On Wed, 13 Apr 2005 12:38:58 -0700 (PDT)
Tom Jennings <tomj at wps.com> wrote:
On Tue, 12 Apr 2005, Scott Stevens wrote:
I had a 'filter' on my BBS because one
single user had an annoying
habit of typing in ALL CAPS. And he didn't have an all-caps
terminal to use as an excuse. So one night I dug in and hacked the
Pascal code (this was a WWIV BBS) to not allow any but the first
letter in an entered word to be upper case (it would automatically
force all following letters to lower case until some whitespace
occured). Next time Mister All-Caps logged in he had a fit. What a
riot online life was those days...
I too ran a lot of BBSs for a lot of years, and the one thing I
could never understand is, why did sysops ever care about such
things? I agree that ALL CAPS IS LIKE YELLING but so what?
It was the whole sysop power trip, I think. In my case, though, it was
about freaking out that one dude.
There's a need for someone to write a good solid history of 1980's BBS
culture. A lot of complicated socioligical (sp?) phenomena has never
really been well explored and recorded that I know of. I.e. : if you
let your message base be taken over by 'the dude who types in all caps'
people quit responding. Then there are no new messages for people to
see and respond to. After they call two times and there are no new
messages, they never call again. Boards could die OVERNIGHT that way,
and often did.
(this is turning into topic drift, to bring it back on-topic slightly
I'll mention that I first started BBSing on a printing DecWriter and an
acoustic coupler before I could afford a 'real' computer with serial
port and all that fancy stuff. Fancy verbose 'welcome screens' on BBSes
were distressing, eating up a few feet of paper each time I logged on.)