Wow this is awesome, thanks for sharing!

    .  .
    |\/|
   ;(-.6)    Doc Clu  (member of...)
   =(___ )=  Prison Board BBS
     --/     rdfig.net  972-329-0781




Sean Dennis -> All wrote:
 SD> Hello, All.

 SD> NPR's "All Things Considered" ran an audio story on BBSing last
 SD> Saturday.  I've got the transcript here...and Fidonet's Mike Powell was
 SD> mentioned in the story:

 SD> === Cut ===
 SD> From:
 SD> http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=120649723

 SD> (Originally a piece on "All Things Considered")

 SD> The 'Wild And Woolly' World Of Bulletin Boards

 SD> November 21, 2009

 SD> These days, if you want to find a fling, a friend or a cheap used sofa,
 SD> you might check out craigslist. But decades before Craig Newmark posted
 SD> his first list, computer users all over the country were connecting
 SD> through electronic bulletin boards.

 SD> Bulletin board systems — or BBS — were born in Chicago in 1978.
 SD> Eventually, there were more than 100,000 of them across the country, a
 SD> precursor of today's World Wide Web.

 SD> Tom Jennings was one of the earliest users, back in the 1970s. He
 SD> describes BBS as sort of like a corkboard at the supermarket entrance.
 SD> "You know, you've got a barbecue for sale? You put a 3-by-5 card with a
 SD> description and your phone number, and you tack it to the wall,"
 SD> Jennings says. "And there's a whole collection of these things. It's a
 SD> form of social commerce."

 SD> In the 1970s and '80s, you had to be at a university or a big
 SD> corporation to have Internet access, but the boards were there for
 SD> everyone. A lot of them were run by basement hobbyists with a computer
 SD> and an extra phone line. If you had a phone and a modem, you could dial
 SD> into a BBS and connect to a vast world outside.

 SD> "Any fool with a thousand bucks to put a machine together could be on
 SD> the Net," Jennings says. "You didn't have to go through layers of
 SD> academic or corporate access. So bulletin boards were wild and woolly."
 SD> At first the domain of computer enthusiasts, the BBS expanded to cover a
 SD> host of topics: sports, fantasy gaming, hobbies and, of course, sex.

 SD> Jennings went on to develop FidoNet, a way of letting individual boards
 SD> connect with each other. FidoNet became one of the first strands in the
 SD> World Wide Web — a development that eventually did in the traditional
 SD> dial-up BBS.

 SD> These days, it's hard to find an old-fashioned dial-up BBS. Most of them
 SD> disappeared in the mid-1990s, or transformed themselves into Web sites.
 SD> But there are a few still out there for the dedicated user.

 SD> Michael Powell runs the Capitol City Online BBS from his home in
 SD> Kentucky. He says most people who dial in do it for the nostalgia value.
 SD> "Usually they'll compliment me on keeping it going," he
says. "It's nice
 SD> to know they appreciate that, and it's nice that I'm still here to
 SD> provide that for them."
 SD> === Cut ===

 SD> Later,
 SD> Sean

 SD> //sean{at}nsbbs.info | http://nsbbs.info | ICQ: 19965647

 SD> ... When there is room in the heart there is room in the house.
 SD> --- GoldED/2 3.0.1
 SD> (1:18/200)

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