Never really understood what the heck these things are compared to the internet I know with webpages and all that fancy graphics

where the BBSs and alt.newsgroups or alt.whatever the only way to communicate before html or windoz or ???

tried to look it up, but just got confused

You REALLY dont have anything better to do ?


B

Newsgroups is where the "real internet" is. There are some pretty good sources for music such as alt.binaries.mp3.blues or alt.binaries.mp3.bootlegs and and of course the ever popular alt.binaries.armpit.noise!!!! If you have cox.net for example set your news to be NEWS.WEST.COX.NET and then in IE6.0 just select Tools->Read News. You can do a search of all the newsgroups and then mark the ones you want to open. MP3 files come as an attachment that can be saved and used later.

I used to call in to BBSs with my Amiga. 2400 Bps modem. You'd dial in, and it'd all be ansi or ascii based text. You'd naviugate the menus, and read and reply to whatever. If you wanted to download something you'd go to the download section, and initiate a transfer. The nice BBSs had multiple lines to dial in to, and you could do a live chat. Otherwise you'd have to log off and wait for replies, log in and reply to the replies, etc.

Newsgroups are still around. You can get a modern newsreader, and download the indexes to the groups you want. Then as you read individual posts it downloads them. You can also get encoded binaries (software, music, images) from newsgroup posts. Usenet is probably the safest way to download music nowadays, but you have to wait fro someone to post what you want.

Towards the end of the BBS era they had this thing called bluewave that made discussion BBSs more like usenet. You'd dial in and download all new posts to your computer, then read and make your replies offline. Then you'd dial in again and upload your replies. It made them require less phone lines, but it's no comparison to web BBSs that can have hundreds of people logged in at once.

Ah yes... takes me back to the 80s... the screeching of the modems, the zipping and sending of the messages overnight... People would dial the local BBS with their 300 baud modem (my first 2400 baud modem cost $500 when it first hit the market!), add their replies/messages, and that night the "sysop" would zip them up (or have a batch file that would automate it) and upload it to another system in the heierarchy... by the next morning the rest of the BBSs in the network would have the new text messages online. Forget photos, rich text, colors, smilies... it was plain text. :-)

I'm so glad technology has evolved. Now we see replies with photos and smilies in minutes.

alt.binaries.??? you name it, the newsgroups had it... probably still do!

I haven't used it in years... when I tossed the 2400 baud, I started surfing instead...

The last time I checked, newsgroups were not monitored for any downloads so things you grab off there are not tracible as it is with file sharing for music or video rips or anything else. Now with heightened security they might be but I doubt it?

The OpenNAP network has tons of terrabytes of everything. Some of it is way out of hand.

In the beginning, there were many unconnected "nets", each with their own email standards, and some with chat like features, and some even browsing features (PLATO, at the U of I, allowed looking up restaurants, movie listings, etc. from dedicated touch-screen terminals as early as 1980). The "Internet" was the bridge between those nets, and created a new communal email standard. Lists of people insterested in a single topic formed as mailing lists, and dedicated management software appeared to handle this. Newsgroups followed with B News, later supplanted by C News, which allowed many anonymous readers and non-anonymous writers. None of this stuff was "DOS based", but based primarily on Un*x systems on lots of different hardware. There were many other "browsing-like" technologies like archie, for a time. In the PC world, dial-up BBSes existed, and even nets of them were formed (FidoNet, for example). Compuserve came into being on top of a time-sharing system called Tymnet to become a mega BBS.

In 1987 or thereabouts, thin links formed between The Internet, previously only connecting universities, military sites, and research centers together, and the dial-up BBSes. Compuserve resisted, then finally relented in 1990 or so. AOL appeared to compete with Compuserve.

By 1992, the Internet was clearly becoming the leader, and Compuserve, AOL, and other BBSes were becoming mere portals into the vast Internet. Also around this time, the WWW software began to emerge from CERN and the University of Illinois, where it had lived in obsurity for some time.

Those were the good old days... THE place to get porn! I had co-workers that did almost nothing else all day long.

Mozilla and Firefox have good built in newsreaders. You need to have a newsserver, a user ID (usually different then your login ID), and password. You can get all that info from your ISP. Enter the appropriate info into Mail and News preferences, IIRC.

Or if you want web based news go to:

http://www.mailgate.org

It's free. Anyone can browse but if you want to post messages you need to register. (However, no alt newsgroups - damn!)

Ahhh.. those were the days.

I was the only 11 year old in my class on my Compay 386/20e chugging away at a bunch of local BBSs downloading all sorts of pirated software and porn doing the Zmodem thing. Before that I was on prodigy on my Hayes 1200 baud modem. BBSes were hot back in the way, a few of my friends experimented setting up our own BBS. The biggest limitation was the number of phone lines. Man those days were funny.

I remember chatting on IRC through DOS, text only. Those were the days....

QUOTE (lapuwali @ Apr 28 2005, 01:53 PM)

In the beginning, there were many unconnected "nets", each with their own email standards, and some with chat like features, and some even browsing features (PLATO, at the U of I, allowed looking up restaurants, movie listings, etc. from dedicated touch-screen terminals as early as 1980).

PLATO ... wow, that brings back memories! Early plasma screens, had a primitive form of instant messaging, and a few games like lunar lander. And this in the mid-70s. Took a few courses on that system.

QUOTE (914GT @ Apr 28 2005, 05:30 PM)

QUOTE (lapuwali @ Apr 28 2005, 01:53 PM) In the beginning, there were many unconnected "nets", each with their own email standards, and some with chat like features, and some even browsing features (PLATO, at the U of I, allowed looking up restaurants, movie listings, etc. from dedicated touch-screen terminals as early as 1980). PLATO ... wow, that brings back memories! Early plasma screens, had a primitive form of instant messaging, and a few games like lunar lander. And this in the mid-70s. Took a few courses on that system.

The units I used in 1980-81 weren't plasma, but vector screens. Rather than raster stuff such as almost eveyrone uses now, with millions of pixels, the vector machines drew straight lines on the tube using the electron beam directly. This allowed a relatively complex picture to be described as a small set of straight lines, so very fast updates could take place with very little data. This suited the slow processors and tiny bandwidths available then. A good number of early arcade games were also vector-based, like Asteroids. Most of the terminals used an amber phosphor screen, which resembles the early (but later) plasma raster displays produced by IBM and a few others.

My first email address was uunet!racerx!james, using the old "bang path" UUCP email address format. UUNet was the very first commercial ISP, and the company I worked for in the mid-80s was one of the few non-research companies that had an Internet connection, which consisted of a then lightening fast 9600 baud Codex modem that dialed Reston, VA (from STL, MO) once an hour and exchanged mail and news. racerx was a Sun 3/50 sitting in the office next to mine.

I was long gone by the 80s so I don't know what it evolved into. I remember the terminals as the one below. It had the plasma screen which could be illuminated from behind like a microfiche to overlay slides on the screen. By the way, that is not me - my hair was not quite that long.

I was a member of several boards on my 386sx-20. Before that I had an PC-comparable. I signed up for Genie, a text-based service sort of like pre-AOL. I think it was $19 a month back in 1984.

Sheez!

I had a 300 baud modem, then a 1200, then a 2400, 28.8, 56K, and then finally DSL!

I just checked and there are four newsgroups for Porsches - alt.autos.porsche, alt.autos.porsche.911, alt.autos.porsche.928, and alt.autos.porsche.944. Looks like there's some activity on them along with the usual spam.

Newsgroups are very much alive and well because as far as I know they are still one of the best ways to get pirated software on the net. Believe it or not IRC is also alive and well for the same reason. There are even online services that have many terabytes of storage to temporarily cache newsgroup traffic so that it is easier for the casual user to nab software. See easynews.