BBS software for the PDP 11

[Adrian Stoness]

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:
>>
>>> 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 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
>
>> 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...
>>
>>
>>
>>
>