Comment by kazinator | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kazinator | Hacker News Reader

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Let me fix that for you:

> Back in mid-##80s## before anyone I knew had an Internet connection, a few of us had modems and would use them to call bulletin board systems via the phone line.

Internet connections were common place in the middle 90's, though perhaps not broadband, permanently connected ones. There was a lot of dial-up.

> The chat wasn't quite like chats are now. It was split-screen, and there were only two participants.

Sysop-only chat is squarely 1980's. I already used multi-participant chat dial-up bulletin boards as far back as 1988. Didn't even have to call long-distance; there was one in Vancouver. By the mid 1990's, that stuff was passé.

In the mid 1990's, you could PPP/SLIP to connect to the Internet over dial-up, and use IRC to chat with people all over the world (either run your own local client, or telnet/ssh into a provider's shell account). I compiled an IRC client for the first time in 1994 and was just amazed: I'm talking with people all over the flippin' world! This guy is in the Netherlands! Another one in Australia... wow! Vast number of channels and users, whoa.

In 1995, I was running Linux 1.3.x, with SMP support: an ASUS motherboard with two 100 MHz Pentiums. I had a 28.8 kbps modem, and had dial-up Internet access (PPP).

Author is Finnish, and I'd say article is accurate for Finland. Local telecom monopolies made internet dial-up very expensive and BBS golden age was probably in mid nineties here, but the decline was very rapid.

That was still an active BBS scene in the mid 90s. Even as Fidonet grew and users left to spend more time connected to the web. The internet, especially in those days, just couldn't deliver the same experience of connecting with a bunch of other people (mostly) in your own area code. I met a lot of friends in those days and being able to get together for outings and events was really fun. I can't imagine meetups like that now. Maybe there are local facebook groups that scratch that same itch?

Everything in my comment is 100% historically accurate.

Yes, there was a BBS scene, but it was a fading retro thing.

That's besides the point; the blog describes technology that existed in the middle 1980's, and claims that was the state of the art in the middle 1990's. Nobody had Internet, chat was for two people, one of whom was the sysop and so on. While those systems still existed, they were just retro holdovers from the 80's.

I contracted for a pay-per-click subscription website running on Linux, in 1994. This had customers. I know because I wrote the billing system to charge authenticated users for the mining/prospecting-related info they accessed. This business still exists today in some shape: http://infomine.com In 1994 it employed some half dozen full-time staff to do the research and keep the database updated.

I knew many people who were Internet connected. I communicated via e-mail.

In 1995, Windows 95 came out. It came with a TCP/IP stack: no more bolted-on networking. And, in a follow up release, it bundled Internet Explorer. Those pieces were there for a reason.

> claims that was the state of the art in the middle 1990's

The blog does not claim this, full stop. The author says "before anyone I knew had an Internet connection", describing a personal experience, presumably during his childhood or teenage years ("I just had it open during the night, so that my parents could use the phone line during the day").

Why attack the author's personal experience and anecdotes?

fwiw, my own experience mirrors the author's exactly. In my area (Philly) there were around two hundred single-line hobbyist boards in the mid 90s, meaning ~1993-1997. It was not a "fading retro thing" quite yet, and as a teenager I didn't personally know any frequent internet users until at least 1996.

For historical context, Yahoo wasn't incorporated until 1995. Internet Explorer v1 was released in mid-1995 and wasn't even initially bundled with Windows 95. Widespread home internet adoption took a couple years, and (at least in my area) dial-up hobbyist BBS's only started to dwindle in the late 90s, while the commercial ones (many-line majorbbs/worldgroup systems) transitioned to become dial-up ISPs.

For another data point, I developed a couple BBS doorgames from 1999-2003. The BBS scene was definitely dying off at that point, but nonetheless I still sold several hundred registrations for my games during that period.

the blog describes technology that existed in the middle 1980's

To quote William Gibson: "the future is already here, just not evenly distributed"

What, exactly, is the point you're making? That the author should have been cooler in the mid-90's?

That the article is not historically accurate. It describes 1985.

It's like saying that all we had in 1995 was cable TV for watching Prince, Madonna, Tears for Fears and Van Halen videos. No; you were just too stoned to remember that that was actually in 1985. You're 50, not 39, like you think, haha.

Turns out I'm about the same age and from the same city as the author. And I'm telling you, hardly anyone had an internet connection at home in the mid-90's where I grew up.

My father's job provided him with a callback modem hookup, so we got on the Internet in, I think, 1995. This was a rarity and the phone bills would have been pretty bad if my family'd had to pay them.

No. It describes the mid-90s in Finland, where the author is from. Just because you in the US had cooler stuff doesn't make the author's personal experience historically inaccurate.

The entire world doesn't doesn't evolve uniformly. In 1985 for example we had literally 1 (state run) TV channel and I still remember what I huge deal it was the day we went from having 1 to 3 TV channels (non of them commercial of course) and I could experience "changing channels".

OP created a really neat app but I agree with all your dates. I got my first modem in 1985 and started running my own BBS in 1986. By 1992 I lost interest in the BBS world and moved onto the Internet.

By 1995 I had a permanently on ISDN 128 Kbps line. My ISP even gave me my own public Class C netblock with that line!

You could almost be me. I got my first modem in 1983. 300bps, like your nick says. I ran self-written BBS in 1985, and then a rewrite in 1986-1987. By 1992 I was in computer science. I poked into BBSes here and there. There was still some activity, but not like before. It was fewer hobbyists and more businesses (like computer stores) running those things. People dialing up to big services like AOL was still a thing.

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