Please wait...
I wonder why this BBS doesn't have a room dedicated to BBS systems and software.
...
The Wikipedia page on Jeffrey Prothero/Cnybe tu Taren, the programmer of the original version of Citadel, states that Citadel was "arguably the first virtual world system" ([citation needed]). Citadel, then and now, is quite different from what we think of as a virtual world, but do you think that comment is based on Citadel message boards being presented as rooms that users move through to read and write messages relevant to the current room's topic, and chat with other users currently accessing the same room?
This means his claim of being "first" is obviously an exaggeration, since he based it on something else, even though that something else is long forgotten.
And it would be another six years before Citadel was rewritten on unix as a multiuser experience.
Well, if you want one, create one.. :)
Tue Apr 11 2023 10:49:22 PM EDT from papaI wonder why this BBS doesn't have a room dedicated to BBS systems and software.
I just found the button, but I think I'll get to know Uncensored a little better before I start changing the topology. ;)
Wed Apr 12 2023 10:08:16 EDTfrom Nurb432Well, if you want one, create one.. :)
Grex.org, the Ann Arbor, Michigan-based on-line community established in 1991, is shutting down for the last time on April 15, 2023.
It was quite a big deal in its day. A lot of fine software hacks pulled-off and a lot interesting people passed through.
Sad to see another avatar of the kinder and gentler, if more naive, Internet of the past get redirected to /dev/null.
as us old timers die off.. so does our legacy
I think I had a grex.org account. I know I had one on Cleveland Freenet.
I have my "system alert" sound set to the 1 KHz beep from the Apple II. Because sometimes all you need is a beep. Not a boop, not a blip, not a plunk or a drip or a bark.
Today I learned!
We all know that the Amiga was the very best computer of its time, and was ahead of its time, even though IBM and Apple out-marketed Commodore to death.
Smart people also know that the Amiga's 68000 CPU had no MMU, which is why it was so easy for a misbehaving program to stomp all over memory it didn't own, leading to the famous "guru meditation" error box.
But today I learned a little bit about some of the AmigaOS internals. It turns out that one of the reasons the Amiga outperformed all other machines with similar specs -- aside from its superior graphics hardware -- was that the OS and applications were designed to make MASSIVE use of shared memory to pass data between userspace processes, system processes, and device drivers.
A decade later, boring computers would catch up to the Amiga by allowing virtual address spaces that could bypass protection within them while still keeping errant programs from corrupting memory they didn't own.
And now you know ... the rest ... of the story.
Ya, while we all fought among ourselves. MS and IBM wandered past us and took the market with "good enough"
Sat Aug 12 2023 11:34:25 AM EDT from IGnatius T Foobar
And now you know ... the rest ... of the story.
I have my flame suit somewhere from the Amiga/Atari wars of the
80s..
MCIBTY.
I was a big Amiga fan. I had the original Amiga 1000 with the RAM expansion pack that snapped into the front and all of its original awesomeness. Atari ST was a joke compared to the Amiga.
And of course the Amiga was also attached by a serial port to the Altos 586 that originally ran Uncensored.
Sometimes I think about writing a version of the "Boing" demo that runs in a web browser. It's trivial now, but at the time it was revolutionary.
I was in a band at the time. Came from a musical family. So it was the natural choice.
While us Atari folks still think we were 100% better of course, trying remain rational, i think each had their bright spots
- Atari was sound focused. And was more 'business targeted' ( and honestly they didnt do a good job marketing to the musician market )
- Amiga was video focused.( even if we did have the blitter chip :) ) and seemed to be more 'consumer targeted'.
Both were centered around the same chip family so that is sort of a wash, unless you want to talk about the ATW, which hardly anyone got to touch...
And while its totally abstract and personal opinion, never was fond of workbench, TOS/GEM made more sense to me. I think it was due to the 'business market target' angle.
Wed Aug 23 2023 04:06:09 PM EDT from IGnatius T FoobarI wasn't quite as much of a musician back then. In fact, it would be another 15 years before I even owned an instrument with a MIDI interface.
Amiga seemed to have amazing sound but it was really just four DACs. There was no synthesizer chip.
I bought my Amiga in 1987, at a discount because it was a floor model at a store that didn't want to sell them anymore, and sold it in 1993 for not much less than I paid for it. I did well on that.
A few messages up I was talking about how regrettable it was that the Amiga didn't have an MMU. I think that's what truly held back that whole generation of machines. I ran Xenix on Altos machines for the first couple of years, and those had an 8086 CPU but they added an external MMU so you could run a "real" multitasking OS on it without fear. It wasn't until the 80286 came out that bog-standard PCs could reliably multitask, because the '286 had an on-chip MMU.