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Internet Forums (or Fora) history?

Darth Vader said:
The MODEM designed for the BBC micro ran at 110 and 300 baud - I had one before I junked it. Even in 1993 communication with the ERS satellite from ESA was at 1.2K baud over X.25 protocol!
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I never saw a BBC online, that would have been fun! Just bought a Acornsoft Termulator ROM for my Beeb from eBay so I can now theoretically use it as a UNIX or Telnet terminal! Why I hear everyone ask. I have no idea.

My first home experience was intense frustration trying to log onto bulletin boards via my PS/2 30 8086 DOS PC via an Amstrad 9.6 modem someone had given me. Man that thing was slow and I didn’t have any spare cash for crazy phone bills. I didn’t do much beyond proving it was possible. That would have been 1989-90 or so. Within a couple of years I’d upgraded to a self-built 486DX2 66 and began learning the whole world of pain that was Winsock.dll in Windows 3.1!

I clearly remember the first version of Mosaic coming out in 1993. Shortly after I stuck the very first static version of pfm up on my Demon Internet webspace.
 
For info I worked and installed possibly the Worlds first email system. It was called WINC (I actually had a badge!). Basically we had a DEC PDP11 running the mail service. This machine would poll the MDS Series 21 computers for mail messages over telephone lines using 2.4Kbps MODEMs hourly or at longer intervals and route them to their destination. I installed the first system for Ford UK. This was around mid to late '80s. It also worked internationally via PDP11 to PDP11 mail server communication. The mail came out directly to a printer so this had to be in a secured office.

DV
 
Tony L said:
There was a period before the phone companies got wise and you could add your ISP to a ‘friends and family’ or whatever deal where you paid a little more each month and those calls were free. Lasted about a year as I recall, then they blocked it.

PS I remember going through all the modems as they came out; 9.6, 14.4, 28.8, 56k etc. I bet I’ve still got a 56k ISA card in my bits box
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My first was a 300 baud one, swiftly followed by a huge leap to a 1200 baud model…
 
I was using the internet at work from about 1991. Those days it was mainly through mailing lists, then a couple of years later I started posting on Usenet groups. Every now and then there’d be complaints about how everything was being ‘ruined’ by the latest batch of ‘dumb users’, eg the AOL mob who arrived in the late 90s. WebTV which must have been around that time also brought in a load of technically naïve people.

Early search tools were fairly clunky. I think Gopher preceded the Web, then there was Netscape (popularly known as Nutscrape) and Alta Vista, until Google conquered the world.
 
Mike Reed said:
As a geographically interesting adjunct, which country boasts the nearest language to Latin? Answers on forums(sic) only !:)
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Interesting question.(albeit completely off topic) :)

For some reason my little grey cells were telling me that it's Romanian, but the Interweb says Italian.
 
narabdela said:
For some reason my little grey cells were telling me that it's Romanian, but the Interweb says Italian.
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My info. correlates with your little grey cells. It's Romanian (confirmed by my dentist as being pronounced ROmanIan; stress on the o and i). Story is that the Roman garrisons in what is now Romania were cut off when Rome fell and in isolation intermarried with the locals, where the languages (Slavic and Latin) became intertwined. Italian is also a development of Latin. The jury's out as to which is truer to Latin but I'm told it's the former
 
Tony L said:
...my tool of choice was Forte Agent, which was versatile email and newsgroup reader. It was nice having both combined in the one app.

...
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I also used Forte Agent, and continued using it as my preferred POP mail client up until a couple of years ago when my provider switched to an authentication regimen that Agent couldn't support. I'm a little annoyed that development and support for Agent just stopped.
 
Tony L said:
The forums kind of grew out of bulletin boards and Usenet newsgroups.
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...and email list servers. And before internet access for the masses became possible, there were forums on AOL and Compu$erve. There were even offline readers available for them, to minimize the amount of time spent racking up phone bills.

So Compu$erve had special interest forums with threaded messages by the early 1990s. Dial-up Bulletin Boards also had threaded messages and offline readers by then too.
 
Yank said:
I also used Forte Agent, and continued using it as my preferred POP mail client up until a couple of years ago when my provider switched to an authentication regimen that Agent couldn't support. I'm a little annoyed that development and support for Agent just stopped.
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I used Agent all the way until I switched to Apple about 16 years or so ago. I can’t remember running anything else on a PC, maybe Thunderbird for a short while, but I was just so used to Agent I stuck with it. They kept emailing me about updates until quite recently when the old ISP email went dead. I hated Microsoft’s Outlook even though Exchange Server was part of my employment skillset. Get paid fixing Microsoft software, try never to use it oneself!
 
Tony L said:
There was a period before the phone companies got wise and you could add your ISP to a ‘friends and family’ or whatever deal where you paid a little more each month and those calls were free. Lasted about a year as I recall, then they blocked it.

PS I remember going through all the modems as they came out; 9.6, 14.4, 28.8, 56k etc. I bet I’ve still got a 56k ISA card in my bits box
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My first outboard modem in 1982 was a Hayes 1200 baud. I recall the beeps and bongs of connecting being somehow strangely reassuring. Don't recall it getting much faster until the early 90s.

Before that, from 1980-1981, I used on a Xerox teletype (luggable, no screen, thermal paper roll) with a built-in 300 baud modem to access their time sharing services.
 
I used the free local call to dial into work to use the internet, free internet till they scrapped the modems.

Pete
 
I remember, back in the mid/late 1970s, a friend who was the IT guru at Glasgow University, showing me his home set-up, which involved one of those modem thingies that you sat a normal telephone handset into.
 
narabdela said:
I remember, back in the mid/late 1970s, a friend who was the IT guru at Glasgow University, showing me his home set-up, which involved one of those modem thingies that you sat a normal telephone handset into.
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All I can see in my head now is "How about a game of thermonuclear war?"
 
Unbelievable as it may sound, 'cos most here know I'm a digital numpty, I got a job for 3 months in the summer of '70 with N.C.R. at their Baker St. h.q. I'd previously been on the Canterbury cash register sales team prior to decimalisation. My job was working with COBOL; Heaven only knows what I did, as I certainly wasn't coding!

I took the transfer to look after a big maisonette in West Hampstead with multiple occupants whilst the incumbent friend was taking a long trip (!) to Morocco. I then returned to C'bury to start college. My only recollection of that job was the impressive bank of ginormous R2R machines in the next room, making quite a racket; must have been a dozen or more. My intro. to the digital world, which left no mark at all. No idea of what the purpose was either, as home/business computers came in quite a long time after; at least 5 years, I'd imagine.
 
narabdela said:
I remember, back in the mid/late 1970s, a friend who was the IT guru at Glasgow University, showing me his home set-up, which involved one of those modem thingies that you sat a normal telephone handset into.
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These were quite common in offices and were used to send/receive fax. I think they were all pf 110 baud but that is fast enough for a fax.

DV
 
chartz said:
Those were epic days. The 56k modem was a blessing :D
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I think that somewhere I still have the small book of modem commands and settings for using the first modem I got at home. (But had been using my Uni emails and usenet setups before this.)
 
NCR is on Marylebone Road close to Marylebone mainline station. Baker Street and associated underground is a short walk away. I worked there for a while and often spent time in Regents park with a very attractive young lady.

There was a wide stair case leading to the upper floors of the building and I used to run up and race people in the lifts to the higher floors.

DV
 
That (former) NCR building is on my walk home from work to Euston. I'll see it in a different light now.
My first modem was a US Robotics 33k modem I bought on special offer from the Radio Times in 1997. It was firmware upgradeable to their standard of 56k. I can still remember the day I nearly doubled my throughput. Was still using a pimped out Amiga 1200 back then, but a lack of Java on its only graphical web browser forced us into buying a PC. Fond days of paying the ISP charges, and the connection and dropping a pound in jar for every hour online to offset the bill a little. Then we got the Alcatel frog ADSL modem in 2000, wow that was a revelation.

Here's a bit of info and trivia for that long lost dialup handshake. https://www.windytan.com/2012/11/the-sound-of-dialup-pictured.html
 
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