Days Before The Internet


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Anybody on this forum speak english? might as well be talking in chinese for all the sense it makes to me! lol

A packet, is data, ie a message, each of you posts are a "packet", when you hit the post button it's identical to when I hit send in Packet radio, but instead of it sending by a transmitter, it sends it down the phone lines. If you could hear the sounds it makes, it would be identical to the transmitted sounds.

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  • 1 year later...

I can.

My mum had hers installed in around 1991, it had been in service for about a year before then.

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It was ...LOL ...sorry

I knew where I was working at the time it was installed, and I had my years wrong. It was 93/94/95. no later as I was abroad after that.

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  • 3 years later...

The other variation I remember was Paging/Messaging. You carried a small receiver with you, and if someone paged you, the thing beeped and you had to find a real phone to ring the person who paged you.

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My first experience of what we call email, was when I was at Rolls-Royce Derby. RR was in co-operation with Pratt & Whitney, in Hartford, Connecticut on the V2500 engine for the Airbus A320. Derby was responsible for the Product Support of the engine and that was the office I worked in. Obviously, there was a time difference between us and America - as we were about to go home they had been at work for a couple of hours. In 1990 we used to type our questions/answers during the afternoon, on a computer screen that had a prepared format, and next morning we had a reply on our computer screens. I cannot remember this system being called email, but it might have been. I can confirm the date because the system was in operation just a few months before the Product Support office was transferred to Scotland and I lost the best job I ever had.

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  • 1 month later...

Anybody on this forum speak english? might as well be talking in chinese for all the sense it makes to me! lol

Well said Ashley,..........nice to know i'm not the only one. lol.

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Re # 36

The old pager system worked well for me 19 years ago when my youngest son was in an horrific car crash with 2 school friends, at 2 am one morning.

My husband was the other side of the World working, eldest son was at University 100 miles away and I just felt I couldn't deal with it on my own. This was before cell phones were widely used and eldest son had a pager which I sent a message to, he called me within minutes and was at home to help within 2 hours.

The kid recovered thank goodness.

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As we all agree, without the internet, they'd be no Nottstalgia. Awful.

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#36

I had to use a pager when I worked as an Area Manager. I thought it was absolutely the most god-awful thing imagineable, never got a minutes peace. Little did I know, then I was given a bleddy mobile.

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Re #37

In those days, 'packets' of mail were sent via international telephone lines.

Your mail was zipped into one file and sent via the phone. It was not instant like today.

Bulletin Board Sysops would zip their mail and send it on to a hub who did the same.

Then it was either sent via a further stage or direct to another country by phone.

It could take days or weeks for a reply, or your email or reply may never get through.

You logged in to the BBS and downloaded your mail packet, which also included discussions

similar to Nottstalgia forums.

And used offline Readers similar to Blue Wave

bwave.gif

http://teck78.blogspot.com/2006/12/bluewave-offline-mail-reader.html

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  • 2 years later...

I ran the the Outer Limits BBS which ran on an Commodore branded 286 PC using Remote access BBS software under DOS. I even wrote some of the software (doors) on it using C++ thanks to help from Steven Holmes of Fonty Towers BBS getting me started. I even became a co sysop of Fonty Towers for a while.

 

I was good friends with Gary Collins of Maxima even before he started the BBS and i helped. Before he started that we used to play games like Doom/Hexen on direct modem dialup multiplayer half the night before gaming servers where a thing. 

 

I gave Jay Severn of Diamond Line my copy of OS/2 to run his BBS on cuz I wasn't using it. Met him with Steve Frank's who went on to start Diamond Wreck BBS....   I remember thinking how amazing Diamond Line BBS was... It was the first one I used.

 

Lots of memories but it was a pretty amazing time before the internet took over thanks to the fact we got free calls... it was the main driving fact for many.

 

Also remember Shaun on this thread, I remember chatting to him on the BBSs.

 

So many great people all out to help  each other and just have fun...I followed quite a few ex BBS users from Diamond Cable area to #ircbar2 on internet IRC chat...

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  • 1 year later...

Hi Mick, Shaun, J7, et al,

 

I've just found this thread and thought I would say hello - This is Steve Holme of The Fonty Towers BBS remembering the good old days of 1990's dial up ;-)

 

I'm still developing software and am now part of the curl development team - if anyone uses this ;-)

 

Feel free to connect with me on Linked In:

 

https://www.linkedin.com/in/steveholme/

 

Kind Regards

 

Steve

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  • 2 years later...
On 7/1/2010 at 9:49 PM, mick2me said:

Riding shotgun with Phil the Iron Cross early 80's I came face to face with some Alphas, Tracked turkying on Gedling Rec.

What ever happened to Phil I wonder.

Now wheres that Dummy Load?

Phil's house is still covered in CCTV, not sure what he has to hide..

although certain stories i've heard over the past few years leads me to think a certain person was a very bad man..

 

Alphas, i know of one genuine one still about living in Heanor, the rest of the original top band Alphas have passed away,

the same ones who did Radio Arthur ??

not the fake CBers who pretend they're alphas like Studney and a couple of others..

 

BBS's Nick is still about,

there was Might Atom, a little scruffy git called Robert Henton, he's still about too the thieving scrote.

i never really got in to internet BBS's just packet radio ones..

 

sorry to resurrect this post, just got bored..

 

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