what is was like getting online in the 80's!

[sideburn]

Just got a modem from Brad at Best Electronics!

Heres a little video of my experience lol

 

 

[+bent_pin]

We need more ascii art

 

[sideburn]

7 hours ago, bent_pin said:

We need more ascii art

 

ATASCII!

 

 

[Zonie]

Good times. BBSing. GT's...

[zzip]

Didn't really know what we were getting into at the time.   My friend got an XM301.   It was the Winter of 86, very snowy, so we spent a lot of time indoors BBSing.   He was also listening to the A-ha "Hunting High and Low" album at the time, the one with "Take on me",  so to this day that music brings back strong memories of getting into BBS and winter and fun times.

 

The online world revealed itself slowly,  we would call any BBS whose number we could find that was in our local calling area (we were smart enough to not run up his parent's phone bill)  We'd discover user group BBSes,  BBSes with Fidonet and similar (to exchange messages and email wtih people in other regions of the country),  BBS games (Doors) like Trade Wars,   ATASCII movies, Pirate  (and other illegal activity) "Leet"  boards wh3r3 3ub3r0n3 t4lk'd lik3 thiz.    Text libraries with jokes, recipes and conspiracy files (what a combo!)

 

I soon had my own XM301 so I could visit things from home.   Soon 300 baud wasn't enough becuase I could read faster than it could display text

 

I do have to say that the ATASCII boards were the best!   Even after getting an ST + PC, their BBSes never seemed to do much more than use their capabilities to add a little color to menus and add cursor positioning.   The ATASCII BBSes usually had much cooler looking screens and animations. 

 

There were also the national online services like Compuserve and GEnie,  but they charged a significant rate by the hour.   I eventually joined GEnie when I had my own income

 

Incidentally,  Atari 8-bit did have a dedicated online service with graphical interface called GCP.   I wanted to try it, but never did.   Looked like it was fairly ahead of its time:

 

[+SpiceWare]

2 hours ago, zzip said:

I do have to say that the ATASCII boards were the best! 

 

 

 

A friend ran a BBS on his Atari so I added full support for ATASCII to my MusicTerm program for the C= 64.  The ATASCII movies were pretty cool:

 

 

 

We had the same thing on Commodore BBSs, though with full color support:

 

 

 

My MusicTerm program worked hand-in-hand with my 64-Net and 128-Net BBS software to enhance the C= online experience with:

• realtime music at 300 baud
• BBS controlled font, including animated characters  (a caller to my BBS would see the ? rotating on its axis)
• sprites
• ability to play online games with joystick
• BBS controlled mini-buffers that held text, sprite data, or animated character data

 

More info, and a video, in this blog post:

 

 

I added support for ATASCII when I lived in Corpus Christi - there weren't that many boards online, so people called all of them and ATASCII support was a big hit with the Commodore owners.  When I moved to Houston there were so many boards running that people segregated based on brand. I found that out the hard way when I called a few Atari BBSes and the other callers were royally pissed off when I posted the number to my Commodore BBS.

[+5-11under]

I think there were about a half dozen BBSes that I visited more than once in the 80s:

• A few with freeware programs (for Atari)
• A regional buy & Sell BBS, which was awesome
• Motorola... long distance, to download data sheets (probably the very early 90s, actually)
• A place that had Star Trek discussions... it blew my mind that people from all over could talk with each other via the BBS

[zzip]

15 minutes ago, SpiceWare said:

We had the same thing on Commodore BBSs, though with full color support:

Cool, I assumed that would be the case, but never visited BBSes on C64

 

16 minutes ago, SpiceWare said:

My MusicTerm program worked hand-in-hand with my 64-Net and 128-Net BBS software to enhance the C= online experience with:

• realtime music at 300 baud
• BBS controlled font, including animated characters  (a caller to my BBS would see the ? rotating on its axis)
• sprites
• ability to play online games with joystick
• BBS controlled mini-buffers that held text, sprite data, or animated character data

That's the sort of thing I would have loved to mess around with back then!   I always felt much more than just *ASCII could be done on BBSes.    ST had a protocol called "Instant Graphics", but I never encountered a BBS that implemented it, it was always boring old VT-52 there.   I wrote an ST terminal program that added an ATASCII mode because I missed visited those BBSes.

 

10 minutes ago, 5-11under said:

Motorola... long distance, to download data sheets (probably the very early 90s, actually)

Yeah I think this kind of thing was more common in the 90s,  sometimes you'd even see 1-800 numbers to download stuff.   In the 80s, PDF, hypertext, Word Docs,  wasn't quite there yet--  certainly not standardized to make viewable cross-platform.   And the hardware would struggle to display it anyway.

[sideburn]

3 hours ago, zzip said:

Didn't really know what we were getting into at the time.   My friend got an XM301.   It was the Winter of 86, very snowy, so we spent a lot of time indoors BBSing.   He was also listening to the A-ha "Hunting High and Low" album at the time, the one with "Take on me",  so to this day that music brings back strong memories of getting into BBS and winter and fun times.

 

The online world revealed itself slowly,  we would call any BBS whose number we could find that was in our local calling area (we were smart enough to not run up his parent's phone bill)  We'd discover user group BBSes,  BBSes with Fidonet and similar (to exchange messages and email wtih people in other regions of the country),  BBS games (Doors) like Trade Wars,   ATASCII movies, Pirate  (and other illegal activity) "Leet"  boards wh3r3 3ub3r0n3 t4lk'd lik3 thiz.    Text libraries with jokes, recipes and conspiracy files (what a combo!)

 

I soon had my own XM301 so I could visit things from home.   Soon 300 baud wasn't enough becuase I could read faster than it could display text

 

I do have to say that the ATASCII boards were the best!   Even after getting an ST + PC, their BBSes never seemed to do much more than use their capabilities to add a little color to menus and add cursor positioning.   The ATASCII BBSes usually had much cooler looking screens and animations. 

 

There were also the national online services like Compuserve and GEnie,  but they charged a significant rate by the hour.   I eventually joined GEnie when I had my own income

 

Incidentally,  Atari 8-bit did have a dedicated online service with graphical interface called GCP.   I wanted to try it, but never did.   Looked like it was fairly ahead of its time:

 

Yep funny how the music reminds you of those times. I was calling all over the world pirating with my war dialed calling card numbers. Also I remember the first online service I called was Prodigy. 

[sideburn]

1 hour ago, SpiceWare said:

 

 

 

A friend ran a BBS on his Atari so I added full support for ATASCII to my MusicTerm program for the C= 64.  The ATASCII movies were pretty cool:

 

 

 

We had the same thing on Commodore BBSs, though with full color support:

 

 

 

My MusicTerm program worked hand-in-hand with my 64-Net and 128-Net BBS software to enhance the C= online experience with:

• realtime music at 300 baud
• BBS controlled font, including animated characters  (a caller to my BBS would see the ? rotating on its axis)
• sprites
• ability to play online games with joystick
• BBS controlled mini-buffers that held text, sprite data, or animated character data

 

More info, and a video, in this blog post:

 

 

I added support for ATASCII when I lived in Corpus Christi - there weren't that many boards online, so people called all of them and ATASCII support was a big hit with the Commodore owners.  When I moved to Houston there were so many boards running that people segregated based on brand. I found that out the hard way when I called a few Atari BBSes and the other callers were royally pissed off when I posted the number to my Commodore BBS.

That’s awesome  atascii on the c64! Nice one. 

[+x=usr(1536)]

Memories of line noise, broken overnight downloads (and uploads), and making less-than-legitimate use of calling card numbers to dial BBSes outside of the country.  Good times.

[sideburn]

6 minutes ago, x=usr(1536) said:

Memories of line noise, broken overnight downloads (and uploads), and making less-than-legitimate use of calling card numbers to dial BBSes outside of the country.  Good times.

The local ATT number my modem repeatedly dialed to hack out calling card numbers was a .10c toll call I wasn’t aware of. I came home from school one day to my dad staring at a BOOK sized $300.00 phone bill. We were both very confused (while I was keeping my illegal activity a secret). I said “ahh it’s my modem, I’ll pay for it” and he scoffed at me like how am I gonna pay for it. Unaware i was making $5 a pop selling floppies with games not available in the USA yet that I downloaded from Europe with my calling card #’s 😂 

Edited August 21, 2023 by sideburn

[Zonie]

We had some WATS number everyone used to call long distance BBS's.

Probably a large company that had a local office like GE or Boeing or someone.

You'd dial the number, get a dial tone, dial 9+1+Area code+ number.

It probably cost that owner nothing or next to nothing (at least that is what everyone thought)

The best BBS's in Phoenix were Lightning one (C64), The unknown bbs "Tubbs" (Apple II), Garden of Eden (two-line Apple II) and Evenign Zephyr. (Atari?)

I had a C64 and 300 baud modem.

[+SpiceWare]

30 minutes ago, Zonie said:

We had some WATS number everyone used to call long distance BBS's.

 

In the late 80s I had a regular BBS caller from Germany. We chatted a few times - somehow he'd gotten ahold of a copy of MusicTerm and was using the internet, via the university he attended, to access a modem pool in Houston to connect to my BBS.

[+x=usr(1536)]

2 hours ago, sideburn said:

The local ATT number my modem repeatedly dialed to hack out calling card numbers was a .10c toll call I wasn’t aware of.

Most of what we were doing didn't require brute-forcing numbers, though we did have a couple of CC generators floating around.

 

The real trick was to call a country-direct operator and take advantage of the fact that calls made through them had to be processed manually after the fact - so call up, give them the number in the destination country that you want to call and the calling / credit card number you're using, and enjoy the fun of 300 baud connections over telecom satellites 

 

Granted, this was in Ireland in the mid-1980s up to about the early 1990s.  As time went on, it got a lot harder to do this.

1 hour ago, Zonie said:

We had some WATS number everyone used to call long distance BBS's.

There was an extender I used to use in Virginia that was awesome for that.  IIRC, it did both inward and outbound WATS.  Ditto loops in L.A., Seattle, Portland, Dallas, and a couple of others I'm not remembering right now, though they were pretty much just used for voice.

48 minutes ago, SpiceWare said:

In the late 80s I had a regular BBS caller from Germany. We chatted a few times - somehow he'd gotten ahold of a copy of MusicTerm and was using the internet, via the university he attended, to access a modem pool in Houston to connect to my BBS.

He may have been using Telenet or IPSS instead of a straight Internet connection - only reason I say this is that I can't figure out how he would have carried his modem traffic over TCP/IP without some form of encapsulation, but anything's possible and I don't know all the details 

[Zonie]

On 8/21/2023 at 2:11 PM, x=usr(1536) said:

He may have been using Telenet or IPSS instead of a straight Internet connection - only reason I say this is that I can't figure out how he would have carried his modem traffic over TCP/IP without some form of encapsulation, but anything's possible and I don't know all the details 

Internet? 1980's?

[sideburn]

On 8/21/2023 at 2:11 PM, x=usr(1536) said:

Most of what we were doing didn't require brute-forcing numbers, though we did have a couple of CC generators floating around.

I wrote mine in BASIC. it called ATT, delayed (I timed how long it took for it to say "please enter your calling card number), dialed 6 random numbers and delayed again (waiting the time it took for a passing code to give me a dial tone), then called a dead BBS in germany. If the carrier connected then it would print that code out on my Okimate 10 and hang up and do it all over again... I would have about 5 card numbers after i got home from school.

 

 

Edited August 26, 2023 by sideburn

[+x=usr(1536)]

44 minutes ago, Zonie said:

Internet? 1980's?

Entirely possible.  The first time I saw the Internet was at UCLA in 1988; my mother has a friend who was a research physicist there at the time, and she showed me USENET.

 

That said, there wasn't much in the way of public access to it at the time.

[+x=usr(1536)]

30 minutes ago, sideburn said:

I wrote mine in BASIC. it called ATT, delayed (I timed how long it took for it to say "please enter your calling card number), dialed 6 random numbers and delayed again (waiting the time it took for a passing code to give me a dial tone), then called a dead BBS in germany. If the carrier connected then it would print that code out on my Okimate 10 and hang up and do it all over again... I would have about 5 card numbers after i got home from school.

That's pretty slick 

 

We couldn't really automate it too much since we had to use a country-direct operator.  AT&T stopped working c.1990 or 1991, IIRC, but Sprint kept going until around the mid-'90s.

 

Overall, it was a lot more efficient to just mail a brick of disks if uploading or downloading was the desired end result, but obviously this didn't work so well if your interest was in messages bases and the like 

[sideburn]

36 minutes ago, x=usr(1536) said:

That's pretty slick 

 

We couldn't really automate it too much since we had to use a country-direct operator.  AT&T stopped working c.1990 or 1991, IIRC, but Sprint kept going until around the mid-'90s.

 

Overall, it was a lot more efficient to just mail a brick of disks if uploading or downloading was the desired end result, but obviously this didn't work so well if your interest was in messages bases and the like 

yeah i think my interest were more int he line of "what can I get away with without my parents finding out" 😂

[Zonie]

16 hours ago, sideburn said:

I wrote mine in BASIC. it called ATT, delayed (I timed how long it took for it to say "please enter your calling card number), dialed 6 random numbers and delayed again (waiting the time it took for a passing code to give me a dial tone), then called a dead BBS in germany. If the carrier connected then it would print that code out on my Okimate 10 and hang up and do it all over again... I would have about 5 card numbers after i got home from school.

 

 

Yeah, I've heard of people doing that.

16 hours ago, x=usr(1536) said:

Entirely possible.  The first time I saw the Internet was at UCLA in 1988; my mother has a friend who was a research physicist there at the time, and she showed me USENET.

 

That said, there wasn't much in the way of public access to it at the time.

Not that we could use or even knew about.

16 hours ago, x=usr(1536) said:

That's pretty slick 

 

We couldn't really automate it too much since we had to use a country-direct operator.  AT&T stopped working c.1990 or 1991, IIRC, but Sprint kept going until around the mid-'90s.

 

Overall, it was a lot more efficient to just mail a brick of disks if uploading or downloading was the desired end result, but obviously this didn't work so well if your interest was in messages bases and the like 

Reminds me of the early 90's when I was traveling abroad... an example (from Korea if I recall) 00911,,,1+xxx xxx xxxx,,,,CC number
the first set was to get AT&T. AT&T worked at least until 1997.

The commas were pauses

the next was the phone number

The last the calling card number

15 hours ago, sideburn said:

yeah i think my interest were more int he line of "what can I get away with without my parents finding out" 😂

Nawww...

[sideburn]

3 minutes ago, Zonie said:

Reminds me of the early 90's when I was traveling abroad... an example (from Korea if I recall) 00911,,,1+xxx xxx xxxx,,,,CC number
the first set was to get AT&T. AT&T worked at least until 1997.

The commas were pauses

the next was the phone number

The last the calling card number

Ha! I forgot about the commas! I totally remember doing that with modem AT commands. ATDT 00911,,,1+xxx xxx xxxx,,,,CC number
 

Another BASIC program I wrote for Atari 8-bit was a tone dialer. I just found it recently on my old 5 1/4" floppies and it still works. It plays the touch tone sounds out the speaker.

I was probably 12 or 13 and I had no idea what I was doing but I knew the DTMF tones were two tones. So I painstakingly played two tones out the speaker until a dial tone went away and then I knew I dialed a number...

 

I did this over and over until I figured out 0 - 9.. There were a LOT of "you got the wrong number, oh sorry what number did I dial??" phone calls during the process 😂

[Zonie]

It probably still works... for landlines... what are those again? LOL we built a new house in 2020 and don't even have phone wiring in it.

[sideburn]

12 minutes ago, Zonie said:

It probably still works... for landlines... what are those again? LOL we built a new house in 2020 and don't even have phone wiring in it.

I’m using a MagicJack (voIP). You can dial into 2600 Network and it’ll route you to tons of BBS’s 

[+Zeptari]

Slow, expensive and exciting.