I was 14 and we got a second phone line to deal with the modem. Wrote BBS software on my C64. It was in basic and slow but still worked great. Learned so much. Incredible times. I am VP of Technology at a company now. I owe it all to these early pioneers.
I ran a multi-line BBS for years. Even with all the advances in technology have happened in the last 30 years, I still think of the pre-WWW days as the golden era for PC geeks.
It was because not everyone was able to get online but it required knowledge and dedication to the hobby. I absolutely agree that internet peaked (as a social networking tool) before the World Wide Web. The final decline started when Facebook was created. Looking at the cesspool that modern social media is it's pretty fitting that the first widely spread social media was created to meet a very similar need - to judge other people by their looks.
This was aired in 1985. The complaints about the complexity with modems and such is understandable during this time because it was still at an early stage of development. I was just starting to use computers in about 85-86 and was using a tape drive to record my programs so I can relate to the frustration. Nevertheless it was a very exciting time for technology. I didn't log on to my first BBS until about 1990-91, and by then the hardware & software had developed enough that it wasn't really that hard to get online. I think the 14,400 modem was a real game changer for BBS & early internet access.
One of the reasons I enjoy watching this show besides computers is the quality of these old transmissions. The background audio hiss, the video quality and the fact that everyone is speaking politely and clearly. It's quiet relaxing to watch and hear.
I am watching this almost 40 years later in 2023 and it is bizarrely relevant. Online etiquette, telecommuting, and free speech/moderation in the digital world
@@karlimo4034 I know, but his comment still didn't age well. Now there's computers in everything. Phones, TV's, some home appliances, cars. Heck were strapping them onto our wrists these days. That's why I said his comment didn't age well, because these days you won't get through an entire day without touching at least 1 computer. 🙂
The computers back then were way less powerful, less capable and less connected. It was still an open question whether all those technologies would keep improving at the same accelerating rates for decades to come. We are taking way too much for granted.
Very true, just on a grander scale with issues like net neutrality, and should network infrastructure for the internet be regulated as utilities just like telephones, water pipes, and electrical wires.
lol. George Morrow was actually one of the early pioneers of personal computers. He was a member of the Homebrew Computer Club and a self-taught computer engineer. He formed one of the first companies dedicated to selling personal computer peripherals. So he definitely _was_ a computer person, especially for the time. I'm pretty sure in his role as co-host, he was trying to get the guests to answer the right questions, i.e. those that the potential modem buyer would be asking.
Yeah, it's hilarious. Before the first commercial break he was all "well modem stands for modulator demodulator and it does this and this and this" and after the break he was like "gosh I have so much trouble with these things"
I ran a BBS from 1988 to 1992 using the Wildcat! software. Since I was active as a scout leader at the time, we focused on things that might be of interest to both the youth and adult members of Scouting. The Eagle’s Nest BBS also offered general interest material. Knowing that some local boards were plagued by less than civil discourse at times, we sought to maintain a higher standard by requiring users to register with their real names, no aliases or “handles.” New members had limited access until I could verify their identity by a voice call to the number they provided. Not foolproof, but better than unfettered access. It was a lot of work for a hobby operation, but also a lot of fun and I made a lot of friends, some of whom I am still in contact with 30 years later. It all came to an end when Indiana Bell decided that even a free BBS was a business and could not be run from a residential line. That raised my operating cost by a factor of 5 and priced it right out of my budget.
27:37 "A computer will some day be the world's best chess player". Surprisingly enough it took until 1997 until Deep Blue could win against Garry Kasparov in a tournament. Nowadays, chess computers are indeed the best players and everyone (even Grand Masters) uses them to analyze positions and get better at the game.
I like how George Morrow was picking that guy's brain a little about how to set up a BBS. Then Stewart exposed that George had been trying to do it himself but ran into some complications. George was a computer genius, but sometimes IT is a different animal from just standard computer logic.
I have a feeling if George had gotten his own BBS running, there would be a lot of intro text telling you all about the hardware and software. “You’re dialing in to a G-Whiz 8600 with 1 meg of memory, running the latest copy of Board Stiff 2.0”. You would be expected to be as impressed as he is, because the only other thing to do would be to download files (a copy of the board software, a home-brew replacement for ‘dir’, and a FAQ for repairing Apple II disk drives), and a bunch of menu options that perpetually read “coming soon”. You would be given 15 minutes of time per call to keep the lines available - of which you would only need 8 to see all there is to see.
During the late 1980s and the early 1990s the Atari 400/800/XL/XE (8-Bit) Computer group that I was a member of were discussing the possibility of starting up our own Bulletin Board system, but while we retained our Atari 8-Bit Computer Systems we also bought our selves Windows PCs that had built in modems.
@@solidaudioTV I didn't ever get to meet or come across actual Atari 400/800/XL/XE (8-Bit) run websites at the time that I wanted to start one, but I did find out that there was one which was still running around the late 1990s / the early 2000s (around 2000 through 2009) that may have been shut down afterwards. 🤔
Incredible history. I wish so much more legacy content were available on the very platforms (UA-cam) whose existences are based on these predecessor systems. Thank you for making this available!
I love the first 30 seconds of this video. "If you don't have a modem you're missing half the fun of a using a computer!" Now if you don't have one, you're missing out on 99.9999% of the fun. Also Rory O'Conner looks like he smokes a cray cray amount of dope.
I had a C-64 back in the 80's and vaguely remember hearing about modems but had no idea what it was all about. I wish I would have looked into it further back then as I would have had a head start on the Internet gold rush
Calling into a BBS was so fun as it felt like an actual destination you were traveling to, unlike a web page which comes right up. That old modem connection sound was a thrill in the mid-80's!
It's interesting to hear Morrow talk like a novice. And his quip about the IRS shows he's all business. LOL! Ingraham uses a baritone voice to let you know he'll slap you around good if you _cross the line._
This is older than most people using the 'net these days. Things have sure come a long way ... and some things haven't changed a bit (no pun intended!)
Right. I was just starting to learn computers when this aired - pretty exciting times! It's amazing how much of what they were talking about way back there is still relevant.
The true skill here is that multiple people, intelligent well beyond the average American, were able to not only describe all this in plain english, they did it at length and with the intent to educate. The best of the best and they had no idea.
Kids today will never get to experience the fun of getting anything with computers to work right from back in the day. Just like IRQ conflicts and DMA addresses, we forget how you had to have the same kind of modems otherwise it didn't work. "Hayes compatible" was what you eventually looked for and I remember starting out at 300 baud, then we had 14.4k and 28.8k and the speed demon- the 56k modem! Now you were cooking! I think USR and eventually 3Com were the most popular brands. Ahh, the good old days...
goddammit, I love how the "additional stories" section of the broadcast is called Random Access Files (edit: and the Jingle Disk advertised at the end was also uploaded to youtube! video ID ZW0wYdEjr9Q)
......."why would there be more computers in homes than typewritters" is absolutely insane in hindsight. Fastforward to 2024 we literally walk around with more computers than the number of typewritters that's ever existed....
Hah, the extreme visionary foresight of this show *cannot* be overstated. Great that it has been save for future generations. The highlight of this show for me was "is this a fad?" short answer: "no". At the time I was developing the the then biggest BBS in the Netherlands called NEABBS. And we for sure, we knew what we where doing; changing the world...
The BBS was the best. I remember connecting to one often and I thought it was the best thing ever. I even created my own but nobody ever called in. I didn’t care. I was just happy I had one.
This is really interesting. Still very relevant on the balance between freedom and legal issues that now encompass the entire internet. Love the guest co-host freaking out about the potential for "bad" the BBS opened up.
To put it in perspective, today (2023) the babies and small kids shown in that San Francisco preschool are now in their late 30s to early 40s, and many have never seen dial-up modems or bulletin boards. Children of broadband and smart phones.
I'm 30, dial up internet was still very much a thing in rural areas like where I grew up. Not saying I'm old, but I can still remember webpages loading in sections on dial up lmao.
Smartphones weren't a thing until they were adults, they would have been around 20 when the first Blackberry phone came out in 2002, let alone when smartphones became popular for average home users by the early 2010s. As for broadband, while it was more common in the 90s, dialup was still dominant in the home, over 40% of Americans would still be on dial-up by the time the kids were adults in the early 00s.
@@CMDRScotty I was born in 1992. If I was born in 1985, I would have been at a Honda dealership on Sept. 12, 2007 to test drive the all new 2008 Accord the day it came out. February 22, 2019 2:05 am
400 baud modem, CompuServe and the latest issue of Computer Shopper for the BBS phone numbers and you was in business. I used to always make sure they disabled Ctrl-break to get around the passwords. It was the first email system using news groups to find information. I miss that sound of the modem initializing for each server you logged into. Great Stuff in the 80's/ Oh and I had the NFL Challenge game. We played it all the time till Command and Conquer arrived.
Richard Wielgosz It was a Hayes 300 smart modem but you could get more out them then designed. Unless you wanted an Atari 400. And in those days modems cost $500.00 plus new!
@@WizzRacing I thought that was a typo until you explained that.. and yes, I do remember getting slightly better rates out of the 300 baud modems.. 450 baud comes to mind, but I dont remember specifically.. Of course, that was in the simple FSK days... once we got to 1200 baud and more complex modulation, all that was over.
Never had and never even used analog audio modems like these. Most people in Poland including myself became familiar with Internet only after broadband internet became available, very often sharing one line with other people/flats. First years after ISDN 128kbps (or twice that at twice the cost) was available around year 2000 we also had the so called Internet cafes which I also used until I had other better ways like internet at school and then sharing ADSL line.
my favorite bbs was either Sector One or Road not taken. I also liked Uplink, that guy had a few nodes. TW2002 & Usurper were the best door games. Z-Modem was my fav. download protocol.
At least you never got in trouble for dialing up a long distance BBS while your parents where at work, and running up a crazy phone bill as a kid, and then had to mow lawns around your neighborhood all summer to pay back that bill lol!
Ha, my mom wanted me to tie up the phone lines with the Internet just so we wouldn't get telemarketers. I had to use a special code when dialing to disable call waiting cause the tone ruins the connection.
So if I understand correctly, in 1985 it was all but impossible to conventionally trace a message posted to a bulletin board. Am I in error on this? Details, anyone?
More or less that is correct. The cops would have to do a traditional wire tap to the phone line with an active connection to locate the caller, no different than a threatening phone call made. Phone companies didn't keep records of local calls so there was no "log" to go by. This of course meant they had to already know a crime was happening vs today where they can retroactively seek out IP logs and do backtracing to locate the original source of the message. Some of this went on with the most highest of profile online criminal cases, but they were few and far between for the most part. The BBS' world was mostly the wild wild west back then where anything and everything were acceptable practices.
I never ran a BBS of my own, but had friends that did, so this is more second hand info. It seems that depending on the kind of software you were using to run your BBS, there were varying degrees of detail that you could configure to extrapolate and record for each user log-on session. I suppose if the guy was really tricky he could avoid being identified electronically, but if you were savvy enough, you could get the phone company to tell you where the call came from. They definitely at least kept logs of long distance calls back then, because I remember seeing Mom & Dad complain about the bills!
It was unimaginable to them that everyone will have computer... and probably also unimaginable that any computer will be orders of magnitude faster than then super computers (for reference supercomputers Cray-2 at the time had 1.9 GFLOPs...)
Problem of 1985 still not solved 30 years later. You can watch a youtube vid of puppies and kittens, scroll down and find nothing but keyboard loudmouths going at it saying things theyd never say to anybodys face, mostly americans
Ha ha, it makes me laugh that the American thinks of a bulletin board as a physical thing. In the UK, the only bulletin board we know is electronic, and the object is a notice board!
The internet has come so far since the first one was set up by the defence department in 1968. When I got internet it was late 1990. My dad built a custom computer with a close friend in 1989 who was a computer expert. So I was five and got to enjoy early 56k internet.
I didn’t realize that 56k modems existed in 1990. Which ISP supported those speeds, and what were you doing as a 5 Yr old kid on the Internet in 1990? I was on by 94 and it was so primitive even then.
@@nyccollin 56k didn't come around until the late 90s, 97/98 to be exact. However, 14.4k was around in 1990 and started getting priced fairly affordable, which was a massive huge leap from 80s era 2400 baud modems that most had around if they had been computing for a while.
Message-only or chat-based boards didn't have to have a hard drive, they could run on floppies and were bolstered if there were a RAM drive on the computer. But if a BBS wanted a decent software download library then it pretty much had to have a hard drive attached. BBS' that didn't have a software library were considered lame in general, so had low/poor membership. Multi phone line boards were also just much easier to do on a PC based computer vs other types since it had the speed and expansion ability, especially once 9600+ baud speeds started becoming available. There were also network-linked BBS systems such as FidoNet that allowed for rudimentary email/forum message exchange so you could communicate with folks across the world that were on the same private system and this required some PC horsepower to do. Some systems adopted CD-ROM drives that had pre-loaded shareware packages but by then the commercial Internet started becoming available so their attraction didn't last long.
Telecommuting could have been a more workable reality, had the general work ethic of the average American stayed anywhere close to where it was in 1985. The general paranoia of trade secret loss, obessive micromanaging of productivity, and ignorant resistance by baby boomer and older-aged management to employees using computers in the home or even using computers in general in a workplace environment, didn't help matters any.
@Duke Hugh Johnson I find it hilarious when boomers try to call other people selfish. Your parents hated you and have you the generation ME moniker and your kids completely agree with that assessment
9:39 "Would you say that people are more venturesome in this environment" The beginning of Trolls
lol!!!!
I was 14 and we got a second phone line to deal with the modem. Wrote BBS software on my C64. It was in basic and slow but still worked great. Learned so much. Incredible times. I am VP of Technology at a company now. I owe it all to these early pioneers.
I ran a multi-line BBS for years. Even with all the advances in technology have happened in the last 30 years, I still think of the pre-WWW days as the golden era for PC geeks.
It was because not everyone was able to get online but it required knowledge and dedication to the hobby. I absolutely agree that internet peaked (as a social networking tool) before the World Wide Web. The final decline started when Facebook was created. Looking at the cesspool that modern social media is it's pretty fitting that the first widely spread social media was created to meet a very similar need - to judge other people by their looks.
This video from 1985 has SO many implications even in 2024. Wild!!
This was aired in 1985. The complaints about the complexity with modems and such is understandable during this time because it was still at an early stage of development. I was just starting to use computers in about 85-86 and was using a tape drive to record my programs so I can relate to the frustration. Nevertheless it was a very exciting time for technology. I didn't log on to my first BBS until about 1990-91, and by then the hardware & software had developed enough that it wasn't really that hard to get online. I think the 14,400 modem was a real game changer for BBS & early internet access.
More than 30 years later, and we still have problems with online etiquette.
Well, people have been struggling with in-person etiquette for all of recorded history.
Yup, some people do not even know it exists and is called "netiquette"
Shut up nerd.
Surprising how prescient this was, and how relevant it still is today.
One of the reasons I enjoy watching this show besides computers is the quality of these old transmissions. The background audio hiss, the video quality and the fact that everyone is speaking politely and clearly. It's quiet relaxing to watch and hear.
I prefer watching the view or cnn
@@jessihawkins9116 old BBC was pretty interesting to watch as well, CNN was good too.
The view and cnn... Holly shi...
@@karlimo4034 😂🤣
I am watching this almost 40 years later in 2023 and it is bizarrely relevant. Online etiquette, telecommuting, and free speech/moderation in the digital world
I love the one guy's question "how could we possibly expect more computers in homes than typewriters?" That question sure didn't age well. LOL!
But it was valid then, computers were way too expensive.
@@karlimo4034 I know, but his comment still didn't age well. Now there's computers in everything. Phones, TV's, some home appliances, cars. Heck were strapping them onto our wrists these days. That's why I said his comment didn't age well, because these days you won't get through an entire day without touching at least 1 computer. 🙂
Very few homes had a typewriter, and few owned a CB or shortwave radio. It was a valid objection at the time.
The computers back then were way less powerful, less capable and less connected. It was still an open question whether all those technologies would keep improving at the same accelerating rates for decades to come. We are taking way too much for granted.
@@Nunavuter1very few homes still have a cb or shortwave radio
The issues discussed on here are as relevant today as they were in 1985, even more so with the explosion of the Internet and Web.
Very true, just on a grander scale with issues like net neutrality, and should network infrastructure for the internet be regulated as utilities just like telephones, water pipes, and electrical wires.
lol. George Morrow was actually one of the early pioneers of personal computers. He was a member of the Homebrew Computer Club and a self-taught computer engineer. He formed one of the first companies dedicated to selling personal computer peripherals. So he definitely _was_ a computer person, especially for the time. I'm pretty sure in his role as co-host, he was trying to get the guests to answer the right questions, i.e. those that the potential modem buyer would be asking.
Yeah, it's hilarious. Before the first commercial break he was all "well modem stands for modulator demodulator and it does this and this and this" and after the break he was like "gosh I have so much trouble with these things"
George got stuck in a loop.
I ran a BBS from 1988 to 1992 using the Wildcat! software. Since I was active as a scout leader at the time, we focused on things that might be of interest to both the youth and adult members of Scouting. The Eagle’s Nest BBS also offered general interest material. Knowing that some local boards were plagued by less than civil discourse at times, we sought to maintain a higher standard by requiring users to register with their real names, no aliases or “handles.” New members had limited access until I could verify their identity by a voice call to the number they provided. Not foolproof, but better than unfettered access. It was a lot of work for a hobby operation, but also a lot of fun and I made a lot of friends, some of whom I am still in contact with 30 years later. It all came to an end when Indiana Bell decided that even a free BBS was a business and could not be run from a residential line. That raised my operating cost by a factor of 5 and priced it right out of my budget.
Interesting how much of internet culture had already started out at this point. Even romances!
Romances were there from the start. Check our the book “The Victorian Internet” by Tom Standage, a lot of this was going on over telegraphs!
@@MajorGeneralPanic Cool
@@MajorGeneralPanic Thank you
Ahhh the good old days of bulletin boards systems. They were the part of my youth in college.
27:37 "A computer will some day be the world's best chess player". Surprisingly enough it took until 1997 until Deep Blue could win against Garry Kasparov in a tournament. Nowadays, chess computers are indeed the best players and everyone (even Grand Masters) uses them to analyze positions and get better at the game.
It was still 2003 before it could be done consistently
RIP George Morrow (1934-2003)
I like how George Morrow was picking that guy's brain a little about how to set up a BBS. Then Stewart exposed that George had been trying to do it himself but ran into some complications. George was a computer genius, but sometimes IT is a different animal from just standard computer logic.
Good old George he loved his user groups.
I have a feeling if George had gotten his own BBS running, there would be a lot of intro text telling you all about the hardware and software. “You’re dialing in to a G-Whiz 8600 with 1 meg of memory, running the latest copy of Board Stiff 2.0”. You would be expected to be as impressed as he is, because the only other thing to do would be to download files (a copy of the board software, a home-brew replacement for ‘dir’, and a FAQ for repairing Apple II disk drives), and a bunch of menu options that perpetually read “coming soon”. You would be given 15 minutes of time per call to keep the lines available - of which you would only need 8 to see all there is to see.
he was old
So amazing to hear them talking about all these issues in 1985 that we deal with day in day out today.
"Working from home" became very relevant again in March 2020... and I have to say that not many companies where prepared for it.
"80386, essentially a mainframe on a chip"
That's funny. I was using a 386 at my job in 1993-94 to do data entry, setup databases, print mail, and play Tetris!
During the late 1980s and the early 1990s the Atari 400/800/XL/XE (8-Bit) Computer group that I was a member of were discussing the possibility of starting up our own Bulletin Board system, but while we retained our Atari 8-Bit Computer Systems we also bought our selves Windows PCs that had built in modems.
The Atari 400/800XL series is the one I learned to use computers on. Did anyone ever run a BBS on one of those?
@@solidaudioTV I didn't ever get to meet or come across actual Atari 400/800/XL/XE (8-Bit) run websites at the time that I wanted to start one, but I did find out that there was one which was still running around the late 1990s / the early 2000s (around 2000 through 2009) that may have been shut down afterwards. 🤔
Incredible history. I wish so much more legacy content were available on the very platforms (UA-cam) whose existences are based on these predecessor systems. Thank you for making this available!
So fantastic! I do miss BBS's and door games.
Telecommuting cannot be more relevant right now in 2020.
“How could there POSSIBLY be more computers in homes than typewriters?” 😂😂😂
I love the first 30 seconds of this video. "If you don't have a modem you're missing half the fun of a using a computer!"
Now if you don't have one, you're missing out on 99.9999% of the fun.
Also Rory O'Conner looks like he smokes a cray cray amount of dope.
+DOG They both look like that :)
tremorist
For reals. like 40 percent of everyone on this show.
"fun" is debatable. You could just leave the house to have fun.
cray cray?😕
@@jessihawkins9116 Yes, Cray computers.
I had a C-64 back in the 80's and vaguely remember hearing about modems but had no idea what it was all about. I wish I would have looked into it further back then as I would have had a head start on the Internet gold rush
Calling into a BBS was so fun as it felt like an actual destination you were traveling to, unlike a web page which comes right up. That old modem connection sound was a thrill in the mid-80's!
It's interesting to hear Morrow talk like a novice. And his quip about the IRS shows he's all business. LOL! Ingraham uses a baritone voice to let you know he'll slap you around good if you _cross the line._
Nice to hear the extended cut of the "Computer Chronicles" theme.
This is older than most people using the 'net these days. Things have sure come a long way ... and some things haven't changed a bit (no pun intended!)
Right. I was just starting to learn computers when this aired - pretty exciting times! It's amazing how much of what they were talking about way back there is still relevant.
The true skill here is that multiple people, intelligent well beyond the average American, were able to not only describe all this in plain english, they did it at length and with the intent to educate.
The best of the best and they had no idea.
people can still do that. have you watched the view?
@@jessihawkins9116 Your comment is satire, I presume.
@@SevenStarBibleQuest what’s that
Kids today will never get to experience the fun of getting anything with computers to work right from back in the day. Just like IRQ conflicts and DMA addresses, we forget how you had to have the same kind of modems otherwise it didn't work. "Hayes compatible" was what you eventually looked for and I remember starting out at 300 baud, then we had 14.4k and 28.8k and the speed demon- the 56k modem! Now you were cooking! I think USR and eventually 3Com were the most popular brands. Ahh, the good old days...
In my opinion, it is Discord that has specifically taken the place of the original function of BBSes.
goddammit, I love how the "additional stories" section of the broadcast is called Random Access Files (edit: and the Jingle Disk advertised at the end was also uploaded to youtube! video ID ZW0wYdEjr9Q)
23:55 “I was there, Gandalf. I was there, in 1985.” 💍💻😊
Walk down memory lane. I ran a BBS with Wildcat BBS from Mustang Software for a few years.
......."why would there be more computers in homes than typewritters" is absolutely insane in hindsight. Fastforward to 2024 we literally walk around with more computers than the number of typewritters that's ever existed....
Hah, the extreme visionary foresight of this show *cannot* be overstated. Great that it has been save for future generations. The highlight of this show for me was "is this a fad?" short answer: "no".
At the time I was developing the the then biggest BBS in the Netherlands called NEABBS. And we for sure, we knew what we where doing; changing the world...
The BBS was the best. I remember connecting to one often and I thought it was the best thing ever. I even created my own but nobody ever called in. I didn’t care. I was just happy I had one.
This is really interesting. Still very relevant on the balance between freedom and legal issues that now encompass the entire internet. Love the guest co-host freaking out about the potential for "bad" the BBS opened up.
To put it in perspective, today (2023) the babies and small kids shown in that San Francisco preschool are now in their late 30s to early 40s, and many have never seen dial-up modems or bulletin boards. Children of broadband and smart phones.
I'm 30, dial up internet was still very much a thing in rural areas like where I grew up. Not saying I'm old, but I can still remember webpages loading in sections on dial up lmao.
Smartphones weren't a thing until they were adults, they would have been around 20 when the first Blackberry phone came out in 2002, let alone when smartphones became popular for average home users by the early 2010s. As for broadband, while it was more common in the 90s, dialup was still dominant in the home, over 40% of Americans would still be on dial-up by the time the kids were adults in the early 00s.
Ahhh yes! Back when computers and being online was FUN! I miss the good old days!
This episode aired exactly one week before I was born!
André Ferreira fellow 85er it really was a good year
@@CMDRScotty I was born in 1992. If I was born in 1985, I would have been at a Honda dealership on Sept. 12, 2007 to test drive the all new 2008 Accord the day it came out.
February 22, 2019 2:05 am
I remember getting a word processor that worked on my pcjr from Ezra’s bbs holy crap that brings back memories.
They should have had ol' visionary Shugart on here. "I don't think this technology will have any significant impact in the future..."
Oh how I loved that intro music and title graphics.
They even had the concept of home office figured out then!
Maybe some of these companies wanting people back to the office should see the segment in this video about telecommuting.
Isn't it a little disturbing to see that even back in 1985, online child porn was still a problem way back then.
400 baud modem, CompuServe and the latest issue of Computer Shopper for the BBS phone numbers and you was in business.
I used to always make sure they disabled Ctrl-break to get around the passwords. It was the first email system using news groups to find information. I miss that sound of the modem initializing for each server you logged into. Great Stuff in the 80's/
Oh and I had the NFL Challenge game. We played it all the time till Command and Conquer arrived.
400 baud?
Richard Wielgosz
It was a Hayes 300 smart modem but you could get more out them then designed. Unless you wanted an Atari 400.
And in those days modems cost $500.00 plus new!
@@WizzRacing I thought that was a typo until you explained that.. and yes, I do remember getting slightly better rates out of the 300 baud modems.. 450 baud comes to mind, but I dont remember specifically.. Of course, that was in the simple FSK days... once we got to 1200 baud and more complex modulation, all that was over.
I've just got my bbs back up and running...telnet for now but I will be adding a 28.8k dial in node.
Never had and never even used analog audio modems like these. Most people in Poland including myself became familiar with Internet only after broadband internet became available, very often sharing one line with other people/flats. First years after ISDN 128kbps (or twice that at twice the cost) was available around year 2000 we also had the so called Internet cafes which I also used until I had other better ways like internet at school and then sharing ADSL line.
everyone had such great grammar on the internet back then
Must get one of these new modem thingies, I'm missing out.
if I heard of this show back in the day, i would be mental over it. I was east coast kid. we got nothing.
Yep.. same here.. In Maryland we had nothing like this show.
Wow around that time I got a 300 baud modem for my 64, and I had to read computer columns in the newspaper to get my first BBS numbers.
25:00 CD-ROM drives in 1985? What?
25:10 Wait-*laserdiscs* with database files on them?? 🤯
Darth Vader NEVER said ‘Luke, I am your father’. 🤯. Mandela Effect.
my bbs handle was "Noe1" back in 92. miss those days...
13:00 Hayes Smartmodem over his left shoulder
The best tv show about microcomputers ever!
If they only knew how crazy it would get in the future
my favorite bbs was either Sector One or Road not taken. I also liked Uplink, that guy had a few nodes. TW2002 & Usurper were the best door games. Z-Modem was my fav. download protocol.
Odd to think those little toddlers are coming up to 40 now
The only bulletin board that I used was @ University of Hawaii Manoa in 1988.
I miss running home and firing up my pc and playing Empire... More CORN!!!!
ahh, the announcement of token-ring LAN, what a golden age of computing where the standards was beeing tested and set for the future.
11:44 wow 2020 prediction
fantastc vid thanks ... used them an ran my own in early 90's
Basically when IBM came to dominate the market he and many other early PC people just sort of faded into the fringes.
16:00 ummm you need lubrication to get online? kinda like now :0)
"as many as 30 people on it at once" lol
40 phone lines
And now we have 4chan.
and the world is a much better place
Many 80s and 90s internet communities were wilder than 4chan could ever dream to be.
@@dijoxxThis is what I want to see more coverage of, what’s the pipeline from Usenet to 4chan to Twitter/X.
The complaints from my parents because I kept using the phone line for internet and no one could call us. lol
At least you never got in trouble for dialing up a long distance BBS while your parents where at work, and running up a crazy phone bill as a kid, and then had to mow lawns around your neighborhood all summer to pay back that bill lol!
Ha, my mom wanted me to tie up the phone lines with the Internet just so we wouldn't get telemarketers. I had to use a special code when dialing to disable call waiting cause the tone ruins the connection.
I wish I had one of those.
The thumbnail looks like some random dudes dressed as Stuart and Gary for halloween!
a lot of modems were sold after that man uttered the word "pornography"
Matthew McClure, here played by Paul Bettany.
Now how many people dated on those bulletin boards back then and are still together today?
@Dr.Quarex 😂 6-12 months had me in stitches. I think people wear a pair of tennis shoes longer than they stay in relationships
So if I understand correctly, in 1985 it was all but impossible to conventionally trace a message posted to a bulletin board. Am I in error on this? Details, anyone?
Anybody at all?
@ Frank Benjamin Asking a question like that on UA-cam? You are in error in too many ways.
More or less that is correct. The cops would have to do a traditional wire tap to the phone line with an active connection to locate the caller, no different than a threatening phone call made. Phone companies didn't keep records of local calls so there was no "log" to go by. This of course meant they had to already know a crime was happening vs today where they can retroactively seek out IP logs and do backtracing to locate the original source of the message. Some of this went on with the most highest of profile online criminal cases, but they were few and far between for the most part. The BBS' world was mostly the wild wild west back then where anything and everything were acceptable practices.
I never ran a BBS of my own, but had friends that did, so this is more second hand info. It seems that depending on the kind of software you were using to run your BBS, there were varying degrees of detail that you could configure to extrapolate and record for each user log-on session. I suppose if the guy was really tricky he could avoid being identified electronically, but if you were savvy enough, you could get the phone company to tell you where the call came from. They definitely at least kept logs of long distance calls back then, because I remember seeing Mom & Dad complain about the bills!
Is that music awesome or is it amazing???
Awesome
12:00 well, George’s fucked it.
It was unimaginable to them that everyone will have computer... and probably also unimaginable that any computer will be orders of magnitude faster than then super computers (for reference supercomputers Cray-2 at the time had 1.9 GFLOPs...)
Ah yes, "parity and protocol"... 2400 bps 8 N 1. Control-g to make the bell/beep sound.
11:04 wtf did that man just say moment by the host
12:35 On home office!
Problem of 1985 still not solved 30 years later. You can watch a youtube vid of puppies and kittens, scroll down and find nothing but keyboard loudmouths going at it saying things theyd never say to anybodys face, mostly americans
Damn those americans. What are you?
George at 9:10 shows why he's American, not British or Finnish...
07:46 Everyone's using their own standards. If everyone is using their own standards, then how is it a standard?
Ha ha, it makes me laugh that the American thinks of a bulletin board as a physical thing. In the UK, the only bulletin board we know is electronic, and the object is a notice board!
11:25 …. No.
The internet has come so far since the first one was set up by the defence department in 1968. When I got internet it was late 1990. My dad built a custom computer with a close friend in 1989 who was a computer expert. So I was five and got to enjoy early 56k internet.
I didn’t realize that 56k modems existed in 1990. Which ISP supported those speeds, and what were you doing as a 5 Yr old kid on the Internet in 1990? I was on by 94 and it was so primitive even then.
@@nyccollin 56k didn't come around until the late 90s, 97/98 to be exact. However, 14.4k was around in 1990 and started getting priced fairly affordable, which was a massive huge leap from 80s era 2400 baud modems that most had around if they had been computing for a while.
Listen to the things the suits are saying. They were never going to allow a private society.
My perdition from 1985..By the year 1999 modem speeds will be well north of 4800 baud!
perdition: (in Christian theology) a state of eternal punishment and damnation into which a sinful and unpenitent person passes after death.
I'm curious how a cheap BBS system looked. Did it need a hard drive?
Yes if it was a file hosting server. However some would use floppy arrays or even tapes.
Message-only or chat-based boards didn't have to have a hard drive, they could run on floppies and were bolstered if there were a RAM drive on the computer. But if a BBS wanted a decent software download library then it pretty much had to have a hard drive attached. BBS' that didn't have a software library were considered lame in general, so had low/poor membership. Multi phone line boards were also just much easier to do on a PC based computer vs other types since it had the speed and expansion ability, especially once 9600+ baud speeds started becoming available. There were also network-linked BBS systems such as FidoNet that allowed for rudimentary email/forum message exchange so you could communicate with folks across the world that were on the same private system and this required some PC horsepower to do. Some systems adopted CD-ROM drives that had pre-loaded shareware packages but by then the commercial Internet started becoming available so their attraction didn't last long.
@@oldtwinsna8347 Thanks
@@BlaBla-pf8mf I “dialled” into an authentic Apple II BBS recently and it worked off of 2 x 5 1/2” floppy disk drives.
@@Bendaak ty
War Games
Privacy. Google, Microsoft and Apple know more about us today then we do. Disgusting.
Telecommuting could have been a more workable reality, had the general work ethic of the average American stayed anywhere close to where it was in 1985. The general paranoia of trade secret loss, obessive micromanaging of productivity, and ignorant resistance by baby boomer and older-aged management to employees using computers in the home or even using computers in general in a workplace environment, didn't help matters any.
Well for some of us it is reality, we never have to commute to a traditional office environment aside from occasional meetings and training.
Covid helped telecommuting
@Duke Hugh Johnson I find it hilarious when boomers try to call other people selfish. Your parents hated you and have you the generation ME moniker and your kids completely agree with that assessment
pff.. Bulletin boards, it'll never catch on.
George Morrow was the best. He hates the internet lolol
wendy woods was a babe