4 ms·

> It was not at all similiar to today's web and social media because each BBS was local... This is an important distinction, because depending on the size of y

• logosmonkey 5y ago
  Yeah, I ended up meeting a bunch of the regulars on my local BBS.
• GekkePrutser 5y ago
  Indeed, we often had meetups. This really made it much more fun. On the packet radio side it was even more fun because you could see all the packets flying through the air and you could 'eavesdrop' on other people's conversations. Which sounds worse than it is - on the CB it was already a given that conversations were public so everyone was already used to that. And it didn't require any wizardry, pretty much every program showed a running log of the packets received. We're talking 1200 baud so you could actually follow it. People would often send stuff by broadcast too (usually many times because of the high packet loss and the chance of people missing it). In fact this really helped my early grasp of network tuning, messing with window and repeat timers to improve performance. Because it was all going in slow-motion you could really see the effects.
• evilbob93 5y ago
  IBM PCs didn't come out until after I was out of high school. A few years later I decided to join a meetup of the people who were users on the BBS I was on. It was mid 1980s, and it turned out that all the users I had been chatting with were in High School. First of many experiences where I felt pretty old.