Hello, Eric.

Saturday January 08 2011 at 21:04, you wrote to me:

 EO> $5/month is pretty good deal.  I'd be curious how many people in my
 EO> area still have POTS modems..

I've gotten a few calls around here locally (although I don't advertise
locally, I guess I could).  These days, I mainly get FREQs from Russia or
Turkey for some of my programs.  I did have a caller who evidently quit
calling my board via dialup from near Nashville.

 EO> Yeah, there are lots of users on the internet, but what exactly do you
 EO> mean by crowded?  It feels like there is endless space on the
 EO> internet, and if there are too many people using one area, it seems
 EO> like another could be created. One thing I did like, though, about
 EO> BBSs back in the day is that they had a lot more of a local feel to
 EO> them - Most of the users were in the same geographic area.

Sometimes, trying to connect to other BBSes for mail is a real pain in the
ass if there's any sort of congestion in their area.  All it takes is one
router to make your life miserable. :)  It's also, like you said, the feel
that the Internet - specifically the web - feel rather cold and anonymous. 
I miss the monthly get-togethers I'd attend with a local BBS and this was
as late as 2000.

 EO> I know what you mean.  But even if a BBS has a web site, POP/SMTP,
 EO> FTP, etc., users aren't forced to use them.  Users can still use only
 EO> the telnet/dialup, and there, I think BBSs have the same feel they
 EO> used to.  On the flipside, I remember a couple BBSs in my area back in
 EO> the day that started to offer the ability for its users to log into
 EO> FTP sites, download files to a temporary area on the BBS, and then
 EO> download those files from the BBS.  I thought that was cool,
 EO> particularly since I didn't have internet access yet.  That was
 EO> also before I fully understood what a BBS was, and I remember that
 EO> some people on one particular BBS were talking about the FTP access as
 EO> a way to get porn. :P

I offer both my dialup and telnet users the ability to telnet out, connect
to an IRC server and chat, FTP out (including grabbing files from a FTP
server then downloading them directly from the door) and even text-based
WWW browsing via telneting to a system in the UK that offers Lynx and Links
for that.  Next time you call my board, press Z from the main menu if
you've not tried that already.

I'm running a FTP server now but it is mainly for moving mail in my own
mail network and not really for "file sharing".  I admit I'm a
real stick-in-the-mud in some ways: I hate HTML email, I still like using a
text-based environment as much as I can and I like to get to know all of my
BBS users personally.  It's also why I don't have a lot of callers on my
board as my system is not some anonymous website; I ask for personal
information as I have the right to know who's visiting my home.  If people
don't like it, they can move on.

Later,
Sean

... Sex at age 90 is like trying to shoot pool with a rope. - George Burns
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