5 ms·

Looking b ack at stuff like Zmodem, it's instructive to compare the computing culture then and now. Back then, everything was so cryptic. Documentation was har

by hilop 10y ago

Looking b ack at stuff like Zmodem, it's instructive to compare the computing culture then and now. Back then, everything was so cryptic. Documentation was hard to find printed books, code and config was extremely abbreviated ( sometimes for legitimate technical reasons of storage capacity). It was all very off-putting unless you put w lot of effort into research, or ran in the social circles that already had data and knowledge. Nowadays we have an embarassment of riches of information and community and expressiveness and usability (when the APIs aren't locked down by DRM and trade secrets)

narrator 10y ago
The other thing about coding back in those days is, if you got stuck, there was no stack overflow. You had to figure it out yourself or maybe ask a small grpup of people on a BBS or at a user group. Also, there was hardly any open source so things that seem trivial now like persistance or fast data structures were considerable efforts.
wvenable 10y ago
The most striking thing to me was there was a huge amount of free-as-in-beer software powering the entire BBS "network" and lots of helpful communities but almost nothing was open source.
- Grishnakh 10y ago
  From what I could tell, it took a long time for the academic tradition of making the source available to work its way into the non-academic world. The academics were using UNIX and other mainframe/minicomputer systems, but non-academics at home didn't have much access to this stuff unless they got themselves an account somewhere they could access through modem. So everyone else was "raised" in the PC tradition, which came from MS-DOS and the 8-bit micros before it. There, there was a bunch of "shareware" and a bunch of freeware available on BBSes, but the whole idea of passing around source code so everyone could benefit or make modifications just hadn't even come up. I grew up on BBSes and the idea of having source code just never even occurred to me honestly, until I started hearing about it when Linux became popular in the early 90s. The first real open-source stuff (which was really Free software), which pushed it as a philosophy, had to be from RMS and his GNU project, but I never even heard of that until Linux came along, and I think it was mostly confined to the insular academic world before this. When Linux came along, the GNU project finally had a kernel and could be put together into an actual working OS, and at the very same time, the internet was really catching on outside the academic world (this is about 1992 remember), and the WWW was only a couple years away. I'd say it was the perfect trifecta: the already-existing GNU software and tools (glibc, gcc, etc. are really important for having a working OS and building stuff), the Linux kernel, and the new-found accessibility of the internet allowing global communication and collaboration.
- bane 10y ago
  It's kind of weird how certain computing platforms that died around this time period have frozen in time this aspect of the modern "sustainment" movements. For example, the Amiga scene these days is full of high-effort oddball software and hardware projects that are closed source and for sale (and likely to earn their creators literally dozens of sales).
- wott 10y ago
  You would have needed to get hold of a compiler then. Of the specific compiler that was used to compile that source, probably. A few hundred $ here and there, and hope it would compile on your machine.
- rhizome 10y ago
  RBBS-PC was a dominant server program (package? so weird) throughout the 80s that was open-source and written entirely in BASIC. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RBBS-PC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RBBS-PC
digi_owl 10y ago
Another thing is that once you logged onto a bbs, that is what you would be doing until you logged off. These days my computer is logged onto a number of computers via various protocols all at the same time (especially if you torture the idea a bit and consider each web site open an anonymous login).

by hilop 10y ago

narrator 10y ago

The other thing about coding back in those days is, if you got stuck, there was no stack overflow. You had to figure it out yourself or maybe ask a small grpup of people on a BBS or at a user group. Also, there was hardly any open source so things that seem trivial now like persistance or fast data structures were considerable efforts.

wvenable 10y ago

The most striking thing to me was there was a huge amount of free-as-in-beer software powering the entire BBS "network" and lots of helpful communities but almost nothing was open source.

Grishnakh 10y ago
From what I could tell, it took a long time for the academic tradition of making the source available to work its way into the non-academic world. The academics were using UNIX and other mainframe/minicomputer systems, but non-academics at home didn't have much access to this stuff unless they got themselves an account somewhere they could access through modem. So everyone else was "raised" in the PC tradition, which came from MS-DOS and the 8-bit micros before it. There, there was a bunch of "shareware" and a bunch of freeware available on BBSes, but the whole idea of passing around source code so everyone could benefit or make modifications just hadn't even come up. I grew up on BBSes and the idea of having source code just never even occurred to me honestly, until I started hearing about it when Linux became popular in the early 90s. The first real open-source stuff (which was really Free software), which pushed it as a philosophy, had to be from RMS and his GNU project, but I never even heard of that until Linux came along, and I think it was mostly confined to the insular academic world before this. When Linux came along, the GNU project finally had a kernel and could be put together into an actual working OS, and at the very same time, the internet was really catching on outside the academic world (this is about 1992 remember), and the WWW was only a couple years away. I'd say it was the perfect trifecta: the already-existing GNU software and tools (glibc, gcc, etc. are really important for having a working OS and building stuff), the Linux kernel, and the new-found accessibility of the internet allowing global communication and collaboration.
bane 10y ago
It's kind of weird how certain computing platforms that died around this time period have frozen in time this aspect of the modern "sustainment" movements. For example, the Amiga scene these days is full of high-effort oddball software and hardware projects that are closed source and for sale (and likely to earn their creators literally dozens of sales).
wott 10y ago
You would have needed to get hold of a compiler then. Of the specific compiler that was used to compile that source, probably. A few hundred $ here and there, and hope it would compile on your machine.
rhizome 10y ago
RBBS-PC was a dominant server program (package? so weird) throughout the 80s that was open-source and written entirely in BASIC. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RBBS-PC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RBBS-PC

digi_owl 10y ago

Another thing is that once you logged onto a bbs, that is what you would be doing until you logged off. These days my computer is logged onto a number of computers via various protocols all at the same time (especially if you torture the idea a bit and consider each web site open an anonymous login).