5 ms·

Before the Internet became widespread, people were using BBSs, and several large (for the time) networks of interconnections between them. Fidonet, and many mor

by morsch 4y ago

Before the Internet became widespread, people were using BBSs, and several large (for the time) networks of interconnections between them. Fidonet, and many more regional ones like Z-Netz. There were also networks for businesses and research institutions that were not the Internet. None of these were just a bunch of Telex machines, even if the network in the article was.

pessimizer 4y ago
Also Telenet when I was a kid.
Maursault 4y ago
> Before the Internet became widespread This is looking at things with blinders and assuming the public at large determines the significance of the Internet. The People were not using BBS, etc. A tiny vanishingly small minority of intrepid computer geeks were using BBS, etc. in the late 1970's, but Arpanet was already very well established by 1973.[1] Just because it was mainly limited to academics and corporations, this still vastly outmatched BBS use in the 1970's. BBS only came into popularity by the mid-1980's, when the Internet was already huge and stayed big, and BBS were effectively extinct within a few years of the invention of WWW. BBS use itself was never "widespread," unless we define widespread as a fraction of a fraction of a percent of the population. Not to diminish the nostalgia for the unique fun of logging into a BBS, in reality, hardly anyone ever used them, which would be maybe tens of thousands at most among hundreds of millions. The number of academics at one large university attached to the Internet in 1978 could match the entire population of BBS users for it's entire existence. [1] https://www.computerhistory.org/internethistory/1970s/ https://www.computerhistory.org/internethistory/1970s/
- morsch 4y ago
  If you say so. I don't have any hard numbers (I would love to see them, either way), but I think there was a brief moment around 1990 when BBS usage was more widespread than the Internet. I wouldn't (and didn't) say BBS usage was widespread in absolute terms. Nor did I say anything about the significance of anything.
  - AlbertCory 4y ago
    I don't have hard numbers on BBS, but on the internet-history@ mailing list, someone estimated there were around a million people worldwide on the Internet in 1990. This is a pretty informed estimate. You think BBS was more than that?
    - morsch 4y ago
      Apparently, there were close to 7000 Fidonet nodes in 1990[1]. What's a reasonable average for distinct user accounts per node? I don't know. If it's 100, that's 0.7 million already. Compuserve had 380000 users in 1987[2], when it was basically US-only. Now, I don't want to argue that Compuserve is a BBS (though I suppose you could). But it's evidence people were using their modems to connect to things that weren't the internet. And Compuserve in 1987 apparently had no ability to exchange information with the Internet proper; when I used it as a child, a couple of years later, I used Compuserve -- its groups, pages, whatever they were called, and did not use it for Internet access. [1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/FidoNet#/media/Datei:Fidonodes.PNG https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/FidoNet#/media/Datei:Fidonodes... almost 40000 at its peak in 1996 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CompuServe#Market_share https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CompuServe#Market_share
      - AlbertCory 4y ago
        I wouldn't dispute any of your numbers. It sounds like they were roughly comparable. At least that's the best we can say 34 years later.
    - icedchai 4y ago
      Yes, much more. The internet didn’t go mainstream until the mid-90’s. According to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulletin_board_system https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulletin_board_system there “were 60,000 BBSes serving 17 million users in the United States alone in 1994.”
      - Maursault 4y ago
        First of all, "in the US alone," is misleading because the vast majority of BBS and their users were actually in the US. In 1990, the Internet was composed of 350,000 hosts being accessed by over a million computers (aka users). 60K BBSs means a capacity of exactly 60K users simultaneously, while the Internet capacity at the time was... more that a million simultaneous users... IOW all of them. The Internet (called ARPANET) was very well established by 1973, but experienced exponential growth from the advent of WWW. Your citation has no citation of its own. Curious how there could be 17M BBS users in 1994 when the US had only 11M modem-equipped computers.[1] IOW, the wiki is very wrong, and the claim is unsupportable. [1] https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/1995/10/16/americans-going-online-explosive-growth-uncertain-destinations/ https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/1995/10/16/americans-go...
- hyperman1 4y ago
  AFAIK the French minitel system was used by The People over there. It was semi obligatory for e.g subscribing to (some?) higher education, and maybe interacting with some governemental services. The People, once introduced to minitel, had some commercial services available, including primitive porn. I consider minitel a fork in the road to the www, with different architectural choices leading to a different net culture. Minitel had a clear consumer vs producer split and 1 central governer, compared to the www free-for-all peer to peer vision. It probably would not have grown so fast as the www. But it had payment infra from day 1 and no 100%free connectivity, so it wouldn't become the privacy invasive ad infestation the www has become.

by morsch 4y ago

pessimizer 4y ago

Also Telenet when I was a kid.

Maursault 4y ago

> Before the Internet became widespread This is looking at things with blinders and assuming the public at large determines the significance of the Internet. The People were not using BBS, etc. A tiny vanishingly small minority of intrepid computer geeks were using BBS, etc. in the late 1970's, but Arpanet was already very well established by 1973.[1] Just because it was mainly limited to academics and corporations, this still vastly outmatched BBS use in the 1970's. BBS only came into popularity by the mid-1980's, when the Internet was already huge and stayed big, and BBS were effectively extinct within a few years of the invention of WWW. BBS use itself was never "widespread," unless we define widespread as a fraction of a fraction of a percent of the population. Not to diminish the nostalgia for the unique fun of logging into a BBS, in reality, hardly anyone ever used them, which would be maybe tens of thousands at most among hundreds of millions. The number of academics at one large university attached to the Internet in 1978 could match the entire population of BBS users for it's entire existence. [1] https://www.computerhistory.org/internethistory/1970s/ https://www.computerhistory.org/internethistory/1970s/

morsch 4y ago
If you say so. I don't have any hard numbers (I would love to see them, either way), but I think there was a brief moment around 1990 when BBS usage was more widespread than the Internet. I wouldn't (and didn't) say BBS usage was widespread in absolute terms. Nor did I say anything about the significance of anything.
- AlbertCory 4y ago
  I don't have hard numbers on BBS, but on the internet-history@ mailing list, someone estimated there were around a million people worldwide on the Internet in 1990. This is a pretty informed estimate. You think BBS was more than that?
  - morsch 4y ago
    Apparently, there were close to 7000 Fidonet nodes in 1990[1]. What's a reasonable average for distinct user accounts per node? I don't know. If it's 100, that's 0.7 million already. Compuserve had 380000 users in 1987[2], when it was basically US-only. Now, I don't want to argue that Compuserve is a BBS (though I suppose you could). But it's evidence people were using their modems to connect to things that weren't the internet. And Compuserve in 1987 apparently had no ability to exchange information with the Internet proper; when I used it as a child, a couple of years later, I used Compuserve -- its groups, pages, whatever they were called, and did not use it for Internet access. [1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/FidoNet#/media/Datei:Fidonodes.PNG https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/FidoNet#/media/Datei:Fidonodes... almost 40000 at its peak in 1996 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CompuServe#Market_share https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CompuServe#Market_share
    - AlbertCory 4y ago
      I wouldn't dispute any of your numbers. It sounds like they were roughly comparable. At least that's the best we can say 34 years later.
  - icedchai 4y ago
    Yes, much more. The internet didn’t go mainstream until the mid-90’s. According to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulletin_board_system https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulletin_board_system there “were 60,000 BBSes serving 17 million users in the United States alone in 1994.”
    - Maursault 4y ago
      First of all, "in the US alone," is misleading because the vast majority of BBS and their users were actually in the US. In 1990, the Internet was composed of 350,000 hosts being accessed by over a million computers (aka users). 60K BBSs means a capacity of exactly 60K users simultaneously, while the Internet capacity at the time was... more that a million simultaneous users... IOW all of them. The Internet (called ARPANET) was very well established by 1973, but experienced exponential growth from the advent of WWW. Your citation has no citation of its own. Curious how there could be 17M BBS users in 1994 when the US had only 11M modem-equipped computers.[1] IOW, the wiki is very wrong, and the claim is unsupportable. [1] https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/1995/10/16/americans-going-online-explosive-growth-uncertain-destinations/ https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/1995/10/16/americans-go...
hyperman1 4y ago
AFAIK the French minitel system was used by The People over there. It was semi obligatory for e.g subscribing to (some?) higher education, and maybe interacting with some governemental services. The People, once introduced to minitel, had some commercial services available, including primitive porn. I consider minitel a fork in the road to the www, with different architectural choices leading to a different net culture. Minitel had a clear consumer vs producer split and 1 central governer, compared to the www free-for-all peer to peer vision. It probably would not have grown so fast as the www. But it had payment infra from day 1 and no 100%free connectivity, so it wouldn't become the privacy invasive ad infestation the www has become.