[UFO Chicago] random rant

[Rob Latham]

On Wed, Jun 05, 2002 at 07:21:12AM -0500, Ryan wrote:

> Did anyone here do the BBS thing? 

modems came to my house as a kid just as BBSes were dying off ( as in
your local BBS was used for warez and LORD and that's about it :> )

> despite how much "faster & bigger" the 
> internet may be, I still think it sucks in terms of community, compared to 
> the old days. 

usenet newsgroups seem to be at least vaugely comparable, but maybe
that's because few people both use usenet and care about the same
obscure(?  are comp.mail.mutt and comp.editors really obscure?) topics
i care about.  Here again, old timers say how nice it was in the old
days, before the september that never ended....

> I live in the suburbs, so I don't expect to log into my 
> neighbor's box, but you guys are all in the city (I take it) - why isn't 
> there some huge, neo-bbs hobbyist thing going on, where everyone is 
> interacting with everyone else, on a LOCAL level? 

probably because only three or four UFOers live close enough to each
other to set up an 802.11b (recent discussions of power levels and
signal degradation rates to the contrary :> )

> I've never met a BBS'er who didn't miss the old days. We must'a been doing 
> something right..

I've never met /any/ 'old timer' ( old not necesarily referring to
age) who didn't miss the old days :>  Heck, even the guys around here
who used to use 300 baud accoustic couplers talk about those days with
nostagia: "why, we had modems you could actually take apart and
understand.  dammit, we built our *own* modems, and we liked it that
way"

==rob

-- 
Rob Latham                                        Woodridge, IL USA
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