19 May
2017
19 May
'17
9:46 p.m.
My dad had some bills of 5 grand he told me but he was dialing out from a
remote location in northern Manitoba that had only microwave said made huge
difference when he went from 500 baud to 5000
On May 19, 2017 2:40 PM, "jim stephens via cctalk" <cctalk at
classiccmp.org>
wrote:
On 5/19/2017 3:23 AM, Liam Proven via cctalk wrote:
On 18 May 2017 at 17:16, allison via cctalk
<cctalk at classiccmp.org>
wrote:
I have news for you. (maybe) From 1976 until it petered out, the phone
time cost a lot too. $200 or more a month at times.
Also a stupid charge for local calls where the PUC's didn't stand up to
the Bell system or successors and call bullshit to the charges. Calling
across a few blocks could cost a lot and you wouldn't know it unless you
were a phone nut due to zone usage metering.
Only with competition in the mid 80s did US long distance start to fall,
and now with the internet and voice over IP have the need to pay for most
such long distance gone away for small users.
I put in a couple of T1 based systems for large offices though as recently
as 7 years ago, and commercially the POTS or digital carrier phone numbers
carry a huge toll.
thanks
Jim
All a DOS BBS was was a user interface that
provided security by
requiring
user/password
and limiting the commands usable. The easy was to do that was a version
of
the CMD module
rewritten to not have things like RMDIR and DEL.
I was never into the BBS scene, because outside North America, local
phone calls cost money. So you paid for every minute you were online
-- quite a lot.
I used (and still use) CIX (www.cix.co.uk) which
was a sort of UK
version of BIX, and used offline readers -- you dial up, it sends your
comments, zips & grabs all your messages, and disconnects, as fast as
possible to keep the phone bill down.
But AIUI later-era DOS BBSes often used DESQview to allow multiple
multitasking user sessions, and the BBS sysops were often early
adopters of OS/2 2.
So DOS <> no multitasking...