HotGas has an article about the political re-alignment that is currently taking place. As usual the comments are where all the good discussion is going on.
But most interesting is a Breitbart post that explains one of the reasons for the realignment. And it is not a political reason. It is a technical one.
A lot of that worked in the old days when you could convince the gatekeepers that, hey, we’re the right guys, we’re doing the right things, give us a pass. Nowadays, man, it’s, as you know, it’s a cowboy mentality with communications, and they’re being burned by 300 million reporters, who are looking at things differently.
I did the I/O Board for the world’s first BBS. It is gratifying to see how that has evolved.
I must add that it is really fun being one of the cowboys. My dreams when I was a five year old are realized (I was a two gun cowboy in those days – cap guns – bang, bang), in a way I could never have imagined.
Comments
4 responses to “The Environment Has Changed”
CBBS? I’m impressed.
I miss the old BBS system in some ways. Forums just aren’t the same.
PS – I lived on Fidonet for years. Packets ruled, back then.
Kathy,
I worked with Randy and Ward, helping them bring up the I/O board. The Intel serial chip (the 8251) had some problems. Because of those problems it had an early retirement.
To get the 8251 in a known state you had to do a hardware reset on it. We fixed that with a line from the parallel port chip (8255). Cuts and jumprers.
BTW I had an 8253 (counter timer) on the board to provide a clock to the UART. I think the maximum baud rate was 9,600 or 19,200 using the system clock.
For faster speeds you needed an external clock of the right frequency. But that would be some years away from the initial introduction.
Heh – ok. I’m even more impressed.