7 ms·

An old photo of a large BBS

118 points by guiambros 5y ago

threeio 5y ago
God I miss the BBS days.
- bobsmooth 5y ago
  I kinda wish I was around for the pre-internet but then I look at my gigabit connection and I feel alright. Dial-up was bad enough.
  - mariuolo 5y ago
    Dial-up was good enough when most of the content was text. And we didn't know any better:)
- rawoke083600 5y ago
  Right !! :/
- b3lvedere 5y ago
  Meh. I don't really miss those days, because my focus shifted lots of times since then. It was fun though. Met a lot of people who were at least equally weird as myself.
  - JKCalhoun 5y ago
    And plenty of people much weirder, ha ha.
- ilaksh 5y ago
  You know there are still quite a lot of BBSs accessible on the internet? Maybe not too lively though.
- icedchai 5y ago
  I miss them too, mostly for the local community aspect, meeting fellow nerds in the area, etc. I ran my own BBS on an Amiga, and then later Linux. Fun times.
trickjarrett 5y ago
What a blast from the past. I was just on the very tale end of BBSs but those were wild times. I remember logging into a local PC wholesaler my father worked with because their BBS had what is today a very not-politically correct blond joke on their BBS every day.
TigeriusKirk 5y ago
I think the two modems on one machine was handled in the BBS software itself, dividing itself between two port buffers. Single-threaded, just alternating its attention. But my memories of such things are quite hazy. I'm sure someone knows exactly how it worked. EDIT- a bit here on how one system did it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Major_BBS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Major_BBS
- tbyehl 5y ago
  For a Galacticomm MMBS/Worldgroup system, the picture would be a pile of modems, one computer running the BBS, and maybe a second computer running Netware to offload Btrieve and free up memory (16MB limit). In the TCP/IP era maybe they'd offload the modems to terminal servers. Basically everything happened in a polling loop. TBBS[1] is the only other DOS BBS software I'm aware of that natively handled multi-line. Source: Former MBBS operator and briefly was a Galacticomm employee around '96. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bread_Board_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bread_Board_System
  - prometheus76 5y ago
    We had a BBS in my town that was four lines and they ran Wildcat! BBS software, and another one in town that had two lines ran Spitfire. They both ran Desqview on their BBS machines so they could chat with people as well. I wasn't technical enough at the time to understand completely what they were doing, but I did spin up my own BBS that was just an anonymous message board software called Free Speech BBS. It was good times, where most of the conversation centered around whatever guest was on Art Bell that night.
  - evanelias 5y ago
    Any stories you're willing to share about Galacticomm founder Tim Stryker? He had quite the reputation of being an extreme technical genius, but also extremely troubled...
    - tbyehl 5y ago
      Afraid I don't really have Stryker stories. He wasn't much involved at the office while I was there, I think he'd moved his family out to Utah at that point. My recollection is that he was charismatic in the ways typical of technical founders who'd achieved some success. He autographed his book, Think a Little, for me -- teenage me thought superdemocracy sounded great but with 25+ years of hindsight I see his vision of utopia as more of a dystopian nightmare. I posted this on my Facebook when MBBSEmu came up here a few months back: --- How'd I never hear of this before? My first "real" job was with Galacticomm and their software is probably most directly responsible for me becoming the computer geek I am today. Story time: I ran a Major BBS in high school. My longest-time friends ought to remember 'cause it's probably the biggest catalyst for us becoming lifelong friends. My dad financed it with dreams of making Rusty-N-Edie money but I don't think it ever paid its own phone bill. Pops saw in the paper that Galacticomm was going to make a big announcement at a local business conference. Maybe it was MBBS 6.25, or the first showing of Worldgroup, I don't recall exactly. But the key part is that I was under 18 and not welcome to attend said conference. I was displeased. I let Galacticomm know of my displeasure. And... Scott Brinker reached out personally to invite me to their offices for a demo. By him. Maybe Tim Stryker was also in the room, I don't remember it all. But Scott, a very young CEO or President at the time, took the time out of his life to make sure this younger, perhaps a bit entitled, fellow geek with a similar geeky backstory was not excluded. It's such a little thing, but for me, it really mattered. Galacticomm and their people have always had an outsized place in my heart. And now I'm crying 'cause I wish I could talk to my dad.
evanelias 5y ago
Found a higher res version of this image on the website for 3D Realms (formerly Apogee back in the day): https://3drealms.com/news/3d-realms-website-turns-20/ https://3drealms.com/news/3d-realms-website-turns-20/ Apparently they ran PCBoard [1] for their BBS software. I know a fair amount about BBS software, and had no idea PCBoard could support this many nodes. Typically high node count boards of this time ran MajorBBS [2] instead, since it did its own multi-tasking and allowed you to have a crazy number of nodes / modems on a single PC! However, that also meant it couldn't run typical DOS door games, instead opting for its own plugin/game SDK. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PCBoard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PCBoard [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Major_BBS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Major_BBS
- xorcist 5y ago
  Not sure about PCBoard specifically but most of the major BBS software supported DESQview and called the provided software interrupt to relinquish time. So it was usually possible to run more than one node per computer, especially when using 16550 UARTs which had a buffer and didn't spin the CPU for every character. It was great to have a local node too on the computer so the SysOp could log in at the same time as users. That was a great use case even if you didn't have multiple phone lines. OS/2 took over DESQview's role pretty quickly, after version 2.0 came out. Porting BBS software was easy and many did it. The was even FOSSIL drivers available (a better performing serial driver than what the BIOS provided).
  - evanelias 5y ago
    For sure, but most of those multi-line boards running on top of DESQview typically maxed out at 2-4 nodes per machine. In comparison, MajorBBS could handle an insane 50+ nodes on a single machine running DOS, as the BBS software implemented its own event loop and multi-tasking. The company behind it (Galacticomm) sold specialized hardware so that sysops could hook up all those modems to one box. OS/2 never became very popular in the BBS scene in my area, at least by the time I got into the scene (~1993). My impression is that it had mixed success in the BBS world as a whole. For one data point, I do know the author of Synchronet invested a lot of time into a native OS/2 port and then his company promptly went bankrupt! Later in the 90s, BBS software started to be ported natively to Win32, including some commercial options: Wildcat WINServer, MajorBBS WorldGroup v3, etc.
deckard1 5y ago
To all the people I woke up at 2am from dialing potential BBS numbers from dubious outdated sources, I apologize. I was 12 and needed that rush of excitement from discovering a new board. Each BBS had its unique ANSI. A room for files, another for XXX content, one for messages to other members. Some felt lively and bustling. Others felt like walking into a quiet dark cave. You never really knew what you might find. My dad ran a small Wildcat BBS in the late '80s. I still have all of his files. Probably a couple hundred megs in total. Not sure how he picked that software. He had every BBS software you could imagine. He had a friend at the time that he would trade floppies with. One day his friend brought over a copy of Leisure Suit Larry. I was really intrigued by a game that I had to leave the room when they played. Everything was a bit seedy back then. You ever seen CGA porn that runs from a .COM executable you downloaded on a BBS? It might be porn. It might also destroy your entire computer. 1980s equivalent of a risky click.
- alfiedotwtf 5y ago
  Rush is a good way of putting it. I remember my heart beating faster once the modem finished handshaking
  - danielrpa 5y ago
    The Internet rules, but we lost something innocent and good from those times. Discovering a BBS was so exciting - new games, new filez and, most importantly, new friends! A lot less toxicity and higher quality interactions.
    - DrAwdeOccarim 5y ago
      Yea, totally. I remember downloading my first picture of a naked lady from a BBS me and my friend had found. It was a single playboy centerfold that took 20-30 minutes to download. I distinctly recall us turning the monitor off to let it download so a) we didn't get caught by his parents, and b) so we'd be surprised by the entire image once it was done downloading and we turned the monitor back on. Now, a single click and you're watching a real donkey show streaming in 4k for free. I am genuinely worried/curious how society and children coming of age now are going to develop when they have access to such dramatically different and stronger pornography. I could see it going both ways, like marijuana legalization, it becomes less cool so less kids get into it. But reproduction is such a low-level, fundamental driving force in all life (esp humans), that it probably can't be simply not viewed by especially horny male teenagers.
justinlloyd 5y ago
Regarding the image: I believe those are IBM 386 computers on the right based on the front of the machine, the megahertz display and the turbo button. The ones on the left are most likely 8086 machines. IBM brand I believe based on the front and the case design. Several PC based BBS machines supported multiline operation without the need for mulitasking, though as modems got faster, supporting 16 modems on a single machine became impossible, and it was often cheaper to buy a new commodity desktop PC rather than a much more expensive machine with a 16-port serial card capable of handling the IO. The machines might have been running a "DOS" flavour, but for the most part, the BBS software was the entire machine. Boot from DOS, but then what we consider DOS is effectively removed from RAM and the BBS software takes over. The 386's might have been using DESQView or equivalent, and running a single line BBS as two separate instances on the same machine. The machine would not boot either from network or harddrive. Network boot was mostly unreliable and a bad node on a token ring network would easily disable your entire ring. Internal harddrives would have been costly, power hungry and unreliable. I can almost certainly guarantee they booted entirely from floppy disks. There was no doubt a token ring network that kept them all communicating. A token ring could be wired to tolerate failure, but it drove the cost up. Those are Miracom Courier modems on top on some machines, a mixture of 9600 and 14.4, and Hayes Smartmodems, on others, 2400 on the black & silver, 9600 on the all blacks. Almost certainly there are no 56k modems in that picture. And they would have almost certainly be plugged in to a dual port serial card that supports dual 16550 UARTs because the 16550 could handle up to 119kbps (118,500) IIRC (typing from memory, feel free to google it), and they had a 16-byte FIFO buffer so the CPU didn't need to poll or IRQ for data quite so often. Therefore they could support 56Kbps on two lines, though at that point, it would have probably be pegging the CPU with two users transferring files using a non-compressing XModem or ZModem. Also, all the drives have been upgraded from five-and-a-quarter to three-and-a-half.
- johnklos 5y ago
  IBM sold computers in cheesy clone-looking cases, with turbo buttons? Do you have a source to support that? And you know for a fact they're only sold with 5.25" drives, because you say they were all upgraded? Sounds like overconfident and incorrect speculation, unless you can provide a link to these IBM models. Also, supporting more than one modem at a time is literally the definition of multitasking. You can't do it without multitasking. Are you talking about not needing a multitasking OS, because the software does its own multitasking?
FPGAhacker 5y ago
Takes me back. I remember most of the bbses I connected to only had a couple lines. I’d set my terminal program to redial and go watch tv waiting to connect.
microtherion 5y ago
It's interesting to compare that photo to the photo in the article about Rusty n Edie's BBS that was posted here recently: https://web.archive.org/web/20051102202650im_/http://www.pixi.com/~irvdili/rnepc.gif https://web.archive.org/web/20051102202650im_/http://www.pix... This one looks to be set up much more professionally.
- icedchai 5y ago
  I used to work at a local ISP in the mid 90's. It was definitely more Rusty-n-Edie's style. I remember going into one of the POPs (point-of-presence, dialup locations.) It was a in a small rented office in an office park, not a data center or colo. There were about 100 analog modems on metal shelving racks, each with its own phone line, serial cable, and power cable. These were regular, consumer-style modems. There was no power management, so we had power strips connected two or three layers deep. There was also no air conditioning, and it could be hot-as-hell in the summer. Some of the modem cases were warped, slightly melted and discolored due to the heat. Nothing special was done wth the phone lines, so there was also a river of RJ-11 cables coming out of the wall. It was a hazard to even go behind one of the racks, since both the power and phone line situation were incredibly chaotic.
nickdothutton 5y ago
Now I feel the need to research 32 RS232 serial port expander cards.
daveslash 5y ago
So then, when you see this picture (and remember, it might only be showing half of the whole setup), do you think "wow, cool, they got to wrangle all of that", or do you think "OMG they *had* to wrangle all of that"? It's an important distinction to make, and I think someone's gut reaction to this amount of hardware in one place might influence how they approach building new systems. I found this to be an interesting and insightful point.
Tucanix 5y ago
I really doubt that setup produced that much heat at all. I recently plugged in an old DOS machine and it only used as much power as my phone charger to my surprise. Less computing power also means it needs less power overall. Old gear is less efficient but today's computers have so much more computational power that we use a lot more power today per machine.

118 points by guiambros 5y ago

threeio 5y ago

God I miss the BBS days.

bobsmooth 5y ago
I kinda wish I was around for the pre-internet but then I look at my gigabit connection and I feel alright. Dial-up was bad enough.
- mariuolo 5y ago
  Dial-up was good enough when most of the content was text. And we didn't know any better:)
rawoke083600 5y ago
Right !! :/
b3lvedere 5y ago
Meh. I don't really miss those days, because my focus shifted lots of times since then. It was fun though. Met a lot of people who were at least equally weird as myself.
- JKCalhoun 5y ago
  And plenty of people much weirder, ha ha.
ilaksh 5y ago
You know there are still quite a lot of BBSs accessible on the internet? Maybe not too lively though.
icedchai 5y ago
I miss them too, mostly for the local community aspect, meeting fellow nerds in the area, etc. I ran my own BBS on an Amiga, and then later Linux. Fun times.

trickjarrett 5y ago

What a blast from the past. I was just on the very tale end of BBSs but those were wild times. I remember logging into a local PC wholesaler my father worked with because their BBS had what is today a very not-politically correct blond joke on their BBS every day.

TigeriusKirk 5y ago

I think the two modems on one machine was handled in the BBS software itself, dividing itself between two port buffers. Single-threaded, just alternating its attention. But my memories of such things are quite hazy. I'm sure someone knows exactly how it worked. EDIT- a bit here on how one system did it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Major_BBS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Major_BBS

tbyehl 5y ago
For a Galacticomm MMBS/Worldgroup system, the picture would be a pile of modems, one computer running the BBS, and maybe a second computer running Netware to offload Btrieve and free up memory (16MB limit). In the TCP/IP era maybe they'd offload the modems to terminal servers. Basically everything happened in a polling loop. TBBS[1] is the only other DOS BBS software I'm aware of that natively handled multi-line. Source: Former MBBS operator and briefly was a Galacticomm employee around '96. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bread_Board_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bread_Board_System
- prometheus76 5y ago
  We had a BBS in my town that was four lines and they ran Wildcat! BBS software, and another one in town that had two lines ran Spitfire. They both ran Desqview on their BBS machines so they could chat with people as well. I wasn't technical enough at the time to understand completely what they were doing, but I did spin up my own BBS that was just an anonymous message board software called Free Speech BBS. It was good times, where most of the conversation centered around whatever guest was on Art Bell that night.
- evanelias 5y ago
  Any stories you're willing to share about Galacticomm founder Tim Stryker? He had quite the reputation of being an extreme technical genius, but also extremely troubled...
  - tbyehl 5y ago
    Afraid I don't really have Stryker stories. He wasn't much involved at the office while I was there, I think he'd moved his family out to Utah at that point. My recollection is that he was charismatic in the ways typical of technical founders who'd achieved some success. He autographed his book, Think a Little, for me -- teenage me thought superdemocracy sounded great but with 25+ years of hindsight I see his vision of utopia as more of a dystopian nightmare. I posted this on my Facebook when MBBSEmu came up here a few months back: --- How'd I never hear of this before? My first "real" job was with Galacticomm and their software is probably most directly responsible for me becoming the computer geek I am today. Story time: I ran a Major BBS in high school. My longest-time friends ought to remember 'cause it's probably the biggest catalyst for us becoming lifelong friends. My dad financed it with dreams of making Rusty-N-Edie money but I don't think it ever paid its own phone bill. Pops saw in the paper that Galacticomm was going to make a big announcement at a local business conference. Maybe it was MBBS 6.25, or the first showing of Worldgroup, I don't recall exactly. But the key part is that I was under 18 and not welcome to attend said conference. I was displeased. I let Galacticomm know of my displeasure. And... Scott Brinker reached out personally to invite me to their offices for a demo. By him. Maybe Tim Stryker was also in the room, I don't remember it all. But Scott, a very young CEO or President at the time, took the time out of his life to make sure this younger, perhaps a bit entitled, fellow geek with a similar geeky backstory was not excluded. It's such a little thing, but for me, it really mattered. Galacticomm and their people have always had an outsized place in my heart. And now I'm crying 'cause I wish I could talk to my dad.

evanelias 5y ago

Found a higher res version of this image on the website for 3D Realms (formerly Apogee back in the day): https://3drealms.com/news/3d-realms-website-turns-20/ https://3drealms.com/news/3d-realms-website-turns-20/ Apparently they ran PCBoard [1] for their BBS software. I know a fair amount about BBS software, and had no idea PCBoard could support this many nodes. Typically high node count boards of this time ran MajorBBS [2] instead, since it did its own multi-tasking and allowed you to have a crazy number of nodes / modems on a single PC! However, that also meant it couldn't run typical DOS door games, instead opting for its own plugin/game SDK. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PCBoard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PCBoard [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Major_BBS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Major_BBS

xorcist 5y ago
Not sure about PCBoard specifically but most of the major BBS software supported DESQview and called the provided software interrupt to relinquish time. So it was usually possible to run more than one node per computer, especially when using 16550 UARTs which had a buffer and didn't spin the CPU for every character. It was great to have a local node too on the computer so the SysOp could log in at the same time as users. That was a great use case even if you didn't have multiple phone lines. OS/2 took over DESQview's role pretty quickly, after version 2.0 came out. Porting BBS software was easy and many did it. The was even FOSSIL drivers available (a better performing serial driver than what the BIOS provided).
- evanelias 5y ago
  For sure, but most of those multi-line boards running on top of DESQview typically maxed out at 2-4 nodes per machine. In comparison, MajorBBS could handle an insane 50+ nodes on a single machine running DOS, as the BBS software implemented its own event loop and multi-tasking. The company behind it (Galacticomm) sold specialized hardware so that sysops could hook up all those modems to one box. OS/2 never became very popular in the BBS scene in my area, at least by the time I got into the scene (~1993). My impression is that it had mixed success in the BBS world as a whole. For one data point, I do know the author of Synchronet invested a lot of time into a native OS/2 port and then his company promptly went bankrupt! Later in the 90s, BBS software started to be ported natively to Win32, including some commercial options: Wildcat WINServer, MajorBBS WorldGroup v3, etc.

deckard1 5y ago

To all the people I woke up at 2am from dialing potential BBS numbers from dubious outdated sources, I apologize. I was 12 and needed that rush of excitement from discovering a new board. Each BBS had its unique ANSI. A room for files, another for XXX content, one for messages to other members. Some felt lively and bustling. Others felt like walking into a quiet dark cave. You never really knew what you might find. My dad ran a small Wildcat BBS in the late '80s. I still have all of his files. Probably a couple hundred megs in total. Not sure how he picked that software. He had every BBS software you could imagine. He had a friend at the time that he would trade floppies with. One day his friend brought over a copy of Leisure Suit Larry. I was really intrigued by a game that I had to leave the room when they played. Everything was a bit seedy back then. You ever seen CGA porn that runs from a .COM executable you downloaded on a BBS? It might be porn. It might also destroy your entire computer. 1980s equivalent of a risky click.

alfiedotwtf 5y ago
Rush is a good way of putting it. I remember my heart beating faster once the modem finished handshaking
- danielrpa 5y ago
  The Internet rules, but we lost something innocent and good from those times. Discovering a BBS was so exciting - new games, new filez and, most importantly, new friends! A lot less toxicity and higher quality interactions.
  - DrAwdeOccarim 5y ago
    Yea, totally. I remember downloading my first picture of a naked lady from a BBS me and my friend had found. It was a single playboy centerfold that took 20-30 minutes to download. I distinctly recall us turning the monitor off to let it download so a) we didn't get caught by his parents, and b) so we'd be surprised by the entire image once it was done downloading and we turned the monitor back on. Now, a single click and you're watching a real donkey show streaming in 4k for free. I am genuinely worried/curious how society and children coming of age now are going to develop when they have access to such dramatically different and stronger pornography. I could see it going both ways, like marijuana legalization, it becomes less cool so less kids get into it. But reproduction is such a low-level, fundamental driving force in all life (esp humans), that it probably can't be simply not viewed by especially horny male teenagers.

justinlloyd 5y ago

Regarding the image: I believe those are IBM 386 computers on the right based on the front of the machine, the megahertz display and the turbo button. The ones on the left are most likely 8086 machines. IBM brand I believe based on the front and the case design. Several PC based BBS machines supported multiline operation without the need for mulitasking, though as modems got faster, supporting 16 modems on a single machine became impossible, and it was often cheaper to buy a new commodity desktop PC rather than a much more expensive machine with a 16-port serial card capable of handling the IO. The machines might have been running a "DOS" flavour, but for the most part, the BBS software was the entire machine. Boot from DOS, but then what we consider DOS is effectively removed from RAM and the BBS software takes over. The 386's might have been using DESQView or equivalent, and running a single line BBS as two separate instances on the same machine. The machine would not boot either from network or harddrive. Network boot was mostly unreliable and a bad node on a token ring network would easily disable your entire ring. Internal harddrives would have been costly, power hungry and unreliable. I can almost certainly guarantee they booted entirely from floppy disks. There was no doubt a token ring network that kept them all communicating. A token ring could be wired to tolerate failure, but it drove the cost up. Those are Miracom Courier modems on top on some machines, a mixture of 9600 and 14.4, and Hayes Smartmodems, on others, 2400 on the black & silver, 9600 on the all blacks. Almost certainly there are no 56k modems in that picture. And they would have almost certainly be plugged in to a dual port serial card that supports dual 16550 UARTs because the 16550 could handle up to 119kbps (118,500) IIRC (typing from memory, feel free to google it), and they had a 16-byte FIFO buffer so the CPU didn't need to poll or IRQ for data quite so often. Therefore they could support 56Kbps on two lines, though at that point, it would have probably be pegging the CPU with two users transferring files using a non-compressing XModem or ZModem. Also, all the drives have been upgraded from five-and-a-quarter to three-and-a-half.

johnklos 5y ago
IBM sold computers in cheesy clone-looking cases, with turbo buttons? Do you have a source to support that? And you know for a fact they're only sold with 5.25" drives, because you say they were all upgraded? Sounds like overconfident and incorrect speculation, unless you can provide a link to these IBM models. Also, supporting more than one modem at a time is literally the definition of multitasking. You can't do it without multitasking. Are you talking about not needing a multitasking OS, because the software does its own multitasking?

FPGAhacker 5y ago

Takes me back. I remember most of the bbses I connected to only had a couple lines. I’d set my terminal program to redial and go watch tv waiting to connect.

microtherion 5y ago

It's interesting to compare that photo to the photo in the article about Rusty n Edie's BBS that was posted here recently: https://web.archive.org/web/20051102202650im_/http://www.pixi.com/~irvdili/rnepc.gif https://web.archive.org/web/20051102202650im_/http://www.pix... This one looks to be set up much more professionally.

icedchai 5y ago
I used to work at a local ISP in the mid 90's. It was definitely more Rusty-n-Edie's style. I remember going into one of the POPs (point-of-presence, dialup locations.) It was a in a small rented office in an office park, not a data center or colo. There were about 100 analog modems on metal shelving racks, each with its own phone line, serial cable, and power cable. These were regular, consumer-style modems. There was no power management, so we had power strips connected two or three layers deep. There was also no air conditioning, and it could be hot-as-hell in the summer. Some of the modem cases were warped, slightly melted and discolored due to the heat. Nothing special was done wth the phone lines, so there was also a river of RJ-11 cables coming out of the wall. It was a hazard to even go behind one of the racks, since both the power and phone line situation were incredibly chaotic.

nickdothutton 5y ago

Now I feel the need to research 32 RS232 serial port expander cards.

daveslash 5y ago

So then, when you see this picture (and remember, it might only be showing half of the whole setup), do you think "wow, cool, they got to wrangle all of that", or do you think "OMG they *had* to wrangle all of that"? It's an important distinction to make, and I think someone's gut reaction to this amount of hardware in one place might influence how they approach building new systems. I found this to be an interesting and insightful point.

Tucanix 5y ago

I really doubt that setup produced that much heat at all. I recently plugged in an old DOS machine and it only used as much power as my phone charger to my surprise. Less computing power also means it needs less power overall. Old gear is less efficient but today's computers have so much more computational power that we use a lot more power today per machine.