Technology Bytes

All right.

Before the Dub Dub Dub, we had the B B S. As in Bulletin Board System. As in, not yet the ‘Net as we now know it’.

As in dialing directly, modem to modem. As in eeeeeee-EEEEEEEE-static.

Which I’m probably butchering as badly as I’m going to butcher this last name:

Wachenschwanz. As in David E, not to be confused with David eeeeeee-EEEEEEEEE-static. OK – I’ve gotten it out of my system. I think.

David E. Wachenschwanz, who signed out of this world on Saturday, June 2nd, was actually the topic of an article that our own Dwight Silverman wrote all the way back in 1996. Without giving away all of this week’s BarretTime, do you have any recollection of that, Dwight?

David was the man who gave us The Atomic Cafe, a BBS that acted as a clearinghouse for other BBSs.

Now for those not quite in the know as to what a BBS is (or was), it’s a system designed to hold not packets but post cards and pieces of paper. Of course, that’s the cork version. The digital version started popping up in the late 70s, and actually did use packets in 128 byte denominations, at least if you were connecting to a bulletin board that used the ubiquitous XMODEM protocol. Developed in 1977, it’s still a protocol contained in Microsoft’s HyperTerm some 35 years later.

So, to get us back on track, we have to go back to the days when the number of concurrent sessions you could host was not a function of your server hardware and bandwidth, but rather directly tied to the number of working telephone lines and modems you had connected to the server running the BBS software. If a resource was busy, you would often have to come back late at night when no one else was dialed in.

Finding Bulletin Boards was a tough prospect as well, as there wasn’t a Google to track down and index everything for you. And that was where the Atomic Cafe came in. Apart from being a community in and of itself, the Atomic Cafe BBS was a clearinghouse for listings of other BBSs in existence at that time. Like the MatchMaker BBS, which eventually became Matchmaker.com, not match.com. (You can always tell who the pioneers are; they’re the ones with the arrows in their backs.) Each bulletin board was usually ran by a single dedicated system operator on any possible combination of hardware and software. The Atomic Cafe spent a number of years on TBBS, which stood for The Bread Board System, a highly configurable BBS server software package that ran on the TRS-80 line of personal computers. This software package was published by eSoft, who later went on to create the IPAD. Gasp! What? IPAD as in Internet Protocol Adapter, a piece of software that brought dial-in BBSs into the Internet Protocol age. You could now telnet into a BBS!

This BBS break-through was also what brought about the BBS downfall. With companies like NeoSoft, MCI and AT&T getting into the Internet game, the need for discrete dial-in bulletin board systems was gone. That’s right: Jay Lee killed your bulletin board. Actually, NeoSoft started life as the Sugarland FIDO in 1986.

Some other interesting BBS names of that time:

The Mail Box in Abeline. 2400 baud.

Second Sanctum in Dallas.

Poseidon in El Paso.

ETC’s Mednet in San Antonio.

In Houston we had Stormy Weather, Chameleon, Space City BBS, Bayou Beastie and Hobbit’s Hideaway.

So, if you’ve ever found yourself wasting precious minutes perusing the collateral damage of a flame war, or if you’ve had the extreme misfortune of taking place in one, you have the early BBS’ers to thank.

And a big thanks to George T for reminding us of this early era of digital communities!

That’s it for your eeeeeeeee-EEEEEEEEEEE-static and that’s that for BarretTime.

Back to full strength now that phliKtid is back from Russia.

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photo by Groovehouse

Technology Bytes Podcast For June 13, 2012 [ 1:59:57 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Allright.

Summer is here, and with it may come the urge to stay indoors, out of the Houston heat and humidity. Given the disproportionate number of hot days we have here in Texas, we also have the opportunity to get more done. Whereas someone in our California listening area may only write some prose or a poem while ducking the dog days of summer, a Texan could knock out an entire novel before the heat index dips back beneath the red.

Hey – does anyone actually *know* what the difference is between poetry and prose? We’ll get to that in a minute, but for now know that once you’ve done the easy bit of authoring a book, John Glaver can get you through the rough stuff – getting it published electronically.

John Gaver is giving a talk on exactly that this Saturday at the Houston Area Apple Users Group monthly meeting. General meetings start at nine in the morning with the main presentation taking place at eleven, allowing you to leave the land of the red street signs slowly and cautiously by 1:00 PM. The meeting takes place at the Bellaire Civic Center at 7008 South Rice Avenue, in Bellaire, Texas. This is a destination you may want to return to, as the summer swap meet is coming up in July, and our own Dwight Silverman plans to talk rumors and reality when it comes to the new iPad in August. Hit www.haaug.org for details, directions, and the summer line-up of meetings and presentations.

Of course, you wouldn’t want to lose your ability to surf the net while stuck indoors, which is an actual concern if you happen to be harboring the DNSChanger Malware that has found its way onto millions of workstations around the world. DNS or the Domain Name System is a distributed naming system for computers on the internet. DNS servers take requests from clients in the form of domain names and then hands out the appropriate IP address for that domain. This saves you from having to remember that 173.193.136.178 is the address for the Geek Radio site. It also makes it possible to stack multiple domain names on a single IP address, making things such as virtual name based hosting possible on web servers. Now, all of this would be hunky dory if some shady cracker slash criminal types hadn’t created a piece of malware that redirects your computers DNS requests away from legitimate DNS servers and instead to DNS servers that they control. So what were they after? Bank account info? Your grandmother’s recipe for chocolate chip cookies? Nope. Apparently, advertising is where the money’s at. And to a lesser extent, iTunes tracks. In Operation Ghost Click, the FBI eventually caught the ring of six Estonians responsible and then determined that simply taking down the servers would rob millions of people of access to any website whose IP address they didn’t have memorized. So on March 12 of this year, they replaced the compromised servers with clean servers that are scheduled to go offline Monday, July 9th. What does this mean to you? If you’ve been infected with the DNSChanger malware – and it’s been in the wild since 2007 – you probably don’t know it, especially now that the FBI is controlling your browsing experience.

I’ll have a link up to the FBI page as well as a link that will tell you whether or not you’re connecting to the DNS servers in question by the end of the show.

But for now, let’s revisit that prose and poetry problem. Brendan Behan, an Irish drinker with a writing problem, reportedly summed it up with the following rhyme:

There was a young fellah named Rollocks
Who worked for Ferrier Pollocks
As he walked down the strand
with his girl by the hand
the tide came up to his knees.

Now that’s prose. If the tide had been in, it would have been poetry.

That’s it for your Irish Education and that’s that for BarretTime.

This week we’re back to regular programming as the station fundraiser has come to an end. Over $238,000.00 was raised over 3 weeks. Thanks to all the Technology Bytes listeners who did their part and helped us to make our portion of the station goal.

This week phliKtid is out of the studio on vacation so we had Groovehouse manning both the control board and the phones. Good job , Groovehouse!

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