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Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry's standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book. It has survived not only five centuries, but also the leap into electronic typesetting, remaining essentially unchanged. It was popularised in the 1960s with the release of Letraset sheets containing Lorem Ipsum passages, and more recently with desktop publishing software like Aldus PageMaker including versions of Lorem Ipsum.

Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry's standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book. It has survived not only five centuries, but also the leap into electronic typesetting, remaining essentially unchanged. It was popularised in the 1960s with the release of Letraset sheets containing Lorem Ipsum passages, and more recently with desktop publishing software like Aldus PageMaker including versions of Lorem Ipsum.

Online communities

Discussion

Students were given Chapter #9 of Claire L. Evans book BROAD BAND last week.

This is Stacy Horn, at the time of this interview in 1992 the web didn't exist yet.

Communities

ECHO

Before ECHO

The chapter you read makes mention of something called Project One and something called Community Memory. Let me tell you a bit more about that.

Here's a bit more on the history of Project One and this.

Project One was home to "Resource One" the first civic computing project, it was running in an old military surplus computers that some of the people from Project One got their hands on. Resource One, was a listing of NGOs working on social issues in the San Francisco area, a way for these organizations to know one another and exchange knowledge and resources. It was maintained by hand by Pam Hardt.

Community Memory

Another initiative that came out of the Project One community was Community Memory, which was the original BBS.

The first version of it was installed in a record store, a local hangout where some of the people from Project One used to go to listen to records. It was conceived as a way to post short messages, exchange ads, etc. A bit like what you still see in many Albert Heijn suppermarkets in The Netherlands.

Modems and acoustic couplers

Calling a BBS. A BBS was literally just a computer that was at the other end of a phone line. To connect to that computer you would have to dial the phone number using a regular phone. Before modems could do this automatically you had to use something called an acoustic coupler. The acoustic coupler would translate the digital data coming form the computer, to an analog sound signal that would then travel over the phone line and would be interpreted by an acustic coupler at the other end and then back to digital signals. It was a way for computers to speak digital to each other using the old analog phone lines.

Here's a clip from the classic movie War Games, where you can see Matthew Broderick use an acoustic coupler.

Unlike today's subscriber lines that depend on a contract that goes back straight to your name and address. Acoustic couplers could be used on any phone, including payphones that you could find in the street. So as long as you could pay for the call, you didn't even need a phone line of your own.

Here's how the modulated signal of a modem would sound like in modem of different speeds as the technology evolved through the 70s and 80s.

Are BBS still alive?

There are still a few BBS out there, mostly run by nostalgic BBS lovers. These days however it is not necessary to call them up using a modem, you can access them through the internet using a program called telnet. Your mac used to have telnet installed by default, but Apple stopped including it in Mojave. You can install it again with brew though, like this:

brew install telnet

When you finally have telnet installed you can access the Diamond Mine BBS like this:

telnet bbs.dmine.net 24

Log in as guest.

MUDs

Tips to play in MUD:

MOO
telnet lambda.moo.mud.org 8888

A quick tutorial on MOO

ZombieMUD
telnet zombiemud.org 3000

Fall into the rabbithole 🐰