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It's fascinating how all of that was enabled by simple decision by telco to make local calls free. Here (Poland) they basically didn't exist

by ilyt 4y ago

bruce511 4y ago
I agree. Where I grew up local calls were metered. Hence no real BBS culture, and not much in the way of modems. When I got the Internet at university in 1990, ftp was a revelation. Downloading files from anywhere and everywhere was insanely empowering. I remember downloading files on hard-drive (MFM) settings to use old hard drives with my salvaged controller cards. It's hard to convey how "hands on" computing was back then. Lots of jumpers to set, lots of hardware, and software, things to set to make it "work just right". Lots of trial and error, but really cool when it worked! Now i just buy any old USB thing, plug it it, and off we go. I confess I prefer the present, these days I'm using the computer to do things, not "make the computer actually work."
- Scoundreller 4y ago
  We never figured out how to stop the rs232 mouse from having an IRQ conflict with the modem, but it didn't matter: we just didn't use the mouse when dialing into our freenet's lynx browser. I still use Lynx today to read articles with just walls of text (and often without the paywall!)
Symbiote 4y ago
Conversely, although in Europe (mostly) we paid for local calls, we didn't pay to receive calls, so mobile phones grew faster here in the 1990s and 2000s.
dghughes 4y ago
Here in Canada local calls were also free. Weirdly even calling someone you only had to use five digits I still recall my old phone number 2-2506. But the other part of the BBS hobby was the computer itself to be able to afford it. At the time computers were expensive, not necessary, an extravagance only well-off families had them. Even modems back then were quite expensive.
unwind 4y ago
Sweden did not have free outgoing calls but absolutely had a BBS culture. Definitely so in the Amiga age (late 80s), not sure about the 8-bit systems that was a bit before my time.

It's fascinating how all of that was enabled by simple decision by telco to make local calls free. Here (Poland) they basically didn't exist

by ilyt 4y ago

It's fascinating how all of that was enabled by simple decision by telco to make local calls free. Here (Poland) they basically didn't exist

bruce511 4y ago

I agree. Where I grew up local calls were metered. Hence no real BBS culture, and not much in the way of modems. When I got the Internet at university in 1990, ftp was a revelation. Downloading files from anywhere and everywhere was insanely empowering. I remember downloading files on hard-drive (MFM) settings to use old hard drives with my salvaged controller cards. It's hard to convey how "hands on" computing was back then. Lots of jumpers to set, lots of hardware, and software, things to set to make it "work just right". Lots of trial and error, but really cool when it worked! Now i just buy any old USB thing, plug it it, and off we go. I confess I prefer the present, these days I'm using the computer to do things, not "make the computer actually work."

Scoundreller 4y ago
We never figured out how to stop the rs232 mouse from having an IRQ conflict with the modem, but it didn't matter: we just didn't use the mouse when dialing into our freenet's lynx browser. I still use Lynx today to read articles with just walls of text (and often without the paywall!)

Symbiote 4y ago

Conversely, although in Europe (mostly) we paid for local calls, we didn't pay to receive calls, so mobile phones grew faster here in the 1990s and 2000s.

dghughes 4y ago

Here in Canada local calls were also free. Weirdly even calling someone you only had to use five digits I still recall my old phone number 2-2506. But the other part of the BBS hobby was the computer itself to be able to afford it. At the time computers were expensive, not necessary, an extravagance only well-off families had them. Even modems back then were quite expensive.

unwind 4y ago

Sweden did not have free outgoing calls but absolutely had a BBS culture. Definitely so in the Amiga age (late 80s), not sure about the 8-bit systems that was a bit before my time.