Early timesharing/BBS systems

From: Tom Jennings <tomj_at_wps.com>
Date: Tue Jul 20 16:21:55 2004

On Sun, 2004-07-18 at 03:49, Ethan Dicks wrote:
> On Sat, Jul 17, 2004 at 11:50:44AM -0400, Richard A. Cini wrote:
> > Anyway, this demo brings-up an interesting question. What kind of dial-up
> > systems existed in the 70's before consumer-oriented services like
> > CompuServe? I remember the DowJones and CompuServe sign-up packs at
> > RadioShack in maybe 1979

There was the ?telenet? service that linked many commercial computers. I
did not have a modem at the time (1975) but a homemade phone patch type
coupler, and played with a freq gen and got the remote modem to respond.
I was rather excited by that (bor-ing).

A few years later (1978?) I did dial into the local telenet modem, and
tried a few connect codes, got the login prompts of a bunch of
commercial machines, maade about a dozen weak attempts at login, and
gave up, never went back.

(You'd dial the number, listen for the answer tone, put your telephone
handset into the accoustic coupler. Wait a few seconds for the modem to
link up, then hit RETURN a few times to determine baud rate (110/300).
Then you got a prompt from the telenet system, something simple like a
colon or something:

:

THen you'd enter the connect command and the machine ID:

: C123,456

I think it was something like customer 123, machine 456.

You often had to hit RETURN again to get the computers attention then it
would present with whatever login prompt it used.

This is deep, dark, old, little-referenced memory, likely riddled with
errors and falsehoods. No warranty implied or expressed.


PS: I can't recall what I used for my very first modem program, but I
wrote my own simple one very soon, it grew in to one of Phoenix
Software's least popular programs, PTEL. I called it Telink until that
time, it was OK, did XMODEM, half-decent terminal stuff. No great shakes
there. It was written in BSD C, around 1977.
Received on Tue Jul 20 2004 - 16:21:55 BST