How did the Airgun Bulletin Board System actually work before the internet?

[harvey_s]

And I remember the USB modems leading the charge, everyone would upgrade their internal or external modem as soon as they released a new version, no firmware upgrades in those days

I don't think anyone had invented USB back then - I think you mean US Robotics and they used a good old serial cable.

[RobF]

I don't think anyone had invented USB back then - I think you mean US Robotics and they used a good old serial cable.

Rs232 was the new kid on my block. It was thought to be advanced that I could splice into the phone line and not have to physically hold a phone in place to communicate with it audibly.

[angrybear]

I don't think I owned a computer until I was 38 (2001) I've no idea what any of the previous was on about.

[Antoni]

I don't think I owned a computer until I was 38 (2001) I've no idea what any of the previous was on about.

Nor do you need to! But it's a hoot to know how things started. The BBS being a case in point.

At work Bob dug up his old 6502 Atom and we did some serious research on it resulting in a relatively successful product. Could have been done on modern stuff but neither of us spoke C++ (or was it just C then?).

[MartynB]

I don't think anyone had invented USB back then - I think you mean US Robotics and they used a good old serial cable.

Yes typo, US Robotics modems, I had later internal versions for PC (AT) then PCI buses

[Rich]

Before modems we had acoustic couplers that the telephone handset had to be laid in, they had rubber shrouds that went round the earpiece and mouthpiece. Then along came the trimphones and they wouldn't fit in the couplers.

You had to choose what kind of being modern mattered to you. A coupler and a 10 cps teletype printer or an up-to-date looking phone.

Then along came 30 cps dot matrix printers that took fanfold paper with sprocket hole edges.

AOL.com was about the only ISP around in the early days of the web and you had to have a browser like Netscape. Unless you had two phone lines (I was lucky) you probably had a wife nagging you to hang up so that she could make a call.

[Rich]

Who were the early people on this BBS? When did it start?

I joined in July 2000 and I was member number 240.

[Antoni]

Before modems we had acoustic couplers that the telephone handset had to be laid in, they had rubber shrouds that went round the earpiece and mouthpiece. ...

My first experience of computing involved one of those connecting to a main-frame which occupied a whole floor of another building. That 'teleprinter terminal' even had its own room. I used pre-prepared paper punch tape to load the programs. I even saw stacks of programming cards being used to load programs. A bit of drift here but that kind of kit absolutely fascinated me.

[Hsing-ee]

Before the internet it was Air Gun World, Exchange & Mart, mail-order catalogs, secondhand shops, shooting and fishing shops, bicycle shops with airguns in, blokes at the church fete with Cadet Majors, a bloke in the pub your Dad knew, an older bloke at work with an Original Diana 50, shotgun shooters who had a air-rifle, six-yard clubs and ten meter clubs attached to the local .22 rimfire 'miniature rifle' NSRA club, then with FT (actual FT with Weihrauch 35s and BSA Mercurys) there were local airgun clubs...

Basically the amount of actual knowledge about air-rifles was very small amongst the air-gun shooting population. Wesley and then the Cardew books were really the only sources of anything sensible.

The best advice of the time was to buy a .177, buy match pellets (as used by the 'square' 10m match shooters), and don't use an over-powered spring.

Then you might hit something smaller than a beer-can.

[Turnup]

In principle the only difference between the current implementation of the BBS and the older systems is the means of communication between your PC and the server. As has been explained by others it was necessary to dial up to the BBS server in order to communicate with it and in that case it was possible to communicate with only the server you had dialled so you had a dedicated connection for the duration of the call. Internet (more correctly "TCP/IP") is a way to communicate with many destinations at the same time, the "connections" are not dedicated, they are virtual connections and can adjust automatically to bypass failed or overloaded routes.

The at the dawn of home use internet it was still necessary to dial up a server, but that was an Internet Server acting as your gateway to the rest of the internet and all the other servers on it so the dial up connection was no longer dedicated to one server.

[harvey_s]

Slow, expensive and no real graphics...but conversely - no adverts, no pop-ups and no-one trying to steal your data.

...and internet porn was non-existent beyond Maxine Headboom

[Antoni]

...and internet porn was non-existent beyond Maxine Headboom

Oh yes it was extant!

On that mainframe there was a file which would print out a portrait style image. It was abt 3 foot long on tractor-feed paper and was made up entirely of ascii characters. I had a download of it for many years - maybe still have it somwhere on punched tape!

The image was of a 4 leg stool with a 2 leg beauty sitting upon it. The resolution was easily good enough to show how beautiful she was.

Could that have been Maxine?

[Solvo]

those were the days..
fbing..fbing... sceeeeee....fwwwww....fbing....

was great when those funky USR modems could give 56k on a phone line

I still troubleshoot US Robotics 56K data modems for the NHS on occasion

[harvey_s]

Oh yes it was extant!

On that mainframe there was a file which would print out a portrait style image. It was abt 3 foot long on tractor-feed paper and was made up entirely of ascii characters. I had a download of it for many years - maybe still have it somwhere on punched tape!

The image was of a 4 leg stool with a 2 leg beauty sitting upon it. The resolution was easily good enough to show how beautiful she was.

Could that have been Maxine?

No, Maxine was moving image using extended ascii characters doing something she picked up from the Duchess of Argyll .

[Turnup]

I still troubleshoot US Robotics 56K data modems for the NHS on occasion

Why does that not surprise me?