, making it a hazard to
| even get behind the rack without tripping on something.
| kstrauser wrote:
| They'd already switched to PRIs before I started so I
| missed out on that "fun", but I can personally vouch to
| the younguns here that every word you just wrote was
| completely plausible and likely.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Portmasters were a godsend. They turned piles of gear
| into clean boxes at a fraction of the heat and mess.
| jamroom wrote:
| Yep - I ran a 16 line Major BBS back in the mid 90's in
| Seattle - used what was called a "Bocaboard" - had 16
| serial ports on it - plugged in 16 external USR 28.8
| modems. It all ran off of one PC.
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| For sure. I knew people who ran multi-line BBS's on DOS PCs
| under DESQview, just like that (running Searchlight BBS, in
| my case). I know of a four line that was just using multiple
| external modems and non-standard IRQ's for COM3 and COM4
| (since, by default, COM1/3 and COM2/4 share an IRQ).
| js2 wrote:
| Even the Apple II had multi-line BBSes[^1], so I'm not sure
| about her assumption.
|
| [^1]: e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diversi-Dial
| nickdothutton wrote:
| Even for a standard PC, you could buy a 16 port serial card and
| hook it up to 16 modems, either discreet devices or the
| dedicated ISP kit which might support dozens of incoming calls
| (possibly on a single bearer) via various means. Telebit
| netblazers and then ascend maxs were common in those days.
| brazzy wrote:
| The question is if you could actually _handle_ that many
| lines concurrently, with available software and the hardware
| resources of a single PC. Rachel 's article as well as other
| comments here indicate that you could not.
| guenthert wrote:
| Telephone line modems were always slow compared to the
| microcomputers of their day. A 14400Baud modem will just
| send less than some 1.5KB/s. Even a Z80 could handle a few
| streams of that. I rather suspect this BBS offered fancier
| services than just chat and file up/download.
| icedchai wrote:
| You certainly could with later 386 and 486 systems. The
| multiport cards take care of the interrupt issues. 16
| lines, all running at 115200 bps (to allow for better
| compression!), isn't even 2 megabits/sec. That is worst
| case. I had a 386 with ethernet and it could push 10
| megabits no problem.
| nickdothutton wrote:
| From memory, it very much mattered on your choice of serial
| card/controller. High quality, high speed, (and high price)
| cards had their own buffers and better drivers resulting in
| fewer interrupts and more efficient use of host resources
| when supporting multiple concurrent file transfers at line
| speed. Being able to drive the modem-to-host connection
| faster than the modem connect speed was also helpful for
| modem protocols with compression.
| j45 wrote:
| Serial ports are a fun thing to learn about, computers had more
| than one. Now with USB, computers can have many serial ports.
| cmpb wrote:
| That assumption feeds into the moral of the post and its
| followup
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| A guy who was local to me, when I was a kid, wrote multi-user
| BBS system (called "MUBBS" originally-- I don't remember what
| the name was changed to later) in Turbo Pascal that had a
| preemptive multitasking loop running in x86 real mode to handle
| multiple lines simultaneously. The coolest part was the console
| was just a "line" so you could logon to the board and interact
| while somebody was online with the BBS, too. Most other DOS BBS
| packages were only available for the SYSOP or the caller
| individually.
|
| Edit: Ugh... I'm gonna have to go back to floppy images to find
| it. There's a "MUBBS" for Mac from 1992 showing up in search
| engine results but that's not the one I'm thinking of. It was
| more like 1989 or 1990.
| layer8 wrote:
| Some details/speculation from the original thread here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30098186
|
| "as modems got faster, supporting 16 modems on a single machine
| became impossible, and it was often cheaper to buy a new
| commodity desktop PC rather than a much more expensive machine
| with a 16-port serial card capable of handling the IO."
| kmbfjr wrote:
| You are correct, but the problem was the PC only had 16 IRQs.
| That required using intelligent multi-port cards from Digi or
| Rocketport. They worked by aggregating all the ports to a
| single card IRQ, and managing all the hardware signals, echo.
|
| I wrote the software for a breakout box that could handle 128
| serial ports. It was an ISA backplane with an industrial 286
| computer and multi-port serial cards. This was our solution
| for a MajorBBS system.
|
| The BBS software would have to timeslice between all the
| cards handling each IRQ, then poll the card details to see
| which ports needed service.
|
| GalactiComm eventually came out with their own around 1993
| that could go out to 255 serial ports and did not require the
| 286 processor.
|
| By the mid-90's, Livingston PortMasters were the preferred
| way to aggregate serial connections, which quickly gave way
| to USR TotalControl.
| guenthert wrote:
| iirc fancier (expensive) multiport ISA card had their own
| CPU (probably a Z80 or 8051) and a little RAM as buffer.
| Here an EISA card with an (unusual) Z280:
| https://oldcomputer.info/terminal/ap_cards/si-eisa_1.jpg
| henrikschroder wrote:
| I don't think those boxes had a 16550 UART...
| mycall wrote:
| You could just use DoubleDOS [1] to run the BBS in partition 0
| and the door could run in parallel in partition 1. This was my
| setup before Windows 3 and DESQview replaced it.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DoubleDOS
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DESQview
| ghaff wrote:
| DESQview never really clicked with me. Did run DoubleDOS and
| when I was a TA (or whatever it was) providing support in the
| computer lab in grad school (most people didn't have their
| own computers) it was a convenient way to switch between
| whatever official systems I needed to access and my own
| stuff.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| And the follow-up article:
| https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2022/01/27/scale/
| roxolotl wrote:
| The quote at the bottom is great:
|
| You can have a second computer once you've shown you know how
| to use the first one.
|
| -- Paul Barham, quoted in the COST paper
| alexfoo wrote:
| Followed by a quote from Pink Floyd's _Another Brick in the
| Wall (Part 2)_.
|
| _Stand still laddie!_
| bjenkins358 wrote:
| The real question is: Was the turbo button pressed?
| richstokes wrote:
| Probably not. That would slow them down. The turbo button
| under-clocked CPUs :-)
| tgrowazay wrote:
| Not on my 386SX. Pressed = 40 MHz, unpressed = 20 MHz
| SneakyMission wrote:
| Higher resolution photo
| https://web.archive.org/web/20230531042903im_/https://static...
| ryanjshaw wrote:
| That telephone cord is impressive.
| syncsynchalt wrote:
| Pretty standard option for any home with a teenager, to be
| honest. Long enough to drag the handset into the nearest coat
| closet when needed.
| netule wrote:
| Mom's listening along on the other phone with her hand
| covering the receiver.
| cucumber3732842 wrote:
| We have them at work on our voip phones so we can roll around
| to each other's cubes while talking to a client without
| putting that client on speaker. We have headsets and the like
| too but you're not always wearing it when the phone decides
| to ring.
| jprd wrote:
| Glorious. This must be what is like when old people long for
| the hot car they lusted for in their youth.
| SpaceNoodled wrote:
| I recall old people being glad that air conditioning was
| invented.
| bombcar wrote:
| Life with air conditioning is nice, but life without it
| wasn't as bad as it is now when the a/c fails.
|
| Cars had vents that would blow outside air right were it
| was needed without using the heater/fan system, or wing
| windows that you could direct "relatively quiet" air at
| you.
|
| Now if your car's a/c fails, you get to roll the window
| down and that's about it.
| mewse-hn wrote:
| > Glorious. This must be what is like when old people long
| for the hot car they lusted for in their youth.
|
| Absolutely. The blog post goes to great lengths about why
| it's stupid to run a cluster, and I run a NAS in my house
| that has more horsepower than anything from the 90s, but
| there's a part of me that's still a teenager who wants to run
| a monster multi-node BBS
| tracker1 wrote:
| I get it... FWIW, you can run a telnet/ssh based BBS today
| over relatively modest hardware, though self-hosting at
| home given common blocking of regular server ports is a
| pain.
|
| I've got a nas and a relatively powerful mini-pc for most
| of my home lab server stuff... but all the same, juggling
| about 6 BBS related projects I'm hoping I can bring all
| together later in the year.
| cvwright wrote:
| Or maybe this is like fondly remembering the busted economy
| car that you drove around with your friends? I have my first
| 386DX sitting on my desk right now and it looks _exactly_
| like the top left of that photo.
|
| The hot car that we all lusted after was maybe something like
| a SGI Indy or an O2.
| louwrentius wrote:
| In this picture it seems that all machines have a 3.5" floppy
| disk inserted. Maybe they had no hard drive and only booted
| from floppy and then ran software over the network?
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| A lot of network interface cards had a socket for an option
| ROM that would allow network boot, but you could definitely
| fit a client on a floppy and boot that way, too. Novell
| Netware server would be the mostly likely server for that
| vintage of rig and a Netware client fit easily on a floppy.
| cheschire wrote:
| Oh that's a breaker box (or a box of wiring of some sort), not
| a mirror!
| ssl-3 wrote:
| A mirror? I first saw it as a common (US-centric) exterior
| metal door, with a window -- and with a shelf blocking the
| opening.
|
| The blur does interesting things.
| cheschire wrote:
| yeah the shine in the top left of the rectangle was what
| led me to think it was a mirror, which from my experience
| would have been really strange for the types of nerds that
| would work in windowless rooms back in those days.
|
| The black cable underneath looked like the shadow of an
| oval frame
| whatthe12899 wrote:
| wait, are you OP? or did you happen to find a high res version
| of the same paper-copy picture that OP supposedly was given 30
| years ago and then scanned and then threw out. or did OP make
| it up? or is OP just a bot?
|
| maybe i'm a bot.
|
| anyway i used to call into BBSs back in the early 90s and the
| thing I'm remembering is that they survived mostly on
| donations, and now that I am seeing the infrastructure that
| supported those systems and recalling the price of hardware
| back then I'm starting to second guess everything I thought I
| knew.
| DetroitThrow wrote:
| Rachel says she had the photo as a postcard. It's likely that
| more postcards were printed, and that other people had owned
| those copies, rather than people being bots.
| manarth wrote:
| postcard- _sized_ photo
| layer8 wrote:
| Click on the HN "past" link for this submission near the top
| of this page, then you'll get to
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30096565 (see the top
| comment there) from when the original image link was still
| working.
| hamdingers wrote:
| Many sites including Google offer reverse image search. You
| give it an image and it gives you a list of places it
| appears, sometimes in higher resolution or with more context
| (or different context, which can be interesting).
| themafia wrote:
| Apparently "Software Creations" BBS, which ran PCBoard BBS
| software and was operated in cooperation with Apogee games.
|
| https://x.com/ScottApogee/status/1593729387106512896
| myself248 wrote:
| Thank you!
|
| In the alcove on the right, I think I'm seeing 66-blocks,
| breaking out the phone lines that must be routed to each
| machine. Two blocks stacked, each with a fanout of wire on the
| right side.
| somat wrote:
| Hmm, that is interesting, why was that version originaly hosted
| on 3drealms site? Probably nothing, somebody there just wanted
| to share a cool picture. But what if that were an early apogee
| shareware distribution bbs?
| rasz wrote:
| it was 3D Realms official BBS
|
| https://nitter.privacyredirect.com/ScottApogee/status/159372.
| .. Scott Miller - Apogee/3D Realms Founder :
|
| >BBS's (bulletin board systems) were the backbone of the
| online world before the Internet came along in 1995. Apogee
| teamed up with Dan Linton's BBS, called Software Creations,
| and we poured $200k+ into it to grow it to nearly 140 call-in
| nodes with a T3 (high bandwidth) line.
| bombcar wrote:
| I seem to recall that the release of DooM caused BBSs
| around the world to be backed up for ages.
| mycall wrote:
| I was lucky enough to have a T1 in 1995 and still think to
| this day that 1.544 Mbps is enough to do real work.
| pseudohadamard wrote:
| That's not a real BBS. A real BBS is one where you dial in at
| 20:50 and the sysop's mum answers and says it's not 21:00 yet
| and you need to call back a bit later when the phone line is
| switched across to the modem.
| hollywood_court wrote:
| That brings back memories. When I was aged 9-12, I made
| enough money mowing lawns during the summer to afford to have
| multiple phone lines to support my BBS. I made a bit of money
| during the fall raking leaves as well. But when winter time
| came, I had to always disconnect all of the additional lines
| because I could not afford them.
|
| But I also kept one extra line just for my PC because it was
| always a pain to dial out to another BBS or chat room when my
| mother wanted to use the phone to talk to her long distance
| boyfriend.
| ralferoo wrote:
| Interesting. I thought that looked like a frisbee between the 3
| disk packs (?) just below the ceiling next to the cupboard with
| the brown slatted doors. But then the original picture was so
| small I thought it must be a desk fan, but in the larger
| picture I'm going back to my original guess of a frisbee!
| nitwit005 wrote:
| I can recall people being very impressed at unix systems being
| able to handle many clients, and being personally confused at the
| idea of a computer only being able to handle a single user.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _I can recall people being very impressed at unix systems being
| able to handle many clients_
|
| That seems odd to me, too, because before DOS and the Commodore
| 64/Apple ][ era, multi-user systems were everywhere.
|
| Not just mainframes and minicomputers, but there were many
| dozens of multi-user systems based on CP/M, MP/M, and other
| operating systems. Even Tandy had them.
|
| The revolutionary part of the "personal computer" era was that
| it was your "personal" computer. You finally didn't have to
| share it with anyone.
| criddell wrote:
| There were also commercial multi-user systems like Compuserve
| and Delphi.
| bombcar wrote:
| Everyone seems to assume you need protected mode to run
| multi-user systems, too.
|
| It wasn't as secure or as easy, but you could certainly do
| multi-user systems without protected mode and within very
| small RAM amounts.
| slongfield wrote:
| Looks like the shelves were custom-built for those machines. I
| wonder what the monitors were hooked up to, or if they were just
| spares.
|
| My first thought was that this was built someone who clearly
| cared about the system they were running.
| ryandrake wrote:
| I remember thinking that I would reach absolute peak-coolkid if I
| could start and run a BBS. I even installed WWIV and DesqView to
| fuel the fantasy and prepare. But my parents didn't understand
| technology and couldn't grasp why I wanted to hook up (and pay
| for) a second phone line for the house. So, unfortunately I would
| remain a mere luser until I went off to University where the
| Internet was just getting popular and 10-Base-T ethernet drops to
| the dorm rooms were standard, and I very quickly forgot all about
| BBSing.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Cool Kids run T1s ;)
|
| Really Cool Kids T3s...
| dwd wrote:
| Thanks for the reminder. Those were heady days.
|
| My first programming job out of Uni had dual ISDN to the
| office.
| jacquesm wrote:
| We ran all of Camarades for the first year on a dual ISDN,
| then came a leased line to Haarlem which was the closest
| fat pipe and the year after that we saturated the
| intercontinental backbone during a space shuttle launch.
| Oops. Then we moved to Canada to have sufficient bandwidth.
| wvenable wrote:
| When I got my first PC (a 286 with a 2400 baud modem) I had to
| wire my computer to the telephone line from my bedroom all the
| way to the kitchen. I had some very long telephone extension
| cable and every morning for 2 weeks my parents woke up with
| chest-high line running down the hallway.
|
| After those 2 weeks, my parents decided to get me my own phone
| line in my room. That's also week I started running my own BBS.
| I ran it for several years.
|
| Those were strange and interesting times.
| tiahura wrote:
| By the early 90s didn't most BBS software support multi-line
| setups on a single pc?
| jacquesm wrote:
| The OS that was running on these is irrelevant, the important
| part is the BBS software.
|
| And these usually ran quite a few lines per box, sometimes they
| would use external racks of modems, but I'm not seeing that here
| so maybe these were using internal modem cards, so maybe 6 per
| box, but if they were using external modems it could easily be 12
| or more, with the PC cards hosting multiple serial ports, 4, 6 or
| even 8 per card.
|
| Typically a card would have a single large connector at the back
| and then a pigtail with a DB9 or DB25 (yes, I know) for every
| modem.
| icedchai wrote:
| The OS was relevant if your BBS software was limited to a
| single simultaneous user, like many of the early DOS BBSes. The
| late 80's "PCBoard" BBSes I'm familiar with needed one PC per
| user, plus a file server with Netware.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Ok, but that's just the vehicle, it is the BBS software that
| does the works. And even in the 80's there were ways to run
| multiple instances of 'single user' BBSs on one box, for
| instance (dare I say it...) OS/2 and TV.
| rconti wrote:
| Yeah, this jumped out at me too. It's a wild misunderstanding
| of how BBSes worked.
|
| That said, I have no idea how a multi-node BBS would work, in
| terms of keeping state synchronized.
| icedchai wrote:
| It depends on the era.
|
| Earlier: one PC per user, shared file system using a Novell
| network. Later: multitasking OS (Desqview, OS/2) or BBS
| software that natively supported multiple users (like
| MajorBBS.)
|
| I ran a BBS on an Amiga for a while. The OS natively
| supported multitasking, but I only had one line. At least I
| could log in the same time as a user...
| daneel_w wrote:
| The older brother of a friend of mine in the 90s was the
| co-sysop of one of Sweden's largest "elite" BBSes at the
| time, Farout BBS. I got to tag along to the sysop's
| apartment once and see the setup, which was an Amiga 2000
| with 3 active nodes and available serial ports for a total
| of 7 nodes, though the sysop hadn't gotten around to get
| more telephone lines wired to his apartment.
| icedchai wrote:
| awesome! getting more phone lines into a residence could
| be a pain. I knew a guy who had an 8 line BBS in his
| (parents', actually) basement. Getting more was difficult
| because they were "out of facilities" and he had to move
| it to an office.
| jacquesm wrote:
| I've seen NetWare, Vines, some proprietary hacks to form the
| backbone.
| xenadu02 wrote:
| > It's a wild misunderstanding of how BBSes worked.
|
| That's quite the assumption.
|
| There were a lot of different BBS hosting programs. They
| wildly varied in what they supported and how they were
| implemented. Further even within a given piece of software
| the ways you could configure them and the consequences also
| varied. Even if a given software supported concurrent users
| on a single PC for various reasons a BBS might choose not to
| host that way.
| layer8 wrote:
| Aren't the modems the black boxes sitting on top of each PC in
| the picture?
| jacquesm wrote:
| Yes, you're right, I totally missed them. Those look like USR
| 'Courier' modems but the resolution is really crappy so hard
| to be sure and it looks like there are multiple types. There
| might still be modems in the boxes themselves as well. It
| doesn't look like more than two modems per box if there
| isn't.
| jasongill wrote:
| yes, most of them look like USRobotics Courier modems. Note
| that not all the machines have one, and some have two.
|
| Assuming that the parent commenter is right and that they are
| using internal line cards, I wonder if the external modems
| were being added to support higher speeds.
|
| However, the fact that we can see at least 2 (but I think
| four) 66 blocks means they had 50 to 100 phone lines for the
| machines visible, which would make sense that the external
| modems are the primary connection and no internal modems are
| being used, based on the number of modems visible and the
| fact that each 66 block can handle 25 lines.
| jacquesm wrote:
| I think you're right and that there were only two modems
| connected to the boxes so that's just the built in serial
| ports, here is another copy of the same picture by someone
| that apparently funded the board with some details:
|
| https://x.com/ScottApogee/status/1593729387106512896
| jasongill wrote:
| This almost confirms it then, each machine has an
| external modem tied to 1 phone line per modem, and there
| are no internal modems in use. The picture shows 50
| modems that I can see, and the original article indicates
| that it's around half of their total setup. Scott notes
| that they had a T3 (likely a frac T3) with 140 dial-in
| nodes, which aligns with the articles guess of 134
| machines.
|
| So I would say that almost definitely, they are using 1
| (or 2 for some on the right side of the photo) external
| modem per PC connected to the 66 block, those analog
| phone blocks tied back to the channel bank/multiplexer,
| and the carrier's T3 tied in there.
|
| No internal modems used at all.
|
| And the person who posted the photo on twitter is none
| other than Scott Miller, founder of Apogee Software,
| publisher of some of the most revolutionary games of the
| late 80's and early 90's, and this BBS (Software
| Creations) was the cornerstone of distributing the
| shareware versions of those games. Very cool bit of
| history, I remember dialing in to Software Creations to
| download Commander Keen!
| xenadu02 wrote:
| "usually" and "typically" are doing a lot of heavy lifting here
| :)
|
| Access to knowledge, equipment, and budget varied dramatically
| prior to widespread internet access. Someone setting up a BBS
| might not even know about multi-line modem cards or serial port
| expansions. Even if they knew about them they may not have been
| able to reasonably obtain them. Or they may have been operating
| on donations, surplus, or discount equipment. Or they simply
| may not have had the luxury of time to research all of that as
| user demand meant they were too busy laying tracks in front of
| the train.
|
| Many BBSes ran on 1-2 lines per PC because that's what they
| understood how to build or the hardware they had access to. You
| might be surprised at just how _many_ lines some BBSes setup
| this way had!
|
| People forget there was a time that anything outside the
| standard PC was extremely expensive, often had flaky or
| nonexistent software support, locked you into a fly-by-night
| vendor that might go out of business tomorrow, was only
| available via a distributor who wanted to have you talk to a
| "sales consultant" before they'd sell you something, etc. Many
| many people chose sub-optimal implementations because it was an
| off-the-shelf PC they could replace at any time with trivially
| simple software requiring no special CONFIG.SYS drivers or TSRs
| to fiddle with. Especially if you'd ever been burned
| previously.
| Aardwolf wrote:
| Office chair technology also has really advanced since then
| (looking at the chair on the picture, which is commonly seen near
| computers in photos of this era)
| wvbdmp wrote:
| Indeed, the Aeron chair, which became a design classic and the
| apparently the best-selling office chair ever in the US, only
| came out in 1994. So about the same time as the web. Not sure
| if it's the only office chair design with a dedicated wikipedia
| page? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeron_chair
| voidUpdate wrote:
| Depends, is the deck of a battleship an "office"?
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emeco_1006
|
| Theres also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirra_chair.
| (wikipedia has a page for "list of chairs", but not all of
| them have a dedicated article)
| fusslo wrote:
| probably my least-regretted purchase (excepting my dog) is my
| used Aeron that I bought in ~2014 for $300. Still use it
| daily
| Vaslo wrote:
| I remember trying to set up a bbs on my pc in the 80s and I
| didn't have a separate phone line so I just put it on while I
| slept. Then people started calling and annoying my parents with
| daytime modem calls, because I was like 10 and I didn't think
| through any of this.
| bredren wrote:
| I set up a uh war dialer around the same age over night and my
| mom got some pretty upset calls the next day.
|
| She had no idea who these people were or why they were upset. I
| don't think I copped to it, it was not an easy thing to explain
| but I did not do that again.
| bluedino wrote:
| Would love a technical explanation of how all that stuff worked
| by someone who did that kind of stuff in those days. In the old
| days I personally never saw anything bigger than a four line BBS.
| But I remember reading about that one in shareware README.TXT
| files
|
| Wouldn't mind hearing war stories from the cdrom.com guys as
| well.
| dekhn wrote:
| https://www.cnn.com/TECH/computing/9904/08/cdrom.idg/ and
| https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/wow-what-a-system-ftp...
| I'm not aware of any others with more details and war stories.
| crmd wrote:
| In the 90's we had microsystems, in the 2020s we have
| microservices.
| saltyoldman wrote:
| In 2030 we'll have microagents
| dublin wrote:
| If they were really badass, they had a rack of Telebit modems.
| (Telebit made 68020 based modems that did 56+ Kbps long before a
| 56K standard, and literally had more compute power than most of
| the computers they were connected to.)
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| (2022)
|
| Some more discussion then:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30096565
| gxd wrote:
| Those were the days. I still believe nothing replaces the
| camraderie of the small, local BBSs. The large ones were good
| too, but these tended to resemble the modern Internet forums a
| bit more.
|
| I miss BBSs and that's why I featured them in the story of my
| sci-fi game! If you are interested:
| https://store.steampowered.com/app/3040110/Outsider/
| joemi wrote:
| I go back and forth on whether BBSes were better or AOL was
| better. I had great experiences on both in my formative years.
| calmbonsai wrote:
| For me it was BBSes hands-down.
|
| I was user #12 on the Bloom County BBS and, eventually, got
| the coveted sysop perms.
|
| It felt far more of an "adult" accomplishment than (much
| later) when I got my driver's license.
| yourapostasy wrote:
| _> ...nothing replaces the camraderie of the small, local
| BBSs._
|
| Nothing quite replaces the drama level and drama complexity of
| the small, local BBSs. Especially when the denizens met in the
| big room with the blue ceiling.
| mrexcess wrote:
| Disagree only in the sense that I think the drama escalated a
| bit in the interregnum, as the BBS scene merged into one
| large if fragmentary collective on the internet. Empirical
| evidence for that extreme level of drama and complexity here:
|
| https://www.wired.com/2001/12/sexchart-degrees-of-separation
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| For a similar nostalgic hit:
|
| Related:
|
| _Ask HN: Remember Fidonet?_
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47321760
| EmmEff wrote:
| I'm enjoying the nostalgia on HN this week!
| SirFatty wrote:
| I used to dial into that BBS... long distance. It had a huge
| library of shareware.
|
| https://groups.google.com/g/bit.listserv.games-l/c/1tg85kGBH...
| joemi wrote:
| Same here! This brings me back. And makes me feel old. Dialing
| the big BBSes like this one were rare special occasions for me,
| due to the cost of long distance.
| pelcg wrote:
| Same! Really appreciate this find, thanks!
| yarone wrote:
| Ahh BBS's: where I learned the difference between a local call
| and a "local toll call" (parents were not happy)
| rconti wrote:
| Reminds me of the Notorious B.I.G. line "phone bill about 2G's
| flat"!
| leptons wrote:
| Same here, except I took it further and was calling out of
| state BBSs to download the latest warez. First phone bill after
| getting the modem was $250, in around 1984 (or about $800 in
| 2026). Parents were pissed. That's when I learned about phone
| phreaking.
| herodoturtle wrote:
| > That's when I learned about phone phreaking.
|
| "And never again have to pay for a service that would be dirt
| cheap, if it weren't run by a bunch of profiteering
| gluttons!"
|
| - Razor & Blade
| bch wrote:
| > do you think "wow, cool, they got to wrangle all of that", or
| do you think "OMG they _had_ to wrangle all of that "?
|
| I touch on similar point of view discussing digital audio work I
| do for fun. I use CSound, which I've heard described as "assembly
| language for audio", and I think that's accurate.
|
| Anyway, when I first, FIRST started, and got a tiny bit familiar,
| I thought "Wow, I can do _anything_! " but quickly realized I was
| also _responsible_ for _everything_. No free lunch.
| mehrdadrad wrote:
| Wow, I used to dial into BBS for around 3-4 years. good time!!
| throw0101d wrote:
| > _It 's possible they managed to do some rudimentary
| multitasking with DESQview (or worse...) and so supported two
| whole users with each box. Does that mean they had to be at least
| 386s to do protected mode? Or was it virtual 8086 mode? I
| (fortunately) have forgotten the finer points of how that stuff
| used to work. I DO remember how damn crashy a box became when you
| ran it "under DV". Constant system freezes. Yep._
|
| I don't recall DESQview to be all that crashy. I was aware of a
| number multi-line BBSes that used it (just in the 416). Some BBS
| software called out its use specifically:
|
| * https://www.synchro.net/docs/multnode_config.html
|
| * http://software.bbsdocumentary.com/IBM/DOS/OMEGA/
|
| Also, a comment from someone whose uncle co-founded the company
| Quarterdeck:
|
| * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29396561#unv_29400530
|
| Also, also, if anyone wants to simulate the old-school DESQview
| experience, perhaps try out "twin":
|
| * https://opensource.com/article/20/1/multiple-consoles-twin
|
| * https://github.com/cosmos72/twin
| bink wrote:
| DESQview was absolutely not crashy. I ran several different
| types of BBS software in it without issues. The "DESQview (or
| worse...)" comment raised the hair on the back of my neck.
| DESQview was revolutionary at the time and I was annoyed at
| having to use Windows many years later.
|
| ASCII windows may not have been everyone's cup of tea but I
| loved it.
| EmmEff wrote:
| I recall running Opus (or maybe the predecessor whose name
| escapes me) under DESQview on my lousy XT clone. I don't
| recall it being crashy but it certainly didn't have enough
| horsepower to handle the BBS software and an interactive DOS
| window.
|
| I couldn't afford a second machine in those days and having
| to sacrifice my one and only PC for the full-time BBS wasn't
| fun :)
| throw0101c wrote:
| > _DESQview was revolutionary at the time and I was annoyed
| at having to use Windows many years later._
|
| I remember running Win3.11 with-in a DESQview window (and
| IIRC there was a full-screen mode as well).
| driverdan wrote:
| I used DESQview with my BBS. It only had one line but I ran a
| second local node so I could be online at the same time as my
| users. I don't remember ever having any problems with it.
| markus_zhang wrote:
| Does BBS still have a usage nowadays? I feel HN is not too
| different -- and actually offer less than a BBS -- back then
| there are a lot of goods on a large BBS. And it's easier to mix a
| pic with text, but I could be wrong.
|
| Also thinking it's a lot environmental easier to host a BBS than
| a Discord server.
| KevinF_ wrote:
| How do you dislike a post
| Bengalilol wrote:
| You need 500 karma for this
| CrzyLngPwd wrote:
| There is so much speculation in the OP that I am not even sure if
| the title is correct.
| neoCrimeLabs wrote:
| This makes me wish I took photos of Diversi-Dial (aka D-Dial)
| setups, which somehow impressed me more due to how much they
| accomplished with much much less hardware.
|
| They were able to set up a 7 x 300baud modems in real-time chat
| system on an Apple ][ . The original marketing called it a CB
| (Citizens Band) Simulator. They were able to run up to 1200baud,
| but I never saw one of those functioning.
|
| As if 7 people chatting through a single 6502 wasn't impressive
| enough, many of them dedicated one or two of their lines to
| interlinking with other D-dials.
|
| Talk about an esoteric memory.
|
| - https://www.ddial.com/ - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diversi-
| Dial
| vinniedkator wrote:
| And the larger ddial sysops would daisy chain multiple Apple
| IIes together. A connector would take up one port on each
| machine. Two machine would give you 12 modems. Each new machine
| after the second would add space for 5 modems (-1 on old
| machine, +6 on new machine). For the sysop it was a big
| investment for very little, if any, monetary reward. I remember
| a user account would cost $5 a month.
|
| Our ddial was a few towns away so we bought a line in the
| exchange in between that would forward to the ddial. This way
| we would not pay a bunch on long distance calls.
| Bengalilol wrote:
| Apogee was somehow part of the party <
| https://x.com/ScottApogee/status/1593729387106512896>
| SirFatty wrote:
| Because of the shareware distribution. A lot of Apogee software
| was shareware (free).
| hackthemack wrote:
| If the site is not responding, can always try the way back
| machine.
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20220207120422/https://rachelbyt...
|
| I remember dialing up to a BBS in the area in 1990 that had 4
| phone lines. That was amazing at the time when most BBS only had
| 1 line.
|
| But I do remember downloading text files FILE.IDZ about other
| BBS, and reading some magazines that mentioned other BBS systems
| that had 32 and more phone lines but you had to pay. That seemed
| like it was just on another level in another part of the world
| that seemed like fantasy compared to the area I was in.
| asdefghyk wrote:
| Brings back memories ...
|
| Boardwatch was the magazine for BBS ( I do not know of any
| others)
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boardwatch
|
| Some all? on internet archive
| https://archive.org/details/boardwatchmagazine I recall buyingthe
| magazine back inthe day...
| johnohara wrote:
| Not mentioned but very important was the number of inbound telco
| lines installed. Equally important was making sure the local
| phone company properly configured the hunt group for those lines.
| Without a properly functioning hunt group it would be very
| difficult to optimize the allocation of telco connections to all
| the users connecting and disconnecting.
|
| Also, it was unusual at the time for a local phone company to
| receive a request for 25 lines (or more) to be installed in the
| basement of a residence. They would generally push back thinking
| you were running a bookie operation or some such.
| asdefghyk wrote:
| How did they keep the room cool? that equipment must not be
| shown... Maybe fans to move the hot air ....
| icedchai wrote:
| If it's like the old ISPs I was familiar with, they didn't. The
| POP (point-of-presence, 100's of modems, plus several terminal
| servers, routers, etc.) would generally be in some basement
| without any cooling at all. There would literally be warped
| plastic.
| gzread wrote:
| It helps these computers didn't use much power, probably didn't
| even have much of a heatsink on the CPU. Someone in this thread
| quoted 3 watts for the CPU. Of course with this many of them
| you might be using something like a kilowatt (for all the
| components) which is enough to make a room quite warm, but not
| damaging. Think about a kilowatt space heater - it's not really
| dangerous to things that don't directly touch it.
| asdefghyk wrote:
| FROM
| https://x.com/ScottApogee/status/1593729387106512896?sort_re...
|
| Top comment about this photo is ( and the poster) Scott Miller -
| Apogee/3D Realms Founder @ScottApogee BBS's (bulletin board
| systems) were the backbone of the online world before the
| Internet came along in 1995. Apogee teamed up with Dan Linton's
| BBS, called Software Creations, and we poured $200k+ into it to
| grow it to nearly 140 call-in nodes with a T3 (high bandwidth)
| line.
| tcherasaro wrote:
| Nice computer "racks"
| Scubabear68 wrote:
| My roommate circa 1989 had a bunch of Apple II's with multiple
| modem cards per machine to run a bulletin board. Not sure why an
| Apple II could support multiple users logging into the BBS via
| multiple modems but DOS based machines could not.
| esseph wrote:
| > So then, when you see this picture (and remember, it might only
| be showing half of the whole setup), do you think "wow, cool,
| they got to wrangle all of that", or do you think "OMG they _had_
| to wrangle all of that "? It's an important distinction to make,
| and I think someone's gut reaction to this amount of hardware in
| one place might influence how they approach building new systems.
|
| Definitely in the "wow, cool, they got to wrangle all of that"
| camp!
|
| I remember dialing up to this BBS quite a bit, and I also
| remember downloading tons of demos from other BBSs that
| originally came from SCBBS!
| myth_drannon wrote:
| I imagine Rusty 'n' Edie's BBS was double of that
| EmmEff wrote:
| There's a name from the past... according to the Wikipedia
| article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rusty_n_Edie%27s_BBS,
| they _only_ had 124 dial-in lines.
| pier25 wrote:
| You could probably replace all those machines with a Mac Mini or
| even a Raspberry Pi.
| api wrote:
| The pre-Internet BBS era is something I remember fondly. I was a
| kid, so there's that halo effect of course, but I loved the indie
| DIY nature of it and the diversity and community you'd get.
|
| There's a site called textfiles.com that's kind of a museum, and
| a documentary you can find on YouTube. There's stuff on
| archive.org too.
|
| It wasn't actually that long of an era. The first modern BBS was
| probably CBBS in Chicago in 1978, though there's other claimants
| depending on how you define BBS. When the Internet started to go
| mainstream in the middle 1990s, the BBS scene died shockingly
| quickly. So it lasted a little under 20 years, probably 17 or 18.
|
| The glory days of it were probably from about 1985 until 1995. By
| 1985 you started to have PCs and modems good enough to make it a
| pleasure to use and cheap enough (and with a used after-market)
| to achieve significant penetration and enable less wealthy and
| kids to get online. By 1995 the Internet was starting to kill it.
|
| I read a lot of rosy stuff about how people behaved so much
| better back then, and some of that is BS. There were trolls,
| weirdos, creeps, racists, black hat hackers that would mess with
| you, and malware that would mess up your machine. There were
| flame wars and sectarian splits where a bunch of users on a BBS
| would leave for a different one. There was junk content, filler,
| and nasty stuff like CSAM around.
|
| I would, however, say that the signal to noise ratio was a lot
| better than modern social media and the modern SEO-trashed web.
| The big difference is that these systems did not have algorithms
| biasing things in this direction. You didn't have an algorithmic
| feed preferentially surfacing the most idiotic or inflammatory
| content to get you to get angry about it and "maximize
| engagement." You didn't have algorithms incentivizing endless
| amounts of chum to game the rankings. It was easy to just ignore
| the trolls and morons and creeps and go for the good stuff.
|
| Much of the same can be said of the early pre-socials pre-SEO
| web.
|
| You also didn't have a lot of money involved, and while money can
| create productive incentives in a lot of areas it seems to create
| mostly perverse incentives in media, _especially_ if the money is
| coming from advertisers rather than consumers of the media.
|
| The original sin is really the time-on-site/time-on-app KPI. It
| is literally destroying civilization. I don't think that's much
| of an exaggeration.
|
| All in all it was good times, and I miss the ethos and community
| and sense of discovery of it.
| icedchai wrote:
| I remember that time fondly also. You are spot on with the
| glory days. I dialed into my first BBS in 1988 with a 1200 baud
| modem. By 1995, they were basically dead.
| philxor wrote:
| I worked for Exec PC internet which evolved from the BBS which
| was the largest in the US afaik. It ran on somewhat custom PCs
| where there were I think four nodes per board on bread racks. No
| cases. Custom software. That BBS was over 250 lines at one point.
| I remember hearing stories the room with the modems, a lot of
| Couriers near the end, was so hot they would have to replace dead
| ones every week.
| Ranxer wrote:
| ExecPC had shelves of Couriers and at some point they were just
| bare modem cards not in indiviual cases. It was impressive to
| see.
| rconti wrote:
| I worked for an ISP that was racks and racks of bare couriers
| with lucent portmasters.
| anyfoo wrote:
| Awesome.
|
| Side note: virtual 8086 mode was protected mode, or rather,
| implied protected mode. A task could run in virtual 8086 mode
| where to the task it was (mostly) looking like it was running in
| real mode, when in actuality the kernel was running in full
| protected mode.
|
| Note that the "kernel" was never DOS. It could often actually be
| a so called "memory manager", like EMM386, and the actual DOS OS
| (the entire thing, including apps, not just the DOS "kernel")
| would run as a sole vm86 task, without any other tasks. The
| memory manager was then serving DOS with a lot of the 386 32 bit
| goodness through a straw, effectively.
|
| It's very bizarre from today's (or even back then's) OS
| standards, and evolved that way because compatibility.
| pavlov wrote:
| Is it so bizarre from today's perspective? Virtualization and
| hypervisors are commonplace.
| anyfoo wrote:
| The virtualization itself is not the bizarre part. The
| bizarre part is where the actual OS is 16 bit and runs as the
| singular "task" of a thin 32 bit layer that merely calls
| itself a "memory manager". The details of that machinery
| (segmentation, DPMI, ...) are quite a sight to behold. And
| it's all because of how PCs evolved at that time, and because
| we needed to keep running DOS and still wanted to make use of
| all the extra memory that wouldn't fit into its address
| space.
| empressplay wrote:
| So, a number of different BBS servers supported multiple incoming
| lines (effectively multitasking inside of the BBS server
| application itself, not by running multiple copies of the
| software on the same machine), typically up to 8 in one machine
| either using a special communications card that connected to a
| number of external modems or by stuffing internal modems into as
| many ISA slots as you can (typically up to 6 so you still had IO
| and video, 7 if you ran 'headless'.)
|
| Some BBS servers also supported multiple instances by connecting
| to a master server, which supplied dynamic content such as chat,
| forum messages and e-mails or door game data to all of the other
| machines. In large markets a BBS having dozens of lines was not
| uncommon.
| beloch wrote:
| "Imagine how much power those things used. Every watt of heat
| they dumped into the room then had to be pumped out, so that
| means a corresponding amount of air conditioning to take it
| outside. That seems like a whole mess of juice to me. "
|
| --------------
|
| A 286 used around 3 Watts of power, while a current generation PC
| PCU uses upwards of 150 W. That's a factor of _fifty_. That 's
| not even factoring in the GPU's, which these computers would have
| lacked.
|
| This room was neither quiet or cool. While the CPU's were
| comparatively low power back then, all the other stuff (modems in
| particular) would have put out a lot more heat than their modern
| equivalents. However, this room could realistically have been in
| somebody's residential home basement without any exotic A/C
| measures. Maybe a wall-mounted unit or two. It would not have
| pumped out nearly as much heat or consumed as much power as
| modern gear of equivalent volume.
| userbinator wrote:
| Indeed, a single high-end desktop today at full load would
| probably use more power than everything in that room.
| nine_k wrote:
| Well, it's truth but not the whole truth.
|
| An IBM AT was capable of consuming nearly 200W [1]. Of course a
| typical machine would not consume as much, because it did not
| have its RAM and disk slots maxed out. The CPU indeed consumed
| around 3W, and normally even lacked a radiator.
|
| A modern PC can consume large amounts of power, mostly
| determined by the appetites of the GPU. But here is plenty of
| desktop CPUs with 65W and even 45W TDP, and a typical recent
| Intel or AMD CPU would consume 3-5W when idle. A quite powerful
| ARM A7 based system, such as an Orange Pi 5, would draw < 15W
| under maximum load, likely providing more compute and I/O than
| that whole room on the photo.
|
| [1]:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Personal_Computer_AT#Power...
| beloch wrote:
| People's intuition is based on what a rack in a typical
| modern data centre would be like. i.e. High end server CPUs
| and multiple GPU's per box, which really should be factored
| in since they're the bulk of the power draw and heat
| production. Put a few of these in your basement and you're
| going to need special cooling and power solutions.
|
| The pictured room is _not_ full of high-performance computing
| machines, even for the day. (HPC was ruled by mainframes back
| then, although if this picture was taken well into the
| obsolescence of the room, high-end workstations (e.g. Silicon
| Graphics and Sun) may have been gaining on them for some
| applications.) This room was built for getting a couple
| hundred callers networked into a BBS where they could access
| the same files, text chat, and perhaps even MUD a little.
| This was a fundamentally different beast.
| t1234s wrote:
| For anyone that enjoyed door games, Grok will simulate L.O.R.D.
| for you.
| userbinator wrote:
| _It 's possible they managed to do some rudimentary multitasking
| with DESQview (or worse...)_
|
| There were even hypervisors available, such as VM/386:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VM/386
|
| https://virtuallyfun.com/2023/06/13/re-visiting-vm-386/
| radar1310 wrote:
| I think the standard BBS modem for most BBS's was the US Robotics
| brand if I'm not mistaken.
|
| My first modem was a Supra 2400 baud, then thinking about all the
| speed I would have with my new 56.6. My first hard drive was a 20
| meg, new it was $320. 20 megs $320 kids, imagine that.
|
| That was for my wonderful brand new Amiga 500. Those were the
| days.
| mansilladev wrote:
| Anyone else still remember old BBS phone numbers? I've got
| several stuck in my head from 40 odd years ago, but I can barely
| remember my kids' cell numbers.
| opello wrote:
| I assume, at least for me, it's because I typed them in many,
| many more times.
| ASUfool wrote:
| I still remember the number for Bob's Answering Machine in
| Phoenix, one of the local Fidonet-connected BBS's.
|
| But oddly, at the same time, I was running a WBBS ( _wave to
| Mr. W. Conrad, the author_ ) as a local dual 360K floppy PC-XT
| BBS, I don't recall my OWN phone number for it.
| pwrrr wrote:
| I miss those times
| YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
| >> So then, when you see this picture (and remember, it might
| only be showing half of the whole setup), do you think "wow,
| cool, they got to wrangle all of that", or do you think "OMG they
| _had_ to wrangle all of that "? It's an important distinction to
| make, and I think someone's gut reaction to this amount of
| hardware in one place might influence how they approach building
| new systems.
|
| It's a very good point. Like, I have some stuff that eats up RAM
| like a, a very hungry thing, so I went online to see if I could
| buy some old server blade with a couple TB of RAM from ebay. I
| found a few, refurbished, not in a horrible condition, not
| prohibitively expensive (I'm not currently funded, as such) and I
| remember this distinct feeling, like a frisson of excitement at
| the thought of having access to ~20 times more POWER than I
| usually have...
|
| ... and then I cooled down, didn't buy a server, and instead
| rented one with "only" 256 GB RAM until I could fix my stuff so
| that it now runs with up to 8GB on my laptop. Still expensive,
| but we're getting there.
|
| Morale of the story: don't know. I prefer to find ways to make
| software go faster than rely on hardware? I get the feeling I'm
| very alone on this, seeing as everyone's talking about putting
| nuclear-powered server farms in space and whatnot.
| wjnc wrote:
| Nobody mentioned the smell of that time yet.
|
| An acrid air, stingy for the first few seconds but then somewhat
| enjoyable because of the ozon. The smell of stale coffee and
| cigarettes lingering. The smell of wood for cabinets (instead of
| pressed and glued materials).
|
| This is how I remember the university where my father worked
| (more coffee), the teachers room from my moms school (more
| cigarettes) and the IT department of the university (very strong
| in the 'IT-smell', but also hard on coffee and sigarettes).
|
| You don't find those smells like that anymore. I'll leave the
| description of the sound in this room to the next one. This was a
| loud room!
| guenthert wrote:
| You forget the toxic brominated flame retardents. No, I don't
| miss that smell so much.
| shagie wrote:
| From my days... this is what an old photo of a "proper" BBS
| looked like https://beeline.org/beeline/?view=a29ed68f4f4d53
| (note the wire wrapped custom modem controller) - the description
| is "Original Apple IIe with 11 modems and two 4-port homemade
| serial cards"
|
| And to keep better time,
| https://beeline.org/beeline/?view=c0a8000daa11ca
|
| It was later upgraded to a 486
| https://beeline.org/beeline/?view=188870d0bbc894
| timthorn wrote:
| And a Televideo 910. Keyboard with added reverb :)
| flopsamjetsam wrote:
| Ah, I was wondering what that was. My knowledge of terminals
| is not good (I just guess VT100 for everything :)
| officeplant wrote:
| Yeah this is a lot closer to the home BBS I grew up around. We
| had 20+ phone lines coming into our house all in a bundle going
| through the attic and dropping down into my dads "office"
| within the house. That led to a shelf full of modems, where I
| had to go find an inactive one and shut it off to free up a
| line. All so I could go turn on the modem in my room, because
| it was time to play a game with a friend across town.
|
| Over time the BBS grew into us being a local dialup ISP as my
| Dad dug deeper into self employeement in the computer age.
| flopsamjetsam wrote:
| I fully appreciate the horizontal "stack" of modems underneath
| the desk in the second photo :)
| shagie wrote:
| Power strips next to them in that photo are fun too.
| flopsamjetsam wrote:
| An absolute mess of cords!
| stevetron wrote:
| Here's a memory: My old Fido-net system, running on a 386, with a
| single phone line. Connected to a Microcom 34Kbaud modem.
|
| Everything is chugging on, and connects to another system further
| up the chain at 2 am for network traffic. Except he's on a new
| phone number, on a new exchange in the state. A 914 exchange.
| Only the phone company's updates haven't reached all of the
| telephone switching centers in the sate. Somehow, it was re-
| routed to 911 services, and I had the police and fire department
| at the front door responding to a 'silent call'. They went away
| unhappy. I wasn't very happy either.
| ralferoo wrote:
| From the follow-up article:
| https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2022/01/27/scale/
|
| "If you are sticking with the 2022 equivalent of MS-DOS and
| machines that do exactly one thing at a time, then yeah, you are
| going to have a whole fleet of systems all sitting there busy-
| waiting on something stupid."
|
| "Don't recreate the basement full of PCs when the problem can
| actually be solved with a single box sitting in a cabinet
| somewhere."
|
| If they really were just PCs to act as a modem-to-network bridge,
| this seems to be remarkably cost-inefficient. I remember around
| 1997 helping the university chuck out a few serial line
| concentrators (no idea what they were actually called), each of
| which had 32x RS-232 ports that worked up to 19200 baud and a
| 10Mbit coax network connection at the back. The on-board computer
| (wouldn't be at all surprised if it was much more than a 68000 or
| two) interfaced with all the serial ports and translated it to
| telnet on a remote machine. You could also send it an escape code
| and then via a primitive command line connect to any arbitrary IP
| address and port over TCP. I remember in my student days (so
| maybe 1995) using finger and SMTP directly from these text
| terminals without actually logging on.
|
| No idea when these became available, but we were chucking them
| out in 1997 or 1998 as we were upgrading the labs of text
| terminals to PCs, so they probably at least a decade old by then.
| gzread wrote:
| The BBS software itself would have likely ran on the PCs, one
| instance per simultaneous user, and because it's a single-
| tasking OS, that means one simultaneous user per PC. They
| aren't just bridging packets to a single central multi-user
| server that serves everyone.
| icedchai wrote:
| Not necessarily. DOS multi-taskers like DESQview and TopView
| existed. You didn't even need a 386.
| joezydeco wrote:
| Okay, but what did you use for a multiuser backend database
| back then? One that could handle multiple threads reading
| and writing to it? A lot of these old BBS systems were just
| slapping together endless directories of flat text files.
| icedchai wrote:
| DOS / Desqview support filesystem locking with
| "share.exe." Honestly I am not sure how well this worked,
| but I knew guys who ran multi-line BBSes under DOS and
| Desqview (and later OS/2) without issue.
|
| Even with multiple PCs you would also have similar
| "shared filesystem" issues. You'd need some sort of
| fileserver and a shared, network drive. Novell was
| popular at the time.
| mark-r wrote:
| So are those just regular bookcases that the computers are
| stacked on?
| tokai wrote:
| Time is a flat circle.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47204799
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