BB FANS

The internet has helped everyone around the world gather information much more quickly, especially students enrolled in online classes. It’s amazing to know people from anywhere in the globe can get an MBA online without having to live next to a physical institution. So in honor of the internet, we’ve created the following infographic highlighting the major events in internet history.

onlinemba.com/blog/history-of-the-internet/

Holy mackerel.

I remember the early days of the Internet when I first tried it in 95 or 96 with Compuserve. Dispite the search capabilities I managed to find the satellite updates quite quickly and started saving the cost of paying someone else to do the updates .

At this time Bullitin Boards worked out cheaper to use that the Internet as you didn't get many hours access to the net for your money. Better still one of the local BBS's was on the same provider as my phone line and I had free evening and weekend access.

I also remember the time when I had to pay £89 for getting carried away in the binary Newsgroups. My parents weren't amused when the bill arrived ! But I knew of someone who had spent many hours in chat rooms and had run up a bill of over £200 . The days of dial-up of course. And there were the pages that reconfigured the settings so some landed up phoning the other side of the world everytime they went on-line and quite likely gave their details away at the same time.

...and I had an 'email' address ending in .UUCP...

We used Wildcat BB's, some in the USA, to get at mail hubs - go online, download zipped package using Zmodem, drop connection, open zip, read and reply to mail, zip reply package, connect, transfer to mail service, drop connection.

My first connection via modem was using a dumb terminal (DEC VT100) with the cable to the diagnostics modem connected, instead of to a PDP 11/34 - and using AT commands to dial.

I got a 1200/75 modem for home, with a spare VT100, so I could connect to the PDP at work and monitor weekend usage (Big Brother?) when people were supposed to be working overtime and messing with the equipment...

I had a Sinclair ZX81 and saved like made to buy a 16K RAM pack for it.

My first PC cost me £200 and had a whopping 64Kb of memory with 200Kb of disc space. I bought a hard card drive, adding as further 200Kb storage, for £150...

I upgraded the monitor - to a 4 colour VGA version (Red, Green, Blue and Black !). My modem was now 1200/1200 and I could download crude images, made up of ASCII characters - eventually some of these became very complex, and included colour, to all 'pictures' of naked women to be sent.

Spam still came in tins...

Wow ,earlier than me. Pre Domestic Internet ?

I had a ZX81 with 16K ,then most of the Commodore range. Then through work I got to use nearly all of the home computers that existed in the 80's.

I had the 1st Amiga in town and have owned the 2000 ,500 ,1200 ,and still have a 600HD.

I chap I did work for had an original IBM PC expanded to 128K don't know what the drive size was.

Now until a few months ago I had a 128K hard-drive sitting on a shelf that had Win3.1 and was running Stacker to increase the size that was used by a local printer. The PCs kept getting faster but the boot drive remained this old drive untill I found a way to copy the contents so it coiuld be transferred to a newer drive. But the software they used were old and the up to date replacements expensive. We did get later programs to do the design work but the plotter software didn't like XP etc plus the Plotter should have been in the Canon museum .

I think the slowest modem used to access a BBS was either a 9k6 or a 14k4 using Hyper terminal though I did have BBS software on a machine but I can't remember the name. When APRS 1st started in the UK I had the BBS set-up to aid the download of the software and it's addons but eventually the internet took over and the BBS wasn't needed.

I remeber buying my 1st PC 486DX33 4MB and 40MB HDD Win3.11 cost £970 which at the time was the cheapest I could find with those specs which were high at the time. Have built loads since rather than ready builts ones.

I've only bought 4 PCs ,that's the one above ,a P4 2.8GHz desktop ,a Laptop ,and a PCFit II.

Have to admit to looking at a 10 inch Tablet with duel boot Android / Windows 7 ,which if it'll run a GPS and a USB camera with supporting software without grinding to a halt, could put to good use.

I remember the V series processor ,V20 ,V40 ? An XT using AT instructions and alot faster than other XTs.

Ahh the days of QBasic and QuickBasic (QBasic with a Compiler to build a standalone executable). Doing event programming the hard way. Calling DOS Interrupts etc. Think the other Basic was GWBasic ?

Never did Assembly or C on a PC. Did 6502 Assembly of Commodores though. Mainly hacking games than writing new ones.

I worked for an engineering company, in the stores. I was originally working on chasing up orders from the machine shop to complete a kit of parts to build the finished product. They were bringing in computer systems and I had a dumb terminal on my desk, long before anyone could do anything much with it. I played.

I tried little proggies I had used on the ZX81 (without RAM pack) like a 24 line version of Number Mastermind. Enter 4 digits, the prog told you if you had picked any that were correct and in the right order, you had about 6 goes to guess the correct sequence.

I had no idea how to save the prog so it was re-typed every time. I was playing one evening after work when the phone rang. Big computer boss at head office, annoyed that his backup had crashed because of an open file. That seemed to be something I was using, but not part of their system. Why, what did I think I was doing, who gave me permission... all those questions and more.

Next day I was called to my bosses office. Big computer boss was there. I was asked again what I thought I was doing. I explained that I was learning how to use my ZX81 at home and found that I could run a little prog on their computer that amused me while I was waiting to go home.

My boss went mad, telling me about the thousands of pounds of equipment involved, playing was not an option, how I'd aborted the system backup - he wasn't happy. Then came the shocker. I half expected being sacked, far from it - computer boss then asked if I wanted to join his team!

I would be a trainee programmer, learning how to program a DEC PDP 11-34 machine (filled a room with less power than your average mobile phone has now!) and they were moving it from head office to our site!

Within a couple of years I was writing software at a reasonable level. Over the 10 years I spent there I moved from storeman to acting system manager in my final year, before they got a new boss and I was made redundant... I went on to other jobs and moved from the DEC PDP and VAX machines to PC's and Visual Basic. Eventually my skillset was so far out of date, and my employers would not even consider retraining, that I was laid off and was unable to get a job programming any more. I was too outdated!

Modems and BB's were starting to appear in my early programming years. I wrote an article for the DEC User magazine to explain to all the techies and fellow programmers around the UK how to turn round the modem to use a dumb terminal and get at the BB's. I put a list of phone numbers in the mag too. I wonder how many people from that era started using those services from that article - before WWW had been thought of?

I still have Windows 3.1 on floppies, as well as Visual Basic 3, which is the last version I actually worked on. I still dabble when I need a little program for something, although I forget a lot of it these days.

I still use batch files on the PC to do things. Why is there no command to create a series of directories that are numbered ABC100 to ABC199 for example? I can do a quick batch file to do that a lot quicker than manually creating one directory after another.

One of the sidelines I got hooked on was a Lotus product called Ami Pro, a word processing package. I got really into the macro language that used and created application in it - particularly a purchase order system where the secretaries filled in a few boxes for the header, then typed the body, hit a button and the entire order was created for laser printing, in a formatted document that was to a design manual for an International company who were sticklers for doing it 'right'. The order system would auto-print copies in the accounts, inspection and other areas of the building to save the secretary from having to sort copies out and put them in internal mail.

I was really proud of that at the time, Lotus in Atlanta had never seen anything like it. I was supported by them directly as the UK office simply didn't have anyone at a level to be able to help me. That was later to be my downfall. By then we had modems running at 33.6K and I was accessing the Lotus BB system to get help with my latest problem. It was for work, was important to me, but my boss dragged me to the directors office and accused me of playing in works time, and I got suspended.

I protested my innocence but it seems my boss had it in for me and the director said it would not be good for me to go back to work in that area, so I was offered a redundancy package. I couldn't see any other option either. Pity, I had enjoyed my work there and had
developed some good systems.

During all this time I had also been using an Acorn Electron with a butchered version of a program that was originally on a magazine tape (yes, cassette tape) that I used in my disco work to display the latest top 20 tracks on a screen, or put a request up for all to read. Big text, scrolling. Amazing stuff back then!