04-17-2016, 10:04 AM
I was a sysop of a BBS system when I was a teenager. Ran it off an Apple ][ clone. If one could imagine PW being a BBS, it would be a single phone line. One person could log in and browse or post messages at a time. Anybody else would get a busy signal. The popular BBSs would require hours of auto-dialing trying to get in. Eventually the BBSs evolved into primitive networks (FIDOnet and WWIV come to mind) where different dial-up points could share posts and even send email between them, however they were not in real time because the data had to "hop" during middle-of-the-night calls where the BBS would hang up on whoever was logged in and send/transmit info to whatever nodes it was programmed to. In this manner, you could send an email from the west coast to the east coast, sometimes in just a couple of hops (a few days).
At the time there was no commercial access to the internet. It was the playground for universities, the military, and few others. Eventually the primitive BBS networks got internet gateway access allowing anybody to get crappy access to usenet and email in non-real time. Then in the early 90's the internet was essentially "de-regulated" and the .com for commercial access was born. Nobody wanted non-real-time access to the networks anymore and the BBSs died shortly thereafter. Rather than tying up two phone lines for a person to access one remote computer, one could access ALL OF THEM on the internet. I remember browsing the first "web pages" using a browser called Lynx. It was text-only. Then came the beta graphical browsers where every web page looked substantially different depending on what browser you were using because there were no HTML standards. All the web pages were hand-coded. It was an amazing time. I remember people asking me what I did for a living and telling them I put businesses on the internet, and them having no idea what I was talking about. Most of them had never heard of the BBS much less the internet. Fond memories seeing technology evolve almost hourly right before my eyes. I don't actually remember the first SPAM email I received, but I do remember it being something that almost never happened to being something that became a plague.
At the time there was no commercial access to the internet. It was the playground for universities, the military, and few others. Eventually the primitive BBS networks got internet gateway access allowing anybody to get crappy access to usenet and email in non-real time. Then in the early 90's the internet was essentially "de-regulated" and the .com for commercial access was born. Nobody wanted non-real-time access to the networks anymore and the BBSs died shortly thereafter. Rather than tying up two phone lines for a person to access one remote computer, one could access ALL OF THEM on the internet. I remember browsing the first "web pages" using a browser called Lynx. It was text-only. Then came the beta graphical browsers where every web page looked substantially different depending on what browser you were using because there were no HTML standards. All the web pages were hand-coded. It was an amazing time. I remember people asking me what I did for a living and telling them I put businesses on the internet, and them having no idea what I was talking about. Most of them had never heard of the BBS much less the internet. Fond memories seeing technology evolve almost hourly right before my eyes. I don't actually remember the first SPAM email I received, but I do remember it being something that almost never happened to being something that became a plague.
