Rich’s Ramblings January 2004

OK, here we are in a Brand New Year and it’s time to reminisce!

Bulletin Board Systems (BBS)

I have been involved in CPCUG (Capital PC User Group, Inc.) and BBS communications since 1981 and I am continually amazed at the speed of data transfer. I used to be able to read a screen of data as it came over the modem. Not any more – with 1.2 MB data transfers I get more data faster than I can absorb it.

Thinking about the last 20+ years of communications brings back some interesting and exciting memories of the days of 300bps modems and the emergence of (BBS) Bulletin Board Systems where people auto dialed my on-line BBS at 10 second intervals. For almost 10 years the line at (301) 949-8848 was busy over 99% of the time and became one of the leading BBS among the over 300 located in the DC Metro area.

I had a great system for running a BBS. It started out with four whopping 320KB 5¼" floppy drives on-line running under Microsoft Interpreted Basic using a souped-up 8088 chip with 128 KB of main memory. I had to limit people to one hour online per day as there were people from around the world dialing into it. Gene Plantz in Chicago, Wes Merchant, and I were about the only games in town outside of a few original BBSs running on a variant of UNIX.

Help for hardware or software problems on your new (1982 vintage) IBM PC was pretty well non-existent, the only computer places in the DC/MD area that knew anything about PC’s were the IBM product store in downtown DC and Computerland on Rockville Pike, both long gone now. So most people who had problems gravitated to BBS’s just like we now browse the World Wide Web for help. Of course User Groups such as CPCUG were an off shoot of this lack of help, which has served many of us well over the years.

Gene Plantz and I were among the first running a BBS on IBM hardware. Wes Merchant ran the CPCUG BBS on a Radio Shack computer. It ran quite well and served our fledgling group well for the first few years. Although DOS 1.1 and 2.0 did not have that many bugs so they did not require daily upgrades and the security risks were minimal, there were just too many people who wanted the latest fixes and utilities for their computers. My system was called the Software Exchange, was very popular for its broad listings of utilities and “shareware”. Wes Merchants BBS was replaced by the Members Information eXchange (MIX) started by Roger Fajman who hosted it at NIH.

Don Withrow’s HostComm was a popular Host program but I ended up writing my own BBS software which I called PC-HOST, and used for over 10 years. Tom Mack got involved in the communications area with the Remote Bulletin Board System or RBBS-PC (distributed free). IBM’s asynchronous communications program was the original interpreted BASIC communications program we all used for dialing into BBS’s and communicating with one-another. Andrew Fluegelman of PC-Magazine ( and PC-World) fame started writing PC-TALK, and coined the phrase “Freeware.” I found a copy of PC-TALK on Gene Plantz’s system in Chicago and then was in almost daily communication with Andrew in the improvement of PC-TALK. I spent many on-line hours helping him implement file transfer protocols.

We used the Xmodem public domain routines from Ward Christensen’s original protocol which gave us the ability to transfer binary files. Otherwise all the compiled and binary files had to first be converted with a basic language program to ASCII printable (and easily transferable) files for transfer. (Remember that 300bps modems had a top speed of 30 characters per second.)

The first PC communications programs effectively threw the bits out the communications port and hoped that you were able to re-assemble them on the other end – a real game of chance. Mostly the basic source code and/or plain text files were sent. Sending compiled programs was a problem as some of the lower ASCII valued characters would jam up the data stream. Like ASCII 12 which is a clear screen or page eject. Lots of fun in those days.

Using the X-Modem protocol, the files to be transferred were broken up into small groups for transmission. A checksum was added to the end of each block or packet of data so that the receiving program could verify the data and ask for a re-transmission if any bits were garbled or missed. This really improved the reliability of sending binary files. Although if your transmission broke off in mid-stream, you had to start all over, but it was a huge improvement over the ASCII file transfer routines. Y-Modem and Z-Modem are offshoots and improvements to the X-Modem file transfer protocol. They kept track of the packets and did not require an acknowledgment of each packet before the next one was sent. It would ask for re-transmissions if there was an error in a packet of data. Many of the modern day communications programs use either the Y-Modem or Z-Modem file transfer protocol. Z-Modem was developed by a bearded wonder named Chuck Forsberg who lived on a houseboat in Oregon. Z-Modem was the ultimate in reliable protocols and most all BBSs ended up using this as their primary file transfer protocol. Z-Modem is still used in many of the modern day communications programs to insure reliable transfers.

Eudora E-Mail

I have used Eudora as my e-mail program ever since the very early days. The new version, 6.01 is the best dang E-Mail package that I could recommend. The nice thing they added in the paid version (they have free versions with advertisements and banners) is the spam filter that puts 95% of the spam into the trash. Before you empty the trash, You get to take a look to see if any of the message should not be trashed. Eudora 6 checks my address book and people who are listed are never put in the trash. A couple of the nice features that I like about Eudora are: NO PREVIEW pane and NO DOWNLOADING of HTML (HyperText Markup Language) graphics among many others I have about six e-mail addresses and Eudora retrieves them flawlessly. Great program all-in-all. Check it out at HTTP://WWW.EUDORA.COM . Best $49.95 I ever spent. I do not have any financial interest in them; I believe they have a great product.

Rich Schinnell can be reached at schinnel@cpcug.org or his web page at HTTP://WWW.SCHINNELL.ORG . As a last resort: if you are web challenged, you can reach him by voice at (301) 949-9292 during reasonable hours.