5 ms·
In the 90s I ran a dial-up BBS, and at some point, I had acquired a 4-CD changer. It was equally satisfying to hear it randomly come to life changing disks as s
by gregmac 2y ago
In the 90s I ran a dial-up BBS, and at some point, I had acquired a 4-CD changer. It was equally satisfying to hear it randomly come to life changing disks as someone had logged on to download something.
- jasonfarnon 2y agoDid you have a pretty static download section? Or were you constantly burning new CDs? I vaguely remember Sysops mentioning CD changers in their advertisements.
- loloquwowndueo 2y agoWhat do you mean? Do you have any idea how long it would take people to download even a fraction of a single CD’s 650MB at 9600 bps at best? My bbs probably switched CDs every 6 months.
- gregmac 2y agoFairly static, but I'd cycle the CDs every few months. Even in the 28.8K modem era, people didn't suck down everything they could, partly due to time, partly due to storage space (eg: the reason I used CDs instead of big drives is because big drives were very expensive), so the life of these was pretty long. The software was also not rapidly changing, probably because distribution was harder (so: get it right the first time), and also partly because it was mostly for offline use (no network, servers, etc to stay in sync with or worry about remote vulnerabilities from).