Casual Conversation

I grew up in rural NM and was in elementary school in the early 80s. My school was not much, multiple years I had more than one grade in my classroom. We had a total of about 60 students on a high year. But we had a very progressive principal who applied for every computer grant he could. We had a Tandy computer in every classroom, complete with tape drive, and a wall of computers in the library, including two that had dual 5.25” floppy drives.

Shortly after that I convinced my parents to buy a computer, I was 8 or 9. I wanted an Apple, but because of the larger variety of programs and games available for the IBM clone we went that route.

In 88 or 89 I skipped school with a friend and we ended up at the university in town and someone got us onto the internet and playing an Amber MUD. By high school I had dial up internet and have been online since. I am still in touch with some of the people I met back then, I married one of them.

I miss when people would balk at the idea of email and the internet in general.

It was so slow but almost like an age of wonder.

80's were fun but I was born in 73. I miss a lot about those days, mostly being young and having few responsibilities and a lot of privileges. The very late 80's and early 90's were the heyday of computing and internet for me. It was the Wild West and everyone in it was mostly young and nerdy. My people.

Now the internet is full of assholes who aren't just autistic, but are self-aware assholes who profit from it in terms of money or attention. If I could turn back time I'd go back to it in a heartbeat.

But it wasn't perfect. CP was everywhere. It hit different when I was 15 myself, but these days I'm glad it's cleaned up. Everything took forever. You could spend hours downloading a thing and it wouldn't work. There were known hacks to bring down chat rooms any time you wanted and assholes would use them. I miss it, though, warts and all. Those were all the things that kept the normies off of it, which I think kept it a better place. Smaller communities with curious people are much better. Which is why I'm here instead of Reddit. When Reddit finally dies, if everyone comes here I bet Lemmy will be pretty miserable, too. It's the people. Not everyone belongs in the online society.

I was just a kid but I did learn about computers in the late 80s. I remember a programming course in the summer that left an impression, though I foolishly never pursued it further.

What I miss most is the wonder. The fascination has mostly all evaporated. Turns out putting a computer in your pocket that your life relies heavily on takes some of the fun away from learning.

I'm trying to recapture it these days by switching to Linux across all my devices and building RasPi projects.

Should have held onto that Lisa II. Probably in a landfill somewhere now, but if I'd known...

Back in the 1980s, a number of phone networks didn't charge (or didn't charge much) for local calls, but charged a lot for long-distance calls.

So while one didn't have the Internet, this meant that one could link up various BBSes via FidoNet. Each BBS could, on a regular schedule, call up a few linked BBSes near it, and forward messages along.

It was a federated system which permitted for forum discussion, something in common with the Threadiverse today. Some of those messages were archived.

https://www.sensitiveresearch.com/Archive/FidoNet/

A major component of FidoNet is (was, whatever) its newsletter, FidoNews. I started it in 1984; as of this writing (1999) it's in its 15th year, and has been published weekly from the start. It is the meta-network, a means to discuss the network itself.

https://www.sensitiveresearch.com/Archive/FidoNet/FidoNews/index.html

Let us investigate the first issue of this newsletter, a snapshot of culture and see how it differs from our own environment!

https://www.sensitiveresearch.com/Archive/FidoNet/FidoNews/1984/FIDO102.NWS

We have content about network security!

Fido is pretty secure, but there have been a few instances where callers gave them selves SYSOP priveleges, and ran amok ... the cure is quite simple.

NEVER NEVER NEVER have your "main" Fido directory available as a download or upload area. Always make sure there is no path that can reach your .BBS files. It is OK to have it as a SYSOP only area, never let it be accessed by NORMAL users.

We have content about piracy and that vile DRM!

Now, it seems, software publishers are getting to be more and more uptight about people either A)Pirating their software (most of which isn't worth the disk it was copied on) or B)Making honest, legitimate backups of their valuable software.

We have content about the potential for government regulation of forums, common carrier legal status, and how it might spell doom for network discussion!

The underlying issue here is one of control: who is liable for the contents of a BBS? It was related to me (by someone who had lawyers persue it) that the status of BBS's is quite up in the air; are they common carriers (ie. the phone co.) or are they publishers (ie. newspapers). Phone companies have limited liability because they provide a medium, and not the contents, and are generally not liable. (If you arrange a sale for a stolen bicycle by phone, Pacific Bell is not resonsible). Publishers control their contents, and I think are liable for even the contents of their classified ads, though that is obviously impossible to ensure.

You really should voice your opinion on this issue. It will not mark you as a political radical, and the FBI will not harrass your neighbors. It is your right, and our right to free communications.

Losing this case will be a large step towards regulating BBSs. Regulation will mean the death of BBSs as we know it. We are unregulated, and are quite responsible and take care of our own problems. The trouble makers are far and few between.

Apparently, people back then didn't always back up data and sometimes lost it!

Oh boy ... the hot news this week is that Fido #1 dropped dead. The hard disk is in the junk pile. Any articles that were submitted for this weeks newsletter are lost forever. Please send them again, I'll see if I cant hold on to them.

Fido is running on two floppies, no room for anything. Until further notice, Fido cannot be downloaded from #1. I have a solution though; I'm getting an ancient old multibuss machine,three 8 inch floppies, at least 660K each, for a total of 1.98 megs. If I can get double sided drives, that might go up to almost 3 megs. It will take a week or two, though.

skims further

And here we are at Issue #26, 1985, and we've got people trying to form a PAC because they're worried about politics in Washington not going their way:

https://www.sensitiveresearch.com/Archive/FidoNet/FidoNews/1985/FIDO226.NWS

The Dog Barks in Washington

We may be getting some power soon. I'm hearing rumors that a "FidoPAC" is in its first stages of birth.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with politics (as I pretty much am myself), a PAC is a Political Action Committee. I gather that they lobby for specific issues, make campaign contributions, and so forth.

With this in mind, a FidoPAC sounds like a pretty good idea.
It's sure as taxes (literally) that the guys in Washigton are going to be passing laws which affect us. It's only common sense that we should try to provide our input into that lawmaking process.

I don't know if necessarily the past was necessarily quite as different as memory might suggest. :-)

I'm old enough to remember the 70s and 80s computers fondly, but mostly because it was my youth and everything that happens when you're young seems rosier.

But more importantly, I'm old enough to know the 90s' beige computers young people in the retrocomputing community lovingly restore and preserve today were utter shit. Most boring, uninspired commodity hardware ever.

And now I understand what my mom used to say about furniture from the 50s and 60s: vintage is all the shit we couldn't get rid of fast enough when I was young that's sold at insane prices today.

I think you have a few rose lenses between you and your memories. There was a reason why FidoNet, say, had a bunch of nicknames like "FIght-o-Net" back then. The things people argued about weren't all that different from now.

I am maybe misplaced in this conversation. I was born in 1990. I do feel a deep nostalgia for early chat rooms and IRC. So much so that I'm trying to build up a chat platform of my own.

In comparison to the time of asking people their A/S/L and just hanging out talking about how our lives are different, there are now maybe four (or five?) categories of potentially society-ending threats hanging around our cultural zeitgeist. All of them addressable, but it just hangs around every internet thread like a miasma now.

But I do think we'll find ourselves nostalgic for this time in a similar way that we look back on the 80's. In the same way it became possible in the mid 70's to just buy some off-the-shelf components and assemble them into personal computers that can be sold en masse, it is every year more and more possible for a relative novice (such as myself) to do something like create their own chat room app. With some prior experience and the help of AI, I've got the bare bones of a shift-left style DevSecOps stack, and it feels really exciting. It feels like I'm a guy in the 70's in his garage putting a prototype personal computer together, the way you can abstract your requirements from deployed resources in CI/CD. I envision a near future where corporate capitalistic social media becomes stale and increasingly awful (status quo) and the average consumer can have an idea for an app and have a fully hardened back end system to support it in the span of an afternoon. I'm looking forward to a new crop of communication technologies that we collectively develop as a people to tackle the overarching issues which affect us all. Imagine if we could all organize to efficiently locate ideal candidates for public office and democratically work out our differences in environments where peaceful debate and separate chill zones are both encouraged, rather than profit-driven systems where outrage is king. We can do so much better, and we are just now on the cusp of having all the tools to enable the average person to finally be able to help themselves.

I'm sorry for the tangent, and for polluting this thread with all of this. I know it's not really on topic, I'm just waiting for tests to process and really pumped up about starting a revolution later, idk, maybe, I mean, like only if you feel like revolting.

I am that old and I do, but not specifically because of less drama. If you were on the right MUD or BBS, things could get VERY spicy, and the concept of moderation kind of didn't exist yet. What I miss is the feeling of possibility and tech not being a grift to scam normies.

I was young, early teens in the mid to late 80s, so I remember the time but not particularly fondly.

I'm not quite THAT old, but I certainly remember the early 90s.

Tech was all new and cool, and I remember very much reading computer shopper or going to various computer stores looking at all the new cool shit I desperately wanted but could in no way afford.

And, of course, the BBS lists that were in the back of computer shopper and various other things like that: I spent uh, more time than I should admit arguing about stupid shit online via local BBSes and Fidonet and a couple of other networks. But, even then, you're right: the absolute hostility was very high, but it was about who had the "right" computer, or my dumb 13 year old opinion of which games were fun, and the level of absolute grumpiness was way lower.

(As an aside, those FTN-style networks do still exist, and still have people having conversations on them, and it's still pretty great.)

Now even the hardware is boring: oh gee, the new CPUs are 5% faster for $600! Oh yay! New video cards which are 10% faster for $1800! Like who gives a shit anymore. The days of there being generational or even every-other-generational improvements sufficient to justify prices of buying it are quite dead, and I don't know if that's just physics being a pain or if it's straight up engineering design choices. Both, probably.

Anyway I'll stop internet Boomering and go take my metamucil and watch the wheel.

I’m not that old but you can filter things on some Lemmy apps. I filter most annoying political things, the far right. But most things are inherently political.

I just like my handful of hobbies tho so I’m there with you

ANSI art!

wget http://artscene.textfiles.com/ansi/welcomes/brokrose.ans && 
    ansilove -R2 brokrose.ans

It looks like it was more a 1990s thing, but it extended to the 1980s.