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Folks who take instant communication for
granted these days may be surprised to learn that Calhoun
Countians had an electronic networking long before the internet.
If you have a really old computer, or a really new
one, chances are that you have a little program on there called
HyperTerminal, and chances are also good that you don’t have a
clue about what it does.
HyperTerminal is a communications program that is used
to let you hook up to directly to another computer over your
modem. Way back in the days before the Internet, everyone used
more souped up versions of HyperTerminal to connect to mostly
local computer Bulletin Boards (BBS). In effect, your computer
would make a call to the other computer, make a connection, and
allow you to leave and post messages and upload and download files
much like you do today on the Internet.
In 1985 there were two operating boards in our local
calling area. One was owned by Kemp’s and was
housed on a MAC, and the other was one of the first ever in the
state owned by Tom Bowerman on a PC.
Unlike the net, which is instantly global, and
somewhat overwhelming and impersonal, the bulletin boards of
Calhoun County were like old friends. You knew that when your
message left your machine it would go to theirs, and there it
would stay.
The heyday of BBS’s in Calhoun County and around the
country was from the early 80’s to the early 90’s. Toward the end,
two interesting things happened to extend their usefulness. One
internet like service was called PCPursuit, operated by General
Electric. They would establish banks of modems in larger towns
around the nation so that someone in Oxford, for example, could
make a local modem call to the bank in Anniston which would allow
the user to then connect to the bank in Chicago. Then, from there,
the user could make calls to the boards there. It was quite
ingenious and expensive. It never really caught on, but was an eye
opener to what was possible.
Then in the late 80’s local BBS’s started banding
together in global networks. You could send a message to someone
in England on a local BBS in Anniston, and magically, about four
in the morning, it would be sent down the phone line and in a
couple of days it would make it to the recipient. Compared to the
Internet it was slow and dorky, but it worked. The Internet was
coming on so quickly, though, that the BBS networks were history
nearly as quickly as they were perfected, and that was less than 5
years. |
Today with broadband, we don’t give a
second thought of moving megabytes of material per minute. In 1985
though, you could do about 150 bytes per second, theoretically. In
practice, a modem could just keep up with a fast typist. Speed was
measured in baud, and in 1985 300 baud was the standard. 300 gave
way to 1200, then 2400, finally ending with a blazing super fast
9600 baud super modem. There was a trick to tie two of these
together to realize 18,200 but it didn’t last long. Nowadays
instead of 9600 characters per second, your modem is theoretically
capable of 56,000 and cable and DSL modems put your computer into
warp drive.
In the middle 90’s BBS’s gave way to local ISP or
Internet Service Providers. One local pioneer was Internettport.
Eventually local mom and pop dispensers were gobbled up by larger
concerns.
AOL began life as a Commodore computer BBS. Did you
know that? In the early days here there were 3 types of computers,
MACS, PC’s, and Commodores. At the zenith, there were about 8 or
10 BBS’s in our area sitting on one of these kinds of computers.
One of the most popular was the Mailbag BBS which used a teensy
little Commodore 64 running at 1 megahertz with 32,000 bytes of
memory and 5 floppy drives each capable of storing a whopping
320,000 bytes of information. Contrast that with modern home
computers with a half billion bytes of memory running at multi
gigahertz speed with 120 gigabyte hard drives. Giga, by the way
means billion. Quite a difference!
These days, we think nothing of striking up an instant
chat with someone a half a world away on the internet. In the BBS
days, you could do a local form of chat with the owner of the BBS,
but otherwise, you were limited to leaving messages. One nice
thing that was available then which isn’t these days, however,
were the local computer clubs. There was a club for each of the
three machines, MAC, PC, and Commodore, and there was a tremendous
loyalty to one’s machine. Eventually, Commodore went under, Apple
(There wasn’t a MAC club) went to the MAC, and the PC guys were
just out there by themselves. At this time everyone sort of
combined into one super group with the strange acronym of OCCUG,
or Occasional Calhoun County User Group.
It was not uncommon at a
club meeting to find PC users side by side with a Commodore user
playing games while the BBQ was cooking outside. The point is that
in the modern era, while we have instant access to the world, we
rarely know anyone on our street who also has a computer. Computer
use these days is much more impersonal.
So, the next time you strike up a connection to the
internet, it might be good to remember those all but forgotten
days here locally when it was one man and one computer talking to
one man with one computer on the other end. It makes one wonder
why we just didn’t pick up the phone. (It wouldn’t have been
nearly as much fun. That’s why!)
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