Do you consider BBS networks to have been "The Internet"?

More like a mesh network, except instead of wifi they called each other directly through regular phone lines to pick up or drop off messages. They basically bunnyhopped their messages across long distance boundaries to avoid charges (which were absolute rape in the 80/90s). A handful of people with more money than sense would foot the bill to queue up all the packets for their local area and fire them off overseas at some ungoldy hour to a different zone in the network. It wasn't uncommon for snail mail to get around faster than echomail sometimes.
The Internet is an entirely distinct network that the web operates on top of. It actually pre-dates BBS networks. BBSes did their own thing independently of the Internet mostly because the Internet was too restrictive or difficult/expensive to gain access to.

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I'm curious as to what kind of images could be shared between users on BBSes in the 80s. Just from a little bit of reading it seems like the Commodore 64 could display a 16 color image in 160x200 resolution. I have simulated that here. But the I suppose the question is how to get the photo on your computer to begin with? The best method I can think of is painstaking pixel by pixel mapping in the absence of any kind of digital camera. 160 x 200 = 32000 pixels. Not out of reach of humans but beyond tedious.

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Unless you were on a fancy RIP board using the proper terminal program so it could draw vector graphics you were limited to ANSI (or PETSCII for the C64). Otherwise you'd have to download images from the board's file area and view them in an external viewer later or by shelling to DOS from the terminal if you had enough memory. The image formats themselves varied a lot depending on platform but you could almost always find a viewer for whatever.

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>Otherwise you'd have to download images from the board's file area and view them in an external viewer later or by shelling to DOS from the terminal if you had enough memory
Well you'd jdo that wouldn't you? Also: you could just print them out.

>Also: you could just print them out.
with what?
1. Printers were another piece of expensive equipment.
2. Color is even more expensive.
3. Text only

I think maybe some Apple and Amiga systems could have done it.

>you could just print them out
terrible idea, most people only had dot matrix printers back then

ya'll ain't thinking 80s enough. Not that 35mm SLRs were cheap at the time.

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it wasn't email. it was fidonet.

not exactly the internet. since what you were doing was actually calling directly into someone elses computer. but yes. it was very similar and shaped the way for the way people used the internet years later.

this thread sure sounds like you fags don't know what you're talking about and need to watch this:
youtube.com/watch?v=nO5vjmDFZaI

For a local board, sure. Sharing image files across an echo network usually required you to file request (FREQ) the file over netmail assuming you had permission and the board was set up to send/receive requests, then you'd come back later (usually the next day) and it would be in the local file area for you to download since the BBS went and got it for you overnight. Or get your sysop to carry a file echo for your chosen interest and give you access to it so the files would get dropped off periodically and there'd be stuff there for you to download when you log on.
File transfers of any significant size really monopolized the sysop's phone line though so that sort of access often operated on a credit system, where you could either pay the sysop for them or give them something they want in exchange. Like porn. Or warez.
Some boards offered actual Internet email using some gateway software but that was a completely separate thing from netmail and echomail.

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email as a concept, not the actual mail system we use nowadays.

but fidonet did give out real email @fidonet.org addresses to it's users in the mid 90s.

We may not have had laser printers, but we did have functional imaginations, so we got by.

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interesting. as a kid in the early 90s I never saw the point of fidonet or email. I just shitposted in usenet groups and on my local bbs.

Email predates Fidonet's netmail. Netmail was just a lot more accessible for the average hobbyist at the time. And even though it wasn't public like echomail, it was still a lot less private than email since every board along the route got a copy of the message and the sysop can freely read anything they want on their own system.

>not still connecting to a BBS via dialup
bbs.fozztexx.com/

I've watched this and it only reinforced my belief that The Internet started in the 80s, not the 90s.

telnetbbsguide.com/

>implying anyone here is old enough to have used a BBS before the internet

>before the internet

just how old do you think the internet is? it had been around lbefore microcomputing made bbs possible.

Fidonet (or more accurately fight-o-net) was the sort of message network you'd use if you didn't have Internet/usenet access.
There were other networks besides Fidonet as well based on the same technology which all worked the same way.
It started in the 70s. darpa.mil/about-us/timeline/arpanet
Considering that BBSes came AFTER the Internet that would be quite the conundrum.

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BBSes and echo networks were basically the average person looking at what DARPA was doing and saying "I want that." And since they couldn't have it, they made their own once microcomputers and modems made it possible.

Literally with blackjack and hookers.

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Ever hear of a scanner?

Here's your scanner, bro.

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BBSs didn't communicate via TCP/IP?

Most BBSes were local only, so no.

I am. Born in 1981

No. Why would they? Your connection to them was a raw terminal link over a modem. They spoke whatever character set the respective platforms used. The utterly ridiculous amount of overhead imposed by internet protocols you don't require at all would have been heresy.
When you wanted to download binary data you'd handshake into a specialized protocol like x/y/zmodem or kermit, do the transfer and then drop back into raw textmode when done.

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Those things were cool. You could get some weird effects by going too fast or too slow.

no. there wasn't any "bbs networks" where they would dial eachother and sync. thinking back, that would have been possible but I don't remember any BBS software actually capable of that.

you'd just dial in to some BBS, read messages there, upload and download files available on that BBS and that was it. of course you could download files and then dial some other BBS and upload them.

in some ways it's similar to the internet, instead of going to some IP to get a server you'd dial a telephone number and get a server. of course.. dialing phone number is expensive, going to some IP is free if you have the internets.

it wasn't.

there wasn't much in terms of images and those that existed where grainy and not worth it. Images were probably scanned by someone but the resolution was really bad and I believe 256 colors was was common at the time BBSes were popular. I even remember seeing some pictures when EGA and 16 colors was common.

I was and I ran one.

because not only the hardware was trash, the software was unbelievably bad

it was great fun messing around with ocr software though, there were some hilarious results

In the mid 80s?

thats basically what the early internet providers were, too. compuserv, aol, earthlink and them. I happened to steal my first internet access from a BBS but that was like early 90s and not PPP or anything.

I think you're not really seeing the bigger picture. Even though the BBSes were not specifically, automatically networked, in practice they were. Users would log in to one of them, read something or download information, and then reshare that information (or files) on another one. They didn't exist in a vacuum from one another. Especially considering a SysOp may specifically make sure they have the latest stuff that is making its rounds through the "network".

From the user's standpoint they are sitting there with their computer and a list of BBSes to dial into (which technically could have been any of them if had the money to pay long distance fees or used ***other*** methods to get free phone calls). How is that much different from having a list of websites to visit?

by the late 80s there were some hand scanners around, even for computers like the c64.

scan groups that digitized and uploaded stuff to bbs started becoming huge in the early 90s.

>there wasn't any "bbs networks" where they would dial eachother and sync. thinking back, that would have been possible but I don't remember any BBS software actually capable of that.
>I was and I ran one.
Yet you never heard of FTN or QWK networks? Normally the BBS software callers interacted with was separate from the mailer software but it was certainly a thing.
Scanman came out in 89. Before that you're probably looking at multi-thousand dollar pro machines.

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That sounds insane. Sounds like technology from a fictional world-building cyberpunk movie.

256 color images can look great tho

>But not the web because of the nature of how you couldn't access any particular BBS at any time like you could any non-walled website.
Can't access any website at any time either. It's rare today but sites used to go down from too much traffic.

It was a ghetto poor-man's solution, because we sure as fuck couldn't afford uplinks to the actual Internet at that stage, And even once Internet providers started offering services to the public they charged by the minute.

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In my imagination someone used a transparent grid over a blown up photo and actually entered every pixel individually so they could send a digital photo to their friend across the country, even if it took them a month to transcribe it.

Sneakernet was also common (and faster than dialup)

That's basically how ANSI art worked if you were a hack.

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>In the mid 80s?
Yep.

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>Sneakernet
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a trunk full of floppies.

BBS networks connected other networks around the world so it could be considered the ancestor of the Internet.

I was using BBSes when 2400 baud modems were still cutting edge. No one considered them " The Internet' at the time, we knew what it was but public access didn't become readily available until the 90s.

A bbs thread?

Do it. With multinode doors so we can murder each other.

Ah, it's such a pain in the ass though. I only have a Linux server to run it on and then I'd have to set up DOSBox for the door games and all that bullshit.

No. BBS culture and Internet/Unix/Linux/FOSS/g/ culture are two VERY different things. Even the BBS software was focused around how 80s micros and early PCs worked, to the point that just compiling Synchronet on Linux was challenging for me.

On the other hand that was probably due to the general immaturity of JavaScript toolchains for ARM at the time. I was the first person in the world to get Synchronet working on little-endian ARM.

good thread

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My dad always claims there was no need for anything above a 300 baud modem.

just do it user, you know you want to.

>gee billy, how come your mom lets you have two usrobotics courier modems

That's the perfect readin' speed. Why would you need more?

It's not even reliably good reading speed. 1200baud I could get behind.

absolutely an internet-like experience.
pre-www but all the core components were still there. i miss them a lot really.
underrated

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It's not the internet. BBS is like a dead drop.
Usenet is internet, even though it's pre WWW.

80s internet definition: no
Modern internet definition: yes

The modern definition of the internet has come to be simply the global connection of all devices.

shotgunning!

Do you know Digitalman?

I actually looked at the Synchronet release that came out recently and it's still ass-backwards to set up and even after you get all that done it just segfaults on startup with the default compile on Debian. Especially not a fan of how the default install tries to spin up _everything_ (including a finger server, I shit you not) and presumes it can just take any ports it wants. Rude.
Mystic is light-years ahead for setup and usability but has some crippling downsides in that development is much less consistent than Synchronet so you could get stuck on a broken build for months, and the author himself has some sort of paranoid or narcissistic disorder and you can force him into hiding at will by hurting his fee fees.

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My

My brother is older than that floppy

>TELIX
One of my earliest PC memories is using this software to download a demo of Dark Ages from some BBS (I don't recall if Apogee had an official BBS or not).
I still think the music in that game holds up today, btw.

I am your brother

>I don't recall if Apogee had an official BBS or not
They did. Also a tip line.
I remember calling their BBS and others like Epic and Sierra to grab patches and distribute them to the boards in my area.

All you needed was this bad boy (80's qt not included)

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I''m genuinely surprised that zoomers can't even comprehend this stuff.

I mean I assumed that they would find it strange and antiquated but I didn't expect they'd actually be incapable of conceptualizing a means of data communication that doesn't involve the global IP network at all.

People also think dial-up was made for the internet.
Shows how much anyone remembers.

>using DOS to browser BBSs
Horrifying, Amigafags really were ahead of the curve.

Depends when we are talking about, later there were BBS servers using broadband that you could call into a virtual number over dial-up also afterwards telnet.

No.

That's part of what I mean about culture. Synchronet assumes it can bind to whatever, run constantly in the foreground, take over half the filesystem, and manages itself through its own tools. It's very much a DOS program ported to Unix and NT rather than a well behaved Unix or NT service suite.

from the article linked when that image is reverse searched
>I have a vivid, recurring dream. I climb the stairs in my parents’ house to see my old bedroom. In the back corner, I hear a faint humming.
I have the same thing. Every month or two I have a restless dream about my first computer. And lately I have been having dreams about my computer back in my old college apartment.

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That inverted the minute you could build a 386 with an SB16 and a VGA card for less than the price of an Amiga, so we're talking what, six years?

BBS is still a thing in Japan mainly because galapagos phone is still a thing and they also provide a form of "email" so you can still shitpost even from a "handy-phone" (japanese version of a burner phone)

Except Amiga 1200 by that time was an option that was even cheaper then what you just tried to claim.
Also we are talking about BBSes here, windowed OS, BBSs in windows, managed downloads, being able to view picture while on the BBS. No need to get butthurt.

PETSCII MOTHERFUCKER
damn did BBS'es look comfy on C64 and Amiga

How do modern Discord servers compare to the BBS experience? To me it seems there are similarities.

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HAHAHAHAHA

You're reading too much into my post.

Of course not. It was just a bunch of disconnected stations.

Now this is epic

fidonet is not email, you stupid fuck.

its one of the emails

>it was still a lot less private than email
god help your extreme levels of ignorance.
wasn't even called email. it was called fidonet.

>wasn't even called email. it was called fidonet
Turns out gmail isn't email

BBS user to BBS user messaging was also email, with or without fido