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The Spectarded Thread: Pre-Email Edition
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2015-09-04 at 1:25 AM UTCITT SpectraL posts all his half-baked truths.
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2015-09-05 at 1:23 AM UTCAmerica Online (AOL) was launched in 1991
Yahoo was launched in 1995
Hotmail was launched in 1996.
MSN Messenger was launched in 1999
Google was launched in 2004
Notice how all these dates are well after Totse's opening in 1989. Years after.
You're wrong, Darkie. Nobody even used e-mail during Totse's golden years. We used BBS and Newsgroups. No WWW, no e-mail, no web browsers, nothing but BBS and Newsgroups. You capeesh? -
2015-09-05 at 2:55 AM UTC
America Online (AOL) was launched in 1991 Yahoo was launched in 1995 Hotmail was launched in 1996. MSN Messenger was launched in 1999 Google was launched in 2004 Notice how all these dates are well after Totse's opening in 1989. Years after. You're wrong, Darkie. Nobody even used e-mail during Totse's golden years. We used BBS and Newsgroups. No WWW, no e-mail, no web browsers, nothing but BBS and Newsgroups. capeesh?
Just because the half dozen or so SyOps on nirvana net weren't savoy enough to incorporate SMTP and POP3 (circa 1988) doesn't mean the rest of us who used things like Compuserve (circa 1969 and widely available in 1979 I through the Issue 2 of Commodore Disk User) didn't understand and take advantage of SMTP/POP1/2/3. -
2015-09-05 at 12:33 PM UTC
Just because the half dozen or so SyOps on nirvana net weren't savoy enough to incorporate SMTP and POP3 (circa 1988) doesn't mean the rest of us who used things like Compuserve (circa 1969 and widely available in 1979 I through the Issue 2 of Commodore Disk User) didn't understand and take advantage of SMTP/POP1/2/3.
Just because something is available doesn't mean it is used. E-mail wasn't used until well into the '90's. So you can stamp your little flat feet all day and none of that will change the facts or the history of it. -
2015-09-05 at 1:30 PM UTC
Just because something is available doesn't mean it is used. E-mail wasn't used until well into the '90's. So you can stamp your little flat feet all day and none of that will change the facts or the history of it.
Just because you weren't using it doesn't mean it wasn't being used. I love it when your wrong though it gives everyone a chance to see your ignorance shine.
But please continue to prattle on about your misguided opinion and be sure not to provide any documentation for it. -
2015-09-05 at 1:36 PM UTC
Just because you weren't using it doesn't mean it wasn't being used. I love it when your wrong though it gives everyone a chance to see your ignorance shone.
I was there in the thick of it all, not just the Screaming Electron, but many other BBS and newsgroup communities. Nobody used e-mail. It was non-existent, in that sense. Oh, I'm sure there were a few who used something similar; it was a very diverse age, but nothing like what we're looking at today. You weren't there, so you would have no real clue what really happened or the way it really was. You're a fucking poser, dude, so just start shutting up before you embarrass yourself even further.
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2015-09-05 at 1:40 PM UTCI have no idea what the program was, but the first time I used a chat room was around 1993 or 1994, at my rich uncle's house, and it was fucking AMAZING. That is all I have to add here, thank you.
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2015-09-05 at 2:36 PM UTCI started in the very early '70's building what was called, in those days, "crystal radio" kits [[FONT=arial]cat's whisker receiver][/FONT]. You bought this kit for 99 cents that looked like a small puzzle box, but it had a board and circuits and a crystal inside, all paper thin, no instructions. Once you figured out how to lay the circuits onto the board correctly, you attached your crystal to the proper connection. Once in full operation and properly configured, the board could capture thousands of live radio transmissions travelling through the air. I used to sit for long hours in my room listening to them.
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2015-09-05 at 2:42 PM UTC
I started in the very early '70's building what was called, in those days, "crystal radio" kits [[FONT=arial]cat's whisker receiver][/FONT]. You bought this kit for 99 cents that looked like a small puzzle box, but it had a board and circuits and a crystal inside, all paper thin, no instructions. Once you figured out how to lay the circuits onto the board correctly, you attached your crystal to the proper connection. Once in full operation and properly configured, the board could capture thousands of live radio transmissions travelling through the air. I used to sit for long hours in my room listening to them.
As vapid as that sounds, I could see myself doing that now, and finding amusement with it. -
2015-09-05 at 3:04 PM UTC
As vapid as that sounds, I could see myself doing that now, and finding amusement with it.
Just so you know, I didn't look up the definition of the word, vapid. I'm just going to go ahead and believe you, this time, that it's derogatory.
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2015-09-05 at 3:29 PM UTC
I was there in the thick of it all, not just the Screaming Electron, but many other BBS and newsgroup communities. Nobody used e-mail. It was non-existent, in that sense. Oh, I'm sure there were a few who used something similar; it was a very diverse age, but nothing like what we're looking at today. You weren't there, so you would have no real clue what really happened or the way it really was. You're a fucking poser, dude, so just start shutting up before you embarrass yourself even further.
You are still just relating a personal experience. The data shows that your experience was not fact. Hell Fido was the largest dial BBS network ever and here are 12 excerpts from it's history in regard to email.FidoNet: Technology, Use, Tools, and History
Randy Bush
[EMAIL="randy@psg.com"]randy@psg.com[/EMAIL]
Copyright 1992-3, Randy Bush. All rights reserved.
FidoNet is a trademark of Tom Jennings.
Abstract
FidoNet is a point-to-point and store-and-forward email WAN which uses
modems on the direct-dial telephone network. It was developed in 1984, and
has over 20,000 public nodes worldwide.The public FidoNet consists of over 20,000 nodes which move email and enews
over the public telephone network using a unique protocol and data format.The addressing scheme may be extended to accommodate points which are power
users who reduce their connect time by using private (i.e. unlisted) nodes
to exchange email and enews with public nodes.As all modem phone numbers are published in the nodelist, point-to-point
transfers are always possible. But, as store-and-forward capabilities are
specified in the basic standards, email tends to be routed through a
world-wide hierarchic topology and enews via a world-wide ad hoc, but
generally geographically hierarchic, acyclic graph.As all modem phone numbers are published in the nodelist, point-to-point
transfers are always possible. But, as store-and-forward capabilities are
specified in the basic standards, email tends to be routed through a
world-wide hierarchic topology and enews via a world-wide ad hoc, but
generally geographically hierarchic, acyclic graph.Topology
FidoNet's addressing hierarchy - zone, net, node, point - approximates the
route which email follows.Power users run points which may connect to only their respective host nodes
to receive and deliver their email and enews. As they are not in the public
nodelist, points are not considered to be official nodes in the network, and
thus are not subject to constraints of technology, national mail hour, etc.Within a local network (i.e. city), nodes usually exchange email directly
with each other. For example, 1:105/6 exchanges mail directly with all
other nodes in 1:105/*. In those cities where phone tariff zones divide the
city, local hubs are used to concentrate intra-city traffic to reduce costs.Each of the six zones (continents) has a unique host which provides
inter-zone email routing. These "zonegates" have alias addresses of the form
orig-zone:orig-zone/dest-zone. For example, the gate from North America
(zone 1) to Oceania (zone 3) has an addressing alias of the form 1:1/3.
Hence, a node in North America may save the cost of an inter-continental
call to Australia by sending the message to 1:1/3, which will in turn send
it to 3:3/1, which will see that it is delivered within Australia.The UFGATE package, which allows an MS-DOS-based FidoNet node to simulate a
uucp host, gates both email and enews. This package made gating fairly
popular by 1987. More recently, other DOS packages have provided similar
features. RFmail, a complete FidoNet implementation which runs on UNIX SysV
and Xenix, includes gateware to transform between FidoNet message format and
that of the uucp/Internet.Around the world, BBSs with FidoNet capability provide the most publicly
accessible and lowest-cost email and enews service today. While most BBSs
are only usable by a single dial-up caller at a time, others run multi-line
systems ranging from two to 20 lines. Public access requirements vary from
formal user validation and possibly a small fee to completely open
facilities allowing full use by the first-time caller.History
In 1984, Tom Jennings wished to move messages from his MS-DOS-based Fido BBS
to that of a friend, John Madil. As Jennings was the author of the Fido
BBS, he was able to quickly modify it to extract messages from a specially-
designated local message base and queue them for sending to the remote BBS.
As US telephone rates are much lower in the middle of the night, he wrote a
separate external program to run this email transfer for one designated hour
to exchange mail with the other node.
This soon grew to more nodes, reaching 200 by early in 1985. The nodelist,
a list of all known active nodes in the public FidoNet, was developed as a
distributed external file and was initially maintained by Jennings. The
reserved mail transfer hour became enshrined as "national mail hour," and is
preserved today despite current technology being capable of intermixing mail transfer and BBS access.FTS-0001 describes the original message data formats, session protocols, and
link layer protocols for FidoNet as it was originally developed by Tom
Jennings. The ability for a node to obey this standard is mandatory if it
wishes to be listed within the public FidoNet, although the vast majority of
connections now use the far more efficient FTS-0006 suite. Data transfer
uses xmodem and a variant called TLink, 128 byte block ACK/NAK protocols,
neither of which is streaming, bidirectional, or windowing, and which
discriminate between email and file transfer at the session and data
transfer level. Mid-file restart recovery is also absent.
So you see Spectard while you were busy breathing through your mouth trying to comprehend the 4 page instruction set which were included in the crystal radio kit your mummy bought that one year for Xmas, some of us were sitting in front of systems emailing one another.
Source: http://www.fidonet.org/inet92_Randy_Bush.txt -
2015-09-05 at 3:36 PM UTC
I started in the very early '70's building what was called, in those days, "crystal radio" kits [[FONT=arial]cat's whisker receiver][/FONT]. You bought this kit for 99 cents that looked like a small puzzle box, but it had a board and circuits and a crystal inside, all paper thin, no instructions. Once you figured out how to lay the circuits onto the board correctly, you attached your crystal to the proper connection. Once in full operation and properly configured, the board could capture thousands of live radio transmissions travelling through the air. I used to sit for long hours in my room listening to them.
This is not voodoo magic. I slapped this mess together when I was in like 2nd grade. It did not come with instructions because it was a no brainer to assemble. The most difficult part of the whole experience was winding that wire to make sure that each loop was touching the one before it. There was no configuring and hardly any actual figuring. Also there is no chance that this would capture thousands of live radio transmissions as it would only pick up the AM stations that were closest to where you lived. I think I was lucky enough to get 5 or 6 and I lived in a rather well populated metropolitan area growing up.
@ Mmq It was pretty cool to put the whole thing together and realize you had made your own radio but nothing like the star struck nostalgia that Spectral is feigning here. -
2015-09-05 at 3:42 PM UTC
This is not voodoo magic. I slapped this mess together when I was in like 2nd grade. It did not come with instructions because it was a no brainer to assemble. The most difficult part of the whole experience was winding that wire to make sure that each loop was touching the one before it. There was no configuring and hardly any actual figuring. Also there is no chance that this would capture thousands of live radio transmissions as it would only pick up the AM stations that were closest to where you lived. I think I was lucky enough to get 5 or 6 and I lived in a rather well populated metropolitan area growing up.
@ Mmq It was pretty cool to put the whole thing together and realize you had made your own radio but nothing like the star struck nostalgia that Spectral is feigning here.
C'mon now. You do know that radio waves can be captured from practically anywhere on the planet, don't you?
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2015-09-05 at 3:54 PM UTC
C'mon now. You do know that radio waves can be captured from practically anywhere on the planet, don't you?
Ignoring the facts again Specky my boy? Why have you chosen to start another debate, sparked by one of your half thought out claims of past brilliance designed to impress kids on the internutz, before you have admitted defeat in the dial BBS/Email noose you've so firmly affixed to your own scrawny, wrinkled, toothless neck?
Do the facts in post #11 of this thread scare you? -
2015-09-05 at 5:01 PM UTC
Ignoring the facts again Specky my boy? Why have you chosen to start another debate, sparked by one of your half thought out claims of past brilliance designed to impress kids on the internutz, before you have admitted defeat in the dial BBS/Email noose you've so firmly affixed to your own scrawny, wrinkled, toothless neck?
Do the facts in post #11 of this thread scare you?
Nobody really used FidoNET.
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2015-09-05 at 5:08 PM UTC
Nobody really used FidoNET.
The rate of growth of FidoNet seems typical of electronic networks in the last decade. The approximate number of nodes at year ends is: Year Nodes 1984 100 1985 600 1986 1400 1987 2500 1988 4000 1989 6500 1990 9000 1991 11000 1992 16000 1993 20000 (Apr '93) -
2015-09-05 at 5:30 PM UTCWhen fido opened with only 200 nodes it was born twice the size nirvananet would ever be.
NirvanaNET was the name of the message system that spanned multiple BBS systems. Somewhat of an underground network, it spanned almost 100 systems across the United States at its peak.
http://everything2.com/title/NirvanaNET Admit defeat and I will stop embarrassing you, on this topic. -
2015-09-05 at 6:12 PM UTCNobody was really interested in FidoNET, more nodes or not. NirvanaNET was a different story, because it was an underground, fringe-discussion, anarchist-style board, and people were drawn to that. FidoNET had shit on NirvanaNET.
Your move, Draco. -
2015-09-05 at 6:21 PM UTCITT: Spectral tries to rewrite history using personal preference and anecdotes.
Just stop dood. U r rong. Give it up. -
2015-09-05 at 6:26 PM UTCI don't know what you people are talking about, else I would make fun of spectral too
