#freeware #bbs #history #floppydisk
In the 1980s, the concept of freeware evolved with the advent of Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) and shared floppy disks.Developers distributed their creations on these platforms, enabling users worldwide to access a variety of software for free
This particular tagline that I posted on Google Plus adorned the group I designated The Rubber Room. 
The BBS world of old, as was computing in general, was male dominated--proven by this widely circulated tagline...
Greg Hewgill's Silly Little Mail Reader launched a gazillion taglines and this is another of his classics:
Ya, I reshared posts from 2 months ago mainly because I did a search on the hashtag #BBS looking for ANSI art, if any. Also looking for vintage taglines. Back on the now-defunct GooglePlus I did a line of posts called "Previously Famous Taglines" and having found a hole in the Fediverse where that's concerned, I'm highly tempted to start that one up again on here. I did have graphics to go with 'em but I still haven't dug those up yet.
Just you wait, tho. #PreviouslyFamousTaglines kicks off with a plain text Greg Hewgill classic from Silly Little Mail Reader:
"On a clear disk you can seek forever..."
Hrm... i'm ever again tickled with the thought, that i would love to more or less rebuild a very old BBS i was cosysop of..
It was a #CNet #Amiga (#Pro) based bbs, on a #Amiga #4000 sporting a nice #Phase5 CyberStorm #MKi #060/50 turbocard and some other bits of fanciness to finally support 6 POTS dialins + 1 ISDN and at times we even hat a PPP uplink to the internet even with a #JoinLink conference yo you could chat across the internet on both BBS as if it was one bigger BBS....
Heck i miss those times and i miss how close we as users from local dialins were connected .. and had regular parties .. where we ever again had to find a new location for the next "usertreff" because the last host/club owner ..... let's say .. had some complaints.. ;)
I've tried to contact the actual licence owner of #CNet #Amiga #Pro to buy a fresh license..
I still have some amiga hardware here .. but well .... i can't afford to run them .. just because of the electricity cost..
But uhm .. i still have a raspi, which can emulate a _WAY_ bigger amiga as ever existed in hardware... Let's talk about MC68080 CPU in virtual Ghz Speeds. Virtually unlimited ram (realistically 1gb is way to much for a amiga) ... And instead of slow SCSI hard discs and CDROMS (which still are here) ... heck we have gigabytes of space on _WAY_ faster storage, even if it's emulated...
So .. yeah i probably need to search down a lot of stuff and components to get all that back together to at least a reminiscent version of the good old days....... I just still wait for some ppl giving me a license for the mailbox software........
*sniff*
The modem world refuses to be a single, stable object of analysis. In life and in memory, it was multiple, different, conflicting networks at the same time. This complexity was written into the architecture of the networks themselves. Before 1996, the modem world was not yet the internet, not yet a single, universal information infrastructure bound together by a shared set of protocols. In the days of Usenet and BBSs and Minitel, cyberspace was defined by the interconnection of thousands of small-scale local systems, each with its own idiosyncratic culture and technical design, a dynamic assemblage of overlapping communication systems held together by digital duct tape and a handshake. It looked and felt different depending on where you plugged in your modem.
The standard history of the internet jumps from Arpanet to the web, skipping right past the mess of the modem world. Platforms didn’t invent the social use of computer networks. Amateurs, activists, educators, students, and small business owners did. Silicon Valley turned their practices into a product, pumped it full of speculative capital, scaled it, and so far refuse to treat the lives we live through it with care.
Yes, my own first exposure to connected networks was via a dial-up modem to a Bulletin Board System. I still remember my first e-mail address, and how after dialling in, you’d create your account from a terminal screen (there were no GUI web browsers back then) and it was all ASCII text on a screen. The BBS was the gathering place to send and receive messages (we got actual e-mail addresses later on), share files, and a bit later on, the BBSs offered links to what was becoming the broader Internet. This was before the IBM PC XT had made any appearance, as I was on an Amiga 500 computer. Later came Netscape Navigator, and early graphics browsers. Yes, we were ‘connected’ long before we’d heard of The Internet.
In the words of one former sysop, the BBS was the original cyberspace. The stories from this era remind us that many different internets have already existed. An internet after social media is still possible; the internet of today can still become something better, more just, equitable, and inclusive—a future worth fighting for.
See https://www.wired.com/story/internet-origin-story-bbs/
#technology #BBS #internet #history #bulletinboards
#Blog, ##bbs, ##bulletinboard, ##retro, ##technology
● NEWS ● #Rachel #Hardware ☞ An old photo of a very large #BBS https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2022/01/26/swcbbs/
This is a brilliant documentary about the history and culture around the dial up BBS's that in many ways was the precursor to the internet as we know it today. It's long but definitely worth it! (I originally watched it as episodes, but this one has been stitched into one long one!)
https://vidcommons.org/videos/watch/bff55f3a-42f0-43f4-b3b6-b7d882524d13
