CDR: Re: Mac created the modern Internet

[Peter Tonoli]

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.