OT: Do people still use DOS based BBS's, What about ALT.newsgroup or whatever Options

[Mueller]

Never really understood what the heck these things are compared to the internet I know with webpages and all that fancy graphics

where the BBSs and alt.newsgroups or alt.whatever the only way to communicate before html or windoz or ???

tried to look it up, but just got confused (IMG:http://www.914world.com/bbs2/html/emoticons/wacko.gif)

[lapuwali]

QUOTE (914GT @ Apr 28 2005, 05:30 PM)

QUOTE (lapuwali @ Apr 28 2005, 01:53 PM) In the beginning, there were many unconnected "nets", each with their own email standards, and some with chat like features, and some even browsing features (PLATO, at the U of I, allowed looking up restaurants, movie listings, etc. from dedicated touch-screen terminals as early as 1980). PLATO ... wow, that brings back memories! Early plasma screens, had a primitive form of instant messaging, and a few games like lunar lander. And this in the mid-70s. Took a few courses on that system.

The units I used in 1980-81 weren't plasma, but vector screens. Rather than raster stuff such as almost eveyrone uses now, with millions of pixels, the vector machines drew straight lines on the tube using the electron beam directly. This allowed a relatively complex picture to be described as a small set of straight lines, so very fast updates could take place with very little data. This suited the slow processors and tiny bandwidths available then. A good number of early arcade games were also vector-based, like Asteroids. Most of the terminals used an amber phosphor screen, which resembles the early (but later) plasma raster displays produced by IBM and a few others.

My first email address was uunet!racerx!james, using the old "bang path" UUCP email address format. UUNet was the very first commercial ISP, and the company I worked for in the mid-80s was one of the few non-research companies that had an Internet connection, which consisted of a then lightening fast 9600 baud Codex modem that dialed Reston, VA (from STL, MO) once an hour and exchanged mail and news. racerx was a Sun 3/50 sitting in the office next to mine.