Guess it's time for me to reminisce.. :) On Wed, 25 Oct 2000, sunder wrote:
Back in those days, I remember having a shell account at school, and SLIP had just come out. Someone had written a small program that would allow users to run SLIP from userland and turn a dial-up shell into a net connection.
Sounds like SLiRP :).. Most annoying thing setting those things up over non 8-bit clean lines.
As the script kiddies got bolder and the laziness of the sysadmins and developers started to show, the shell accounts went away. More and more people started offering unlimited network access, but busy signals put a limit on that.
It's still hard to get unlimited access since it costs around 16-19c a meg wholesale in Australia.
Back to AOL. I remember them from the latter Commodore 64 days. They were Q-Link back then. This was a time when BBS's were the rule, and toward the end, before the internet killed most of them off. The better ones such as Searchlight used ANSI text editors and menus, some had tree like message structures - much like usenet, and some even carried a few newsgroups.
Most boards this side of the world were running Remote Access or other QuickBBS clones.. IMHO more configurable :)
Not that I could tell an "A" character apart from a "B" character, but I could tell that one had been sent, and then another, and then a third, etc. If you tried to immitate a carrier, some stupid modems would try to handshake with you. Going from 300 to 1200 was fun. :) It's how
I remember users connecting to my system with modems that only supported 300bps or 1200/75 and seeing them attempt to upload at 1200/75, now that was slow.
Going back to the later and more final versions of the BBS world... there were a few graphical standards coming out for BBS's.
I'm suprised with the amount of Mac users here, that no-one's mentioned BBS systems such as 'firstclass'. Firstclass was the first GUI based terminal application I ever used - it allowed you to call BBS'es while retaining an interface similar to the finder - at a reasonable speed too. Downloading files was simly a click and a drag away.
Most notably was the RIPScript code which had a new line followed by a pipe and an exclamation as its escape code sequence. Unlike ANSI codes which were (and still are for VT100 emulation) ESC followed by an open square bracket, these could be sent via email, so you could send pictures of a sort over 7 bit ascii systems and change colors, etc.
RIPscript didn't really take off here, at least in Australia. Speed was something to be desired, and the resolution wasn't that good. I also faintly remember licensing issues, or that there wasn't a free/affordable RIPterm. Fuzzy memory.. There was also AVATAR which was similar to ANSI, but used shorter escape codes, and was a fair bit faster although it was still text based.
features is not much different from this -- except for the ability to link to urls, (and more recently with JavaScript -- infect you with viruses) which I don't think (or recall) RIPScript had.
Mentioning that, I remember the first vulnerability I saw. The BBS package TBBS tended to dump all memory (specifically usernames/passwords) to the user if they had the %location% macro, which would print their location, in their location.
Compuserve was also a very pricey fucked up place. You paid through the nose for just getting on, and then some for the extras. And those idiotic comma separated email addresses weren't helping.
First time I tried it, the hourly cost was something like A$38p/h, not including those services which cost more - besides the layout of the place wasn't terribly untuitive.
Yes, I recall spending nearly $400 for a piece of shit clamshell 1X SCSI CDROM for my Mac, and man it was so much slower than the hard drives, they were nearly floppy speed.
Worse still, when MacOS 7 came out. I remember having to share one of those slow CDROM's between several users on a localtalk network - ultimate definition of slow.
But then having picked up Project Guttenberg's latest CD, I could now read tons and tons of books -- more than I had shelf space for. And as a bonus, I got the usual world Atlas (never mind that today you can get street maps on CD's!) a dictionary/thesaurus and a cheesy encyclopedia. (Back in those days every parent was sold on feeding their kids Britannica and the cheaper versions. To get it on CD was really something.)
Back in those days, you could get BBS-in-a-box type CD's that had basically all of the shareware and PD software you'd need.. Slowly these CD's would turn into multiple CD set's.
By 94 or so, I did use Mosaic and Cello and Trumpet Winsock on Win31 to get to the first of the web pages. Most of the "web" was really gopher and ftp sites, but here and there a web server was to be found.
Hey, don't forget WAIS :)
yet another horse for the TLA's, and full of the negligent and ignorant who don't know they are there. Full of banner ads and privacy invading cookies subsidizing content.
Too true.. Peter.