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.
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
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.
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.
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...
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. 🤔
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
Haha, good question. I know lots of people who met and dated on BBSs in the 1990s and those relationships all lasted about as long as normal offline ones, like 6-12 months at best
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
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!
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!
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.
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...)
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
I think they were talking about offline ones where people used to physically meet up. I don't think an online forum etc can fully capture everything about that.
user groups back then were all local based. they usually held meetings at a library room or somewhere. people brought their computers and a lot floppy disks to do what these groups really were: massive pirating operations.
Still the same thing but it's called internet now... only thing is that computers in the past are 6 times more xpensive.. They are already talking about child porn... so ahead for the time.
Much more than that. You can get by with a $99 tablet these days that can do far more than the cheapest budget computer back in '85, which, once you decked it out with a display, modem, and floppies would easily sail the $1500 mark in 1985 dollars. So a $99 tablet today is like $38 in 1985 money. That would bring a difference of about 40x more expensive. And that's just hardware, connectivity had a stark difference. Internet connectivity is essentially free while back in the day to use telenet/tymnet network (closest commercial equivalent to Internet today) cost something on the order of $30/hour during peak hours.
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.
@@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.
As someone who already had a computer by the time this episode came out, and was like 5, it would have sounded absurd to me certainly. I could do more on my Atari 800XL than grandma could on her typewriter, I knew that much
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.
Except the "why would we ever have more computers than typewriters" guy, hahaha seriously, what the hell bro, I was a young kid then and I could have told you typewriters were already passé
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"
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._
Incredible history. I wish so much more legacy content were available on the very platforms (RU-vid) whose existences are based on these predecessor systems. Thank you for making this available!
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.
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
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)
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.
@@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
