ollygd wrote:
I suppose mentally re-living the experience had me thinking about the whole ritual - modems/comms/huge phone bills etc... Im trying to pin down exactly what made it so exciting and why the internet so abruptly ended it all.
This is an interesting point, and I really think there's something in it. I remember my first evening of being a sysop. My board ran from 10pm till 7am (that's right, using my parents phone line). I'd wander downstairs after ten and quietly swap the phone cables (sorry Grandma. The line's mine now!). Back upstairs and you'd see the final light on the modem burning red..."Auto Answer". I actually got a call that night. I spent the weeks previously honing my ANSIs and I was quite proud of it all, it seemed to work well and I thought it looked good. Suddenly, a flicker of the activity lights on the modem, the hard drive whirring into action, the screen changing from the BBS rest state to the (carefully designed) log on prompt. And then the computer under the control of someone else, heaven knows who. M...A...R...S...H. That was the name of the first caller to the board. I think he was younger than me, had seen my amateurish advert on another BBS and thought he'd give me a try. I had to sit on my hands for all of 1 minute before finally breaking into "sysop chat" and giving him the chance to introduce himself (he was a friendly chap and called back often). Eventually he logged off and the BBS software returned to the waiting state. Total callers now listed as "1", auto answer light back on and waiting. I didn't sleep much that night.
So, what was it that was so exciting about those days which just doesn't seem to be captured by telnet efforts? Here are some thoughts..
a) Full screen. I've been using Syncterm (on OS X and Linux) and it's a good bit of software. But you can't get it to take over the screen. You can't "escape" and be transported into the BBS world. Okay, I know on the Amiga i could use NComm with telser or better still DCTelnet (which is excellent) - both of which provide lovely full screen.
b) The modem noises and lights!
c) Nostalgia for a time when such easy communication were still a novelty. This is probably the big one. Before the BBS my "interaction" with other Amigans was through the letters pages of Amiga Format and CU. They were where I found like-minded souls. Of course, there were kids that owned Amigas in school, but they were simply Mega Drives with keyboards to them. It was only in the magazines that I found other people doing really fun stuff with the Amigas. Then, people started calling my board, I started to call other boards, and we could interact, talk about computers, swap files (even pictures of naked women!). This was hugely exciting to a 15 year old.
Would having a dialup board recapture all of this? I imagine it would be a bit like comparing WinUAE to buying an A1200 off EBay. On the face of it they look the same, indeed, WinUAE would be FASTER. But, it never quite satiates that sense of nostalgia. It comes close, it's a useful device, but it doesn't make the heart flutter like it does when sitting in front of the real deal at 2 in the morning, feeling like you're 15.
