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Comment by eeZah7Ux | Hacker News Reader

Indeed plain-text BBS (over a slow modem) were faster than loading 10 MB of javascript over an ADSL.

Also the information density and signal-to-noise ratio was higher. Even if you use ad-blockers.

I have a lot of nostalgia for my bbs days, but one thing I distinctly recall was the slowness of it all. The palpable improvement when you went from 300 baud to 600 or from 14k to 28k to 56k.

I think we romanticize this stuff too much. Even showing a splash screen of ASCII text was stuttered. Chat operations were slow over the wire, you just never knew because ... maybe they just hadn't typed anything?

Yeah, I don't think interactive use was actually faster. Noninteractive use however - FidoNet (an early messageboard system with similar properties to UseNet) supported downloading a chunk of posts which you could then read through offline in a native, responsive program.

> a splash screen of ASCII text was stuttered

...on a 600 baud modem. Not on a 28.8Kbps. I remember doing timing analysis at the time.

Well of course. The speed of the modem dictated how palpable the delay was.

True but we could do what nobody else in the world could do. We had chat, file sharing, forums, multiplayer games and more before everybody else. BBSers felt like the elite and nobody else understood it.

There was a low barrier to entry. Anyone could start a BBS. Since there were so few, any new BBS would have a flood of new users, making them successfully very quickly.

The slowness created an exciting anticipation.

I'm not sure I consider 'slowness' a 100% bad thing, though. I got into far fewer insignificant flame wars over BBS & dialup than I ever have since the advent of broadband. That slowness means you have to honestly consider what it is you're saying, who you're saying it to, and why you're saying it. In some ways, a slower connection means that you're more aware of a human being on the other end.

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