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56. By the modem light’s red glare part 2 – Flashback, tracks from the past
This is the second out of three episodes, talking about the BBS era in Sweden. We’ve hit the 90s and lead you towards the sunset of the BBS scene and the Internet taking over. But this journey is an hour, so we will cover who the typical BBS-user might have been, why the some hated how easy it had become to start a BBS and quality of some of the discussions on a board like mine.
The term “Board” and “BBS” mean the same thing here, just so you know.
The show
00:00 ericade.radio – Time for another episode of Flashback – Tracks from the past
00:06 DJ Daemon: Start up your terminal programs and let’s dial into an episode about the sunset era of the bulletin board systems. In episode 50, we covered the BBS-scene from the late 70s to the early 90s. If you didn’t know anything about what was in store back in 1990, it was easy to believe the age of the boards would last forever. It would not!
00:33 Necros of PM – “Click”
03:41 DJ Daemon: In early 90s, everything got faster, cheaper and better. The system operators were almost gods in their owning of expensive hardware and hard to setup software. And now, any dude with a 386, Amiga or Atari could create a board for themselves. And rule over the debating forums and file areas. A frustrated, but unknown Sysop wrote this in 1995: “The Modem scene is FAR TOO BIG. Face it, how many boards have you ever heard of? Too many! And it’s still just a “fart in space” of all the boards that have ever and does still exist. Did you know that 60% of all the boards closes down within a month due to user inactivity? EVERYBODY with a modem has come up with the dream of starting an own board, letting people call to yourself, gettin’ free warez instead of big phone bills. Cute, but few’s succeeding. ” If we ignore the bad grammar and that fart of a Swedish colloquialism that no one really understands outside our country, that’s a brutal take down of the scene don’t you think?
05:07 ArchAngel – Archons of light
07:58 DJ Daemon: I don’t think that elitist nonsense is good for anything except the feeling of being superior and the creation of a camaraderie that just made the scene look like a king of the hill scenario. With the possibility of anyone getting to cut their teeth as a sysop, this was the advent of BBS:es as a true hobbyist network. I started my own BBS on the 18th of October 1993, running on an Amiga 500. But we’ve discussed that in an earlier episode of this podcast. It was a great way of learning computers, script-based programming, social media before they even existed and just how much of a diplomat you had to be. I will share a few memories never told on this podcast before, but we must then continue into the sunset of the modem era.
09:03 Cooth – The Misty Lake
13:27 DJ Daemon: Even if it was easy to setup a typical board compared to the 80s, there were still a number of hurdles to overcome. I wrote a lot of commands in Arexx, the Amiga flavor of IBM Rexx. It was an easy language to learn, and I had a good reference manual. So, I often got questions from people asking me how to fix problems or build functions. This was very fun and sharing the code and the knowledge was what we did. And others could show you ways to improve your own crappy code. Then there was Peter… The name is his own because way should we protect the guilty? He didn’t ask people to help him, he tried to make the write the whole script that he wanted for his board. And once he offered to pay another sysop to build a script, then refused to pay. Quite a character and he had to flee the scene after the other sysops running him out on a metaphorical rail with tar and feather. Let’s hope it was metaphorical.
14:45 Purple Motion – Sundance
17:37 DJ Daemon: I wrote a joke-full text with severa...
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By Erik ZalitisThis is the second out of three episodes, talking about the BBS era in Sweden. We’ve hit the 90s and lead you towards the sunset of the BBS scene and the Internet taking over. But this journey is an hour, so we will cover who the typical BBS-user might have been, why the some hated how easy it had become to start a BBS and quality of some of the discussions on a board like mine.
The term “Board” and “BBS” mean the same thing here, just so you know.
The show
00:00 ericade.radio – Time for another episode of Flashback – Tracks from the past
00:06 DJ Daemon: Start up your terminal programs and let’s dial into an episode about the sunset era of the bulletin board systems. In episode 50, we covered the BBS-scene from the late 70s to the early 90s. If you didn’t know anything about what was in store back in 1990, it was easy to believe the age of the boards would last forever. It would not!
00:33 Necros of PM – “Click”
03:41 DJ Daemon: In early 90s, everything got faster, cheaper and better. The system operators were almost gods in their owning of expensive hardware and hard to setup software. And now, any dude with a 386, Amiga or Atari could create a board for themselves. And rule over the debating forums and file areas. A frustrated, but unknown Sysop wrote this in 1995: “The Modem scene is FAR TOO BIG. Face it, how many boards have you ever heard of? Too many! And it’s still just a “fart in space” of all the boards that have ever and does still exist. Did you know that 60% of all the boards closes down within a month due to user inactivity? EVERYBODY with a modem has come up with the dream of starting an own board, letting people call to yourself, gettin’ free warez instead of big phone bills. Cute, but few’s succeeding. ” If we ignore the bad grammar and that fart of a Swedish colloquialism that no one really understands outside our country, that’s a brutal take down of the scene don’t you think?
05:07 ArchAngel – Archons of light
07:58 DJ Daemon: I don’t think that elitist nonsense is good for anything except the feeling of being superior and the creation of a camaraderie that just made the scene look like a king of the hill scenario. With the possibility of anyone getting to cut their teeth as a sysop, this was the advent of BBS:es as a true hobbyist network. I started my own BBS on the 18th of October 1993, running on an Amiga 500. But we’ve discussed that in an earlier episode of this podcast. It was a great way of learning computers, script-based programming, social media before they even existed and just how much of a diplomat you had to be. I will share a few memories never told on this podcast before, but we must then continue into the sunset of the modem era.
09:03 Cooth – The Misty Lake
13:27 DJ Daemon: Even if it was easy to setup a typical board compared to the 80s, there were still a number of hurdles to overcome. I wrote a lot of commands in Arexx, the Amiga flavor of IBM Rexx. It was an easy language to learn, and I had a good reference manual. So, I often got questions from people asking me how to fix problems or build functions. This was very fun and sharing the code and the knowledge was what we did. And others could show you ways to improve your own crappy code. Then there was Peter… The name is his own because way should we protect the guilty? He didn’t ask people to help him, he tried to make the write the whole script that he wanted for his board. And once he offered to pay another sysop to build a script, then refused to pay. Quite a character and he had to flee the scene after the other sysops running him out on a metaphorical rail with tar and feather. Let’s hope it was metaphorical.
14:45 Purple Motion – Sundance
17:37 DJ Daemon: I wrote a joke-full text with severa...