A purge of stuff at home uncovers some history.
December 2008 is the month that I gave up my disks and manuals of DOS Bibliographic software. It was great software at the time, and very expensive as well. Good bibliographic software packages were expensive but I held on to them because the DOS based and early Windows programs were better than what followed in Win95/98 versions.
Even though I could and have run these programs on a Linux based computer, I knew it was time to move on. The Firefox add-on called Zotero is an excellent tool for creating bibliographies. JabRef, another bibliographic program, can import the files created with Zotero using the Bibtex format. Both Zotero and Jabref are free of course, easing the pain of tossing out the DOS software.
It was a purge session at home that prompted the tossing out of the old DOS stuff. During this process I found some pages from an old BBS Manual that I was saving. These pages are interesting keepsakes and despite the purge, I still have them because they mark another more significant passage than my purge of the DOS stuff.
These pages are from an upgrade that allowed the Galacticomm Major BBS to be a node on the Internet. That was hot stuff in those DOS days of blazingly fast 14,400 baud modems. The saved pages from the manual mentioned that the software included a DOS based WEB server and described how to write this new fangled thing called a webpage.
It did not take me very long to realise that this was the way to go and shortly thereafter, all of my content from the BBS was in HTML format. Within a month, there was no activity on the BBS, and more activity than I ever had before was on the website. December 1994 to February 1995 was when this shift happened, marking the time in history when the WWW started to displace local BBS systems.
Some of the BBS systems were successful at becoming ISP's. Those were the systems that did run on the Galacticomm Major BBS as the transition was easier to make. The other popular BBS system at the time was PCBoard but there was something about PCB's code that made it difficult to place on the web. One of the largest PCB BBS systems in Canada was Canada Remote Systems who tried to create their own interface to the WWW ala America On-line. High development costs along with internal problems led to their demise. It would have been for naught anyway as the cable modem killed off many of the dial-up ISPs. (Was that 1996?).
Galacticomm is still in business with a product called WorldGroup.
So there you have it, if you ever wondered when did the world change, it was in the last half of 1994 and the first half of 1995. At least by my account.
Reference:
Canada Remote Systems http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canada_Remote_Systems
Galacticomm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Major_BBS
Zotero http://www.zotero.org/
JabRef http://jabref.sourceforge.net/
Thanks for the Memories John
AAAAAAAAhhhh... the days of the BBS. I remember them well.
I have a copy of Hyper ACCESS still around here somewhere still today. That was my favorite modem/BBS application. I used it in DOS and later Windows. But in the Days of CP/M I used M-Term (which was a local user group built program).
I remember tapping into news papers, and various news sites for information, and good ol' FidoNET for the really cool downloads. Things were dirt slow (from hopping around screens of information to downloading a file), and learned patience back in those days.
We have advanced so much since then, and we are better for it, so I think. However there is nothing like the good ol' days where things were just a bit simpler.
Thanks for the article John!
Thanks for the article John! Major BBS, wow, that stuff always seemed expensive (not quite as bad as TBBS). I ran a Renegade BBS briefly, switching and sticking with Synchronet for many years (though I tested PCBoard a few times). My BBS' claim to fame was 187 WORKING BBS doors though I only had 2MB of RAM so if someone called in on the second line Desqview would boot the person on the first line off.
I had an account on CRS. I think part of their success was the massive message bases. If you were a member of Fidonet's file network (as many Fidonet BBSs were, you could get a lot of the cool new stuff being sent to boards like CRS). It's a shame they went the way of the dodo.
I like Zotero
Hi John,
Zotero is great!
I use is occasionally, but find it very useful.