Having used DOS for the first time only in the late 90s, my Mac-only world made me pretty much miss out this era of "pseudo-Internets", early forms of networking over phone lines in closed networks before people use this "network of network" we're now accustomed to.
This article about Minitel made me remember how much, as a kid reading French magazines, how those strange Minitel services felt magical. Essentially subsidized by the French government, the terminals, including the modem, were offered for free, while France Telecom would get monopoly on hosting Minitel number destinations. The text-only interface looked great in the 80s, but beyond that they became some odd kind of cultural artifact.
BBS, on the other hand, was the American-free-market equivalent. You pay for your own computer and modem, and if you know the right phone numbers you can access some free bultin board services, while others required paid accounts or used non-free commercial numbers. These were used easily until the early 2000s, and also allowed file transfers.
On the Macintosh end, the only equivalent that I've experienced in the "graphical world" was Hotline, an odd little client or server software that would allow within a single IP connection chat, bultin boards, and of couse file transfers. The difference though is that this was Internet-based, but somehow retained that "feel" of BBS.
There was a strange effect of community and empowerment in those times when people would take the effort of hosting their own network servers. True, it was often used for piracy, yet even then the whole economics behind controlling access to your "wares" could make anybody with a decent modem speed (or faster Internet connection) a "master of your own domain". Also, each little BBS or Hotline server would act as its own little "darknet", secretive and hidden from the other networks.
But there's also the effect of having most communication done in those darknets rather than in the open that made the whole thing more "edgy". You had to know a guy that knows the dude that can give you the phone number and an account in a place where you can get "hot wares". Now the best equivalent is maybe Freenet, I2P or private torrents. It's still doesn't feel exactly the same, with that public over-sharing and constant spam noise that became the whole Internet.
Published on June 29, 2012 at 21:26 EDT
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