1 00:00:00,000 --> 00:00:13,270 *34C3 preroll music* 2 00:00:13,270 --> 00:00:17,939 Herald: Back in time, back to the 1990's where the internet actually made sounds, 3 00:00:17,939 --> 00:00:22,922 and you could annoy the whole family while blocking the phone line. He was actually 4 00:00:22,922 --> 00:00:28,230 heavily involved in these early days of the internet. He operated and participated 5 00:00:28,230 --> 00:00:33,713 in these early structures, namely Bulletin Board Systems and the UseNet. And he now 6 00:00:33,713 --> 00:00:38,965 takes us back in time, to tell us all about the time when the internet made 7 00:00:38,965 --> 00:00:40,951 sounds. Thank you very much LaForge. 8 00:00:40,951 --> 00:00:47,985 *applause* 9 00:00:47,985 --> 00:00:53,437 LaForge: Thank you very much for the introduction.This is a quite unusual 10 00:00:53,437 --> 00:01:01,405 setting for me. Typically I give talks about deeply technical topics. Protocoll 11 00:01:01,405 --> 00:01:06,739 level details and telecom specs and so on. Now the first time I speak in the Art and 12 00:01:06,739 --> 00:01:11,484 Culture track. That is definitely something new for me. So, why am I here 13 00:01:11,484 --> 00:01:17,559 and why am I talking about this topic. First of all, I was involved to some 14 00:01:17,559 --> 00:01:25,343 extent yes, but for sure I was not somebody who had any significant role in 15 00:01:25,343 --> 00:01:31,524 that universe. Neither in the BBS scene or in the early internet days. I was just 16 00:01:31,524 --> 00:01:38,360 basically a youngster, a teenager, who had fun playing with technology and was 17 00:01:38,360 --> 00:01:43,309 helping others to communicate using technology. There are many more people who 18 00:01:43,309 --> 00:01:47,428 have, who are much more qualified than me to talk about that subject but I ... and 19 00:01:47,428 --> 00:01:51,920 that's the reason why I'm here and why I submitted this talk is, you don't really 20 00:01:51,920 --> 00:01:56,346 see many people speaking about these days or about those topics anymore. And even if 21 00:01:56,346 --> 00:02:00,490 you want to research it, I think there's like one or two books in German on that 22 00:02:00,490 --> 00:02:07,559 subject, they're very hard to get and also not very complete. So, I think we have to 23 00:02:07,559 --> 00:02:15,490 sort of document the history of it for those people, who have not been around at 24 00:02:15,490 --> 00:02:19,598 the time. So, this talk will not have as many acronyms as you are used to from 25 00:02:19,598 --> 00:02:24,720 talks that I usually give. Still you have typos in the slides, as you can see in the 26 00:02:24,720 --> 00:02:28,450 second line already, so that didn't change. I didn't invent any of the 27 00:02:28,450 --> 00:02:32,279 technologies covered here. I didn't write any of the software covered. I was just a 28 00:02:32,279 --> 00:02:40,390 user and operator or sysadmin. And that's the world I grew up in from 11 onwards. 29 00:02:40,390 --> 00:02:46,194 As I said many people lack that history and to start with that, maybe a quick poll in 30 00:02:46,194 --> 00:02:51,718 the audience. Who has ever dialed into a BBS using a modem? Raise your hands. Okay. 31 00:02:51,718 --> 00:02:58,890 So, I'm preaching to the converted. Okay, maybe I should invite all of you up to the 32 00:02:58,890 --> 00:03:05,800 stage and we should make a discussion- round instead. Anyway. So, circuit switch 33 00:03:05,800 --> 00:03:10,900 telephony. Well, this is the telephony from 1876 until about 1988 with 34 00:03:10,900 --> 00:03:15,416 analog voice circuits over copper wires and dial-up connections between A and B. 35 00:03:15,416 --> 00:03:19,185 I guess everybody still remembers these. Even if you're young, you should have seen 36 00:03:19,185 --> 00:03:26,780 a classic telephone, I think. And yeah, you have analog amplifiers possibly in the 37 00:03:26,780 --> 00:03:31,404 path, but actually the copper wires are physically switched at telephone 38 00:03:31,404 --> 00:03:36,486 exchanges. So, this structure looks a bit like this: We have a telephone at one end, 39 00:03:36,486 --> 00:03:41,133 we have a telephone at another end, and we have telephone exchanges or switches, 40 00:03:41,133 --> 00:03:45,377 which actually switch the circuit - hence the term circuit switched telephony - 41 00:03:45,377 --> 00:03:52,260 between A and B. So, you have a copper wire from your phone to the office, the 42 00:03:52,260 --> 00:03:56,747 exchange, to which you are connected and then that exchange again has copper wires 43 00:03:56,747 --> 00:04:02,735 to other exchanges and so on. And based on the phone number you dial the call is 44 00:04:02,735 --> 00:04:08,316 switched to the destination subscriber. That's sort of the foundation in terms of 45 00:04:08,316 --> 00:04:13,914 technology that we're using here. Also something to document for the 46 00:04:13,914 --> 00:04:19,000 international audience in Germany at that time even local calls were metered and 47 00:04:19,000 --> 00:04:24,942 charged by the minute, flat rates didn't exist and we had multiple zones so there's 48 00:04:24,942 --> 00:04:29,219 not just local calls and long-distance calls but different depending on your 49 00:04:29,219 --> 00:04:34,780 distance so like up to 50 kilometers or more than 50 kilometers and so on. And 50 00:04:34,780 --> 00:04:39,400 given on that and the steep pricing and not so many people could afford long- 51 00:04:39,400 --> 00:04:45,308 distance BBSing at least not for a long time. All of this started with a device 52 00:04:45,308 --> 00:04:51,156 called the acoustic coupler. It's actually also how I started even though I'm young 53 00:04:51,156 --> 00:04:57,946 and I only started in I think about 90 or 91. At 10 or 11 years of age you don't 54 00:04:57,946 --> 00:05:01,490 have the latest and greatest in technology. I got a used second hand or 55 00:05:01,490 --> 00:05:07,331 third hand Olivetti acoustic coupler from my uncle it had even a battery it could be 56 00:05:07,331 --> 00:05:12,090 operated mobile it had a battery compartment with eight Mignon (AA) cells. 57 00:05:12,090 --> 00:05:15,840 Actually I still own it and I still own related telephone I just thought: yeah 58 00:05:15,840 --> 00:05:21,311 don't have to bring it here. But it still exists. So anyway, here you have to 59 00:05:21,311 --> 00:05:25,616 dial using your normal phone. You dial the digits of the phone number and once the 60 00:05:25,616 --> 00:05:30,859 other side picks up the phone and they put their receiver onto the acoustic coupler 61 00:05:30,859 --> 00:05:35,328 and you put your receiver onto the acoustic coupler, then data can be 62 00:05:35,328 --> 00:05:40,010 transmitted over the telephone line as said with manual, dial manual pickup and 63 00:05:40,010 --> 00:05:49,416 rather extremely low speed. This all looks like this and the next step in the logical 64 00:05:49,416 --> 00:05:55,402 progression then was modems, which is sort of you can think of an automatized method of acoustic 65 00:05:55,402 --> 00:06:01,109 couplers, where you don't have an air gap anymore. So in the acoustic coupler you 66 00:06:01,109 --> 00:06:05,541 literally have a couple of centimeters of air between the speaker and the microphone 67 00:06:05,541 --> 00:06:10,016 in the receiver of your phone, versus the acoustic coupler. So with the modem 68 00:06:10,016 --> 00:06:16,411 there's a direct connection and also you have automatic facilities to dial the 69 00:06:16,411 --> 00:06:20,282 telephone number and to answer the line and so on. So you don't need a manual 70 00:06:20,282 --> 00:06:26,540 operator anymore to pick up a phone or dial numbers. And this thing gets 71 00:06:26,540 --> 00:06:31,251 transmitted over the telephone line. This is a stack of various different 72 00:06:31,251 --> 00:06:35,804 modems – we will see some others here, some of you will remember the brands or 73 00:06:35,804 --> 00:06:41,672 the shapes or even the specific models of those modems. But that's too much level of 74 00:06:41,672 --> 00:06:50,199 detail for the moment. So let's look a bit at the speed, or lack of speed, that was 75 00:06:50,199 --> 00:06:57,999 available. It started with 300 bps. I actually used 300 bps a couple of times. 76 00:06:57,999 --> 00:07:05,405 In fact, in like around 1990 of course it was extremely slow but still it was what I 77 00:07:05,405 --> 00:07:12,464 could start with at the time. Then the 1200 bps; so this is still rather slow and 78 00:07:12,464 --> 00:07:16,366 you can slowly read and follow the text as it's being printed. Unfortunately 79 00:07:16,366 --> 00:07:20,930 I don't have an animation or something like that. I'm not such a multimedia savvy 80 00:07:20,930 --> 00:07:27,411 guy. So yes, then the speeds progressed, you see the years in which they were 81 00:07:27,411 --> 00:07:34,769 created. The lines with the asterisk mark years that I found some secondary sources 82 00:07:34,769 --> 00:07:38,349 that originally it had been specified then. But actually the oldest spec 83 00:07:38,349 --> 00:07:42,464 document for all these earlier ones was from 1988. So if you go to the ITU 84 00:07:42,464 --> 00:07:46,676 website, the earliest documents you can find are from 1988 and none of those 85 00:07:46,676 --> 00:07:50,163 earlier documents could – at least on the internet – be found anywhere. Maybe you 86 00:07:50,163 --> 00:07:55,449 can go to a library or something like that. Yeah so speeds progressed, different 87 00:07:55,449 --> 00:08:00,140 modulation schemes were introduced to squeeze ever more bits into these 88 00:08:00,140 --> 00:08:07,899 3 kilohertz analog circuit over the telephone line. And every couple of years 89 00:08:07,899 --> 00:08:14,460 a new, especially in the 90s, if you follow this 91 14.400 bps, 93 19.200 90 00:08:14,460 --> 00:08:21,201 to 1994 28.000 bits per second. And there were of course also proprietary protocols, 91 00:08:21,201 --> 00:08:26,861 then you had to have the same manufacturer of modem that the other side whom you're 92 00:08:26,861 --> 00:08:32,134 calling and so on, but these are the official standardized protocols and speeds 93 00:08:32,134 --> 00:08:38,268 that were used. Which brings us... so okay we have a telephone system; we can dial 94 00:08:38,268 --> 00:08:43,287 numbers; we have a modem that can dial numbers; we have modems that can send bits 95 00:08:43,287 --> 00:08:50,483 in exceptionally fast speed. What do we do with this? And this brings us to be BBSs: 96 00:08:50,483 --> 00:08:55,445 where could you actually dial, and what could you do there? So what's the BBS? 97 00:08:55,445 --> 00:09:01,257 Fundamentally, it's some computer – any hardware, any operating system, any 98 00:09:01,257 --> 00:09:06,570 software. Some computer that accepts incoming calls attached to a modem and 99 00:09:06,570 --> 00:09:11,334 offers some kind of interactive service to the people who dial into that BBS. And if 100 00:09:11,334 --> 00:09:16,165 you wanted to operate a BBS, you had to have a separate dedicated computer for 101 00:09:16,165 --> 00:09:21,369 that. Because, at the time, most of the BBS software – and most of the software 102 00:09:21,369 --> 00:09:25,998 that people used in general – predated multitasking operating systems. So when 103 00:09:25,998 --> 00:09:30,209 you ran the BBS, the computer was busy running the BBS; you couldn't do anything 104 00:09:30,209 --> 00:09:35,659 else at the same time. So you had to invest quite a bit into a separate second 105 00:09:35,659 --> 00:09:40,850 computer, or third or fourth, to actually operate that BBS. You had to have a 106 00:09:40,850 --> 00:09:45,505 separate telephone line. Because if you operate the BBS into which people dial 107 00:09:45,505 --> 00:09:49,997 into, of course any time of the day or night people will dial in there, so you 108 00:09:49,997 --> 00:09:53,304 cannot use your normal phone line that you use to make phone calls but you had to 109 00:09:53,304 --> 00:09:58,654 have a separate dedicated phone line. And of course the system had to run more or 110 00:09:58,654 --> 00:10:03,772 less 24/7 so people could dial in and reach it. Luckily, on the user side there 111 00:10:03,772 --> 00:10:10,649 was not so many requirements in terms of technology that you needed. Your computer 112 00:10:10,649 --> 00:10:15,734 of course you only power when you use it, and you can share the regular phone line – 113 00:10:15,734 --> 00:10:20,186 with the side effect, as in the introduction has been mentioned, that your 114 00:10:20,186 --> 00:10:26,511 family might have gone angry if you occupied it too long – but otherwise no 115 00:10:26,511 --> 00:10:31,754 additional infrastructure other than a modem required. Now you dial into the BBS 116 00:10:31,754 --> 00:10:39,249 – what kind of content do you get? What do you do in that BBS? And the name BBS in 117 00:10:39,249 --> 00:10:45,560 English is a Bulletin Board Service, that's actually the acronym expansion. So 118 00:10:45,560 --> 00:10:49,869 there were Bulletin Boards, message boards where you could exchange messages and 119 00:10:49,869 --> 00:10:55,352 texts with other people, other users of that BBS or the so-called sysop, the 120 00:10:55,352 --> 00:11:01,007 system operator, the guy running that BBS. You could also chat with the system 121 00:11:01,007 --> 00:11:07,106 operator, which, well, didn't exist before – the ability to chat with somebody else 122 00:11:07,106 --> 00:11:14,174 remotely over a text-based terminal. There were also multi-user games, text-based, as 123 00:11:14,174 --> 00:11:19,021 well as so called file areas where you could download files. And downloading 124 00:11:19,021 --> 00:11:26,053 files, given the speeds back then and so on and so on, of course it was primarily 125 00:11:26,053 --> 00:11:31,375 text documents or small programs or something like that. Mp3 didn't exist of 126 00:11:31,375 --> 00:11:37,200 course, at least until 95 or whenever it came out, so maybe some mod files for your 127 00:11:37,200 --> 00:11:42,386 module tracker, something like that. And of course, last but not least, ASCII and 128 00:11:42,386 --> 00:11:48,237 ANSI artwork, which basically is an entire subculture and scene and community in 129 00:11:48,237 --> 00:11:56,618 itself, creating artworks and drawings using the character set that was used by 130 00:11:56,618 --> 00:12:04,386 ANSI.sys, which was the DOS, you could say display driver, in quotes, in a certain 131 00:12:04,386 --> 00:12:09,796 character set and you could draw graphics like this. We will see some more. And 132 00:12:09,796 --> 00:12:15,722 people were putting a lot of effort into this, and sort of competing who could who 133 00:12:15,722 --> 00:12:21,589 could make the best representation or the most expressive artwork given the limited 134 00:12:21,589 --> 00:12:29,521 resolution and the limited characters and colors available in this domain. So, what 135 00:12:29,521 --> 00:12:33,825 kind of software did one use? Or what kind of technology was used? Well, we already 136 00:12:33,825 --> 00:12:39,573 had the computer and modem, you needed some software. So on the BBS side, BBS 137 00:12:39,573 --> 00:12:46,024 software, there's an unlimited number of different BBS software programmes, and 138 00:12:46,024 --> 00:12:50,663 extensions, and modifications thereof, a lot of them are freeware or shareware. 139 00:12:50,663 --> 00:12:55,785 Some of them are public domain, some actual free software, some are 140 00:12:55,785 --> 00:13:00,741 proprietary. For any operating system, for any computer architecture, people were 141 00:13:00,741 --> 00:13:09,143 writing BBS software. Whether you had an Amiga or Atari or you had Apple or DOS PCs 142 00:13:09,143 --> 00:13:16,883 or you name it, software was written, by hobbyists primarily. One concept that you 143 00:13:16,883 --> 00:13:21,861 will find in BBSs is the concept of so- called doors. You can think of it as 144 00:13:21,861 --> 00:13:27,713 similar to CGIs in web. So basically, the BBS software could call an external 145 00:13:27,713 --> 00:13:32,639 programme, which would then take over the input and output to and from the user. So 146 00:13:32,639 --> 00:13:36,668 you could have sort of plugins to your BBS software which would add additional new 147 00:13:36,668 --> 00:13:44,865 games or add chat software or messaging or whatever. On the user side you had a 148 00:13:44,865 --> 00:13:50,897 primarily so-called terminal program. It's called terminal program because actually 149 00:13:50,897 --> 00:13:57,399 it emulates a serial terminal, which is a dedicated hardware device with a keyboard 150 00:13:57,399 --> 00:14:02,397 and a screen and a serial line, but not a general-purpose computer and in order to 151 00:14:02,397 --> 00:14:07,448 make a general-purpose computer behave like a terminal you had a terminal program 152 00:14:07,448 --> 00:14:12,982 on dos which I was using at the time. It's primarily telex and telemate I think were 153 00:14:12,982 --> 00:14:20,668 the favorite ones at least on this side of the planet and you started that program, 154 00:14:20,668 --> 00:14:25,333 you had a serial port, the serial port attached to your modem and from there you 155 00:14:25,333 --> 00:14:29,350 dialed and the terminal program then was responsible for displaying the texts and 156 00:14:29,350 --> 00:14:34,932 the ANSI graphics and so on and exchanging files of a variety of different protocols, 157 00:14:34,932 --> 00:14:42,419 which we will also cover later but before we go on let's do a quick demo of how this 158 00:14:42,419 --> 00:14:48,809 looks like. Now as a note I don't have a modem here I'm not emulating a modem I'm 159 00:14:48,809 --> 00:14:54,507 not emulating a serial port, these days you can get the same experience by using 160 00:14:54,507 --> 00:14:59,466 telnet over the internet but you can actually telnet into BBSs, I just want to 161 00:14:59,466 --> 00:15:10,488 basically show how it looks like. So this is the terminal program and we have now 162 00:15:10,488 --> 00:15:15,758 connected to the BBS this is sort of a introductory graphic that we see before 163 00:15:15,758 --> 00:15:22,465 even logging into the the box yeah some... of course the scrolling was much slower 164 00:15:22,465 --> 00:15:29,655 back then, so now we can scroll back up to actually see what was there. Yes, some 165 00:15:29,655 --> 00:15:33,893 more graphics. You still haven't seen the login prompt yet, as you can see a fairly 166 00:15:33,893 --> 00:15:39,919 graphics heavy BBS. Then you can choose the theme of the BBS, a user interface, 167 00:15:39,919 --> 00:15:48,617 I'm going to go for the classic ANSI here. Finally, I come to a login screen and I 168 00:15:48,617 --> 00:15:57,915 can log into the system where I have to enter my handle and the password which is 169 00:15:57,915 --> 00:16:03,774 now in clear-text over telnet. For those of you interested in this, not that 170 00:16:03,774 --> 00:16:07,380 there's anything useful I just registered this morning at the BBS so there's nothing 171 00:16:07,380 --> 00:16:13,637 associated with this account. Yeah some more graphics. Finally, we are at a 172 00:16:13,637 --> 00:16:19,862 message board and we see as I said I just logged in or registered this BBS today. We 173 00:16:19,862 --> 00:16:26,504 see there is a message number one from Hawk Hubbard, "Welcome", so if I want to 174 00:16:26,504 --> 00:16:31,176 look at that message I could basically say "I want to read it now". This is the 175 00:16:31,176 --> 00:16:36,284 message reader I go in here, then here, "Welcome to forge" and so on.. So he 176 00:16:36,284 --> 00:16:45,242 welcomes me to the BBS now let's go to the main menu of the BBS, which in this case 177 00:16:45,242 --> 00:16:53,704 looks like that and you have different... the file areas, where you can download 178 00:16:53,704 --> 00:16:57,760 files, you have the door games that I mentioned, you have an ANSI gallery, a BBS 179 00:16:57,760 --> 00:17:02,878 list, you can look at the last callers who has called this mailbox and you can see 180 00:17:02,878 --> 00:17:08,443 this... Well, yeah three test calls from me this morning, but you can see actually 181 00:17:08,443 --> 00:17:14,429 other people are still logging into this BBS and it's 2017, so it's not... to me 182 00:17:14,429 --> 00:17:18,491 this is mostly history but during the preparation of this talk I discovered that 183 00:17:18,491 --> 00:17:22,502 some people, for some people it is still the present and I'm very happy to see 184 00:17:22,502 --> 00:17:28,076 there's still such an active community around BBSs and which enables me to show 185 00:17:28,076 --> 00:17:33,963 all of this without firing up some emulators and so on. So yeah, we also can 186 00:17:33,963 --> 00:17:40,095 look at one-liners, here's some messages that people can leave to other people, 187 00:17:40,095 --> 00:17:46,314 other users in the BBS, again with some quite a graphical... We don't want to 188 00:17:46,314 --> 00:17:52,265 leave any additional words here, but what for example we can look at the ANSI gallery 189 00:17:52,265 --> 00:17:58,325 just very quickly, can try to select something here, I have no idea what I'm 190 00:17:58,325 --> 00:18:06,980 looking at so... Ok... so here you have a sort of a viewer that, yeah... So it will 191 00:18:06,980 --> 00:18:17,140 show you the sections of a sort of longer artwork in this particular case... Yeah... 192 00:18:17,140 --> 00:18:25,454 well... And the artwork... to me there always was a lot of similarity between the 193 00:18:25,454 --> 00:18:36,604 sort of, between the ANSI art artists and the people doing... Now I'm lacking the 194 00:18:36,604 --> 00:18:42,829 word, street art basically I think there's a lot of similarity between that. Okay 195 00:18:42,829 --> 00:18:46,479 good, that was just a very quick demo of course I could now look at more messages 196 00:18:46,479 --> 00:18:52,618 and write messages and play blackjack and do whatever I want, which I don't in this 197 00:18:52,618 --> 00:18:58,512 case, so we will log off. And again some more graphics and you can leave a comment 198 00:18:58,512 --> 00:19:05,112 to the sysop if you want or you can just basically... Log of... Ok, that for a very 199 00:19:05,112 --> 00:19:10,240 quick demo of the look and feel. Now since I'm such a technical person and looking at 200 00:19:10,240 --> 00:19:15,288 protocol stacks, I tried to draw a protocol stack diagram for BBSs, which 201 00:19:15,288 --> 00:19:20,036 ended up at this. So basically at the lower layers we have the pots, the plain 202 00:19:20,036 --> 00:19:25,525 old telephony system or ISDN, which we will get to in a few slides. We had modems 203 00:19:25,525 --> 00:19:30,440 on the analogue telephone system, we had other things on ISDN. In the end at some 204 00:19:30,440 --> 00:19:35,800 point you always have rs-232, a serial port, either emulated or real, and then 205 00:19:35,800 --> 00:19:40,670 either you had a terminal program directly on top of that or, for example to transfer 206 00:19:40,670 --> 00:19:46,689 files, you have used X modem or Y modem or Z modem, which added error correction and 207 00:19:46,689 --> 00:19:50,408 retransmission and block transmission so you could safely transfer files without, 208 00:19:50,408 --> 00:19:58,365 or at least with less, corruption. The checksum algorithms were not so scientific 209 00:19:58,365 --> 00:20:05,554 in many cases. Here we then have well some other things, FTN, Point what does that, 210 00:20:05,554 --> 00:20:10,030 UUCP we will cover that later. Basically you could run different protocols and 211 00:20:10,030 --> 00:20:14,500 different systems on top of that. One curiosity that I still want to mention is 212 00:20:14,500 --> 00:20:20,200 that, which I actually I forgot until on Twitter somebody reminded me a couple of 213 00:20:20,200 --> 00:20:25,599 days ago that this existed, and I went "oh yes, RIPterm, I used that quite some time 214 00:20:25,599 --> 00:20:32,000 ago", so instead of having these text- based user interfaces some people, company 215 00:20:32,000 --> 00:20:38,147 called TeleGrafix came up with a language called RIPscript which was a fairly 216 00:20:38,147 --> 00:20:45,080 compact language of textual commands, by which the BTS could control a vector 217 00:20:45,080 --> 00:20:49,142 graphic renderer on the client side in your terminal program, and you could 218 00:20:49,142 --> 00:20:54,502 actually draw VGA resolution graphics like the one that's presented here on the slide 219 00:20:54,502 --> 00:21:00,770 from the VBS on the screen of the user, which was quite a big change compared to 220 00:21:00,770 --> 00:21:08,522 the ASCII art or ANSI art that you've seen before. Yeah, so we're still at BBSs and 221 00:21:08,522 --> 00:21:12,599 BBSs that are isolated, so you can participate in those bulletin boards and 222 00:21:12,599 --> 00:21:16,880 you can read and write messages and exchange ideas and recipes and thoughts 223 00:21:16,880 --> 00:21:22,161 and cheat codes and whatever you want to exchange. Users log in at different times, 224 00:21:22,161 --> 00:21:27,991 the BBS is busy if it has only a single line while it's being used by some other 225 00:21:27,991 --> 00:21:32,314 user. Of course you can add as a BBS operator, as the sysop, you can add more 226 00:21:32,314 --> 00:21:37,473 modems and more phone lines, which is of course expensive, together with the multi- 227 00:21:37,473 --> 00:21:43,134 port serial cards and and everything that was required. You can have time limits for 228 00:21:43,134 --> 00:21:49,140 each user, but in the end it's sort of, there's a limit to how far you can scale a 229 00:21:49,140 --> 00:21:57,879 single BTS sort of - not a BTS, a BBS, jeez, a single BBS... Well also there's a 230 00:21:57,879 --> 00:22:04,235 scalability limit for BTSs, but that's another talk, so, yeah. Which brings us to 231 00:22:04,235 --> 00:22:11,750 one method of more efficiently engaging with BBSs for exchanging messages which is 232 00:22:11,750 --> 00:22:18,040 a concept of points or offline message reading. So as we have just seen in this 233 00:22:18,040 --> 00:22:26,416 example we log in to the VP... the BBS and we have an online interactive session with 234 00:22:26,416 --> 00:22:29,904 the BBS while we read and write the messages and of course it means we occupy 235 00:22:29,904 --> 00:22:36,477 the telephone line for an extended period of time and it's not used very efficiently 236 00:22:36,477 --> 00:22:41,154 because humans typically read slower than at least a fourteen point four or twenty 237 00:22:41,154 --> 00:22:48,372 eight kilobits per second. So people invented something called points or 238 00:22:48,372 --> 00:22:52,198 offline message reading and different concepts different systems different 239 00:22:52,198 --> 00:22:57,142 standards different technologies. What they did in the end is they compressed and 240 00:22:57,142 --> 00:23:04,890 batched all the messages for you into files and you on your client-side you were 241 00:23:04,890 --> 00:23:08,596 writing your messages offline and also compressing and batching the messages that 242 00:23:08,596 --> 00:23:12,662 you've written and then you make a call, you quickly exchange those files in both 243 00:23:12,662 --> 00:23:18,603 directions even in full duplex if the system supports it and then you terminate 244 00:23:18,603 --> 00:23:23,185 the connection again. So during a very short call you can exchange much more, many 245 00:23:23,185 --> 00:23:27,500 more messages and you have all the time to read through those messages without having 246 00:23:27,500 --> 00:23:33,030 to look at the phone meter or your phone bill all the time. So, more scalability, 247 00:23:33,030 --> 00:23:37,829 more users, shorter connection time, lower cost for everyone involved. Definitely an 248 00:23:37,829 --> 00:23:45,314 interesting technology, but still sort of scalability is limited of a single BTS 249 00:23:45,314 --> 00:23:52,334 which, eh, BBS which brings us to BBS networks, store-and-forward networks which 250 00:23:52,334 --> 00:24:00,437 basically extended the ability to exchange messages beyond a single BBS, but so 251 00:24:00,437 --> 00:24:04,890 basically the bulletin boards or the message groups that you had at a BBS were 252 00:24:04,890 --> 00:24:09,578 replicated over different protocols that were invented by various different people 253 00:24:09,578 --> 00:24:16,281 over time, so not only one BBS had all the messages of a given bulletin board but all 254 00:24:16,281 --> 00:24:21,526 the other BBSs participating also were receiving these messages and replicating 255 00:24:21,526 --> 00:24:28,884 them all over the network. Also for personal mail, which is like email, right, 256 00:24:28,884 --> 00:24:35,444 between two participants, you could route those messages across the network. The two 257 00:24:35,444 --> 00:24:40,276 users exchanging messages didn't have to connect to the same BBS anymore. So much 258 00:24:40,276 --> 00:24:45,440 more scalability and also you could use it efficiently for message routing to reduce 259 00:24:45,440 --> 00:24:51,660 the need for long distance calls and so on. So let's look at a couple of these BBS 260 00:24:51,660 --> 00:24:58,776 networks and the technologies they used. One large and very popular example of 261 00:24:58,776 --> 00:25:05,302 course is the Fido Network which consists of two parts, net mail and echo mail. 262 00:25:05,302 --> 00:25:12,750 Net mail is the private personal mail and echo mail are public message boards or message 263 00:25:12,750 --> 00:25:19,651 groups. Fido had some, the technology used by Fido called FTN Fido technology 264 00:25:19,651 --> 00:25:24,062 networks were used also by other networks. They were using the same protocols, but 265 00:25:24,062 --> 00:25:30,110 they were not the same group of BBSs or the same content and so on. Treknet for 266 00:25:30,110 --> 00:25:35,880 Star Trek fans was one, Gernet in Germany was an example for that. And there also 267 00:25:35,880 --> 00:25:42,368 were other technologies and other networks such as Z-Netz, where they called it 268 00:25:42,368 --> 00:25:49,190 "Bretter" actually, so boards, the individual message groups. And again they 269 00:25:49,190 --> 00:25:53,929 had other offsprings that used the same technology but have different groups and 270 00:25:53,929 --> 00:25:59,460 different policies and different structures such as T-Netz or CL-Netz. And 271 00:25:59,460 --> 00:26:08,328 then there was the big faction of people who did UUCP, the UNIX to UNIX copy, which 272 00:26:08,328 --> 00:26:13,180 we will look at a little bit. And MausNet is another german example here originating 273 00:26:13,180 --> 00:26:21,363 from the city of Muenster, which was used to up to 120 BBSs here. Let's look at Fido 274 00:26:21,363 --> 00:26:28,717 a little bit more. Started allegedly in 1984. Of course I was not involved at that 275 00:26:28,717 --> 00:26:37,644 time at the age of 5. It reached a limit of 250 nodes in 1985 because apparently, I 276 00:26:37,644 --> 00:26:41,911 suppose probably, a single integer UINT8 was used for the node number or something 277 00:26:41,911 --> 00:26:45,992 like that and then about 250 should be sufficient for everyone. I don't know what 278 00:26:45,992 --> 00:26:51,239 the other 5 are for. And then they introduced in '86 hierarchic regional 279 00:26:51,239 --> 00:26:57,984 routing and addressing that was more scalable and in the end at the peak of the 280 00:26:57,984 --> 00:27:06,384 Fido net propagation it was 39,000 nodes; that's BBSs not individual users but 281 00:27:06,384 --> 00:27:12,199 39,000 BBSs were interconnected with an estimated 2 million users worldwide and 282 00:27:12,199 --> 00:27:18,882 that's for a you know hobbyist amateur network is I think quite impressive. 283 00:27:18,882 --> 00:27:23,862 The addresses looked like this. That's actually a node number that I used around 284 00:27:23,862 --> 00:27:33,019 '95 in Nuremberg at the time. Z-Netz started as Zerberus-Netz - and I'm not 285 00:27:33,019 --> 00:27:37,340 sure if padeluun or Rena or any of the people involved in the audience if then I 286 00:27:37,340 --> 00:27:45,608 hope I represent the history correctly - which is a network technology created in 287 00:27:45,608 --> 00:27:50,827 Germany. The standards are inspired but different than the Usenet and UUCP 288 00:27:50,827 --> 00:27:54,785 protocols and there were all kinds of flame war about who understood the specs 289 00:27:54,785 --> 00:27:59,567 wrong and whether there's an improvement between ZConnect compared to the Usenet 290 00:27:59,567 --> 00:28:05,855 standards or not. But anyway it was different and there was one program called 291 00:28:05,855 --> 00:28:09,980 CrossPoint which was the most popular point software at the time I think at 292 00:28:09,980 --> 00:28:15,739 least on DOS for Z-Netz and also for other technologies. The screenshot here at the 293 00:28:15,739 --> 00:28:21,138 bottom actually is a cross point screenshot. And cross point in the early 294 00:28:21,138 --> 00:28:28,015 90s already had features that I'm still missing today in any email client that I 295 00:28:28,015 --> 00:28:35,824 have found. Right? Imagine you have a thread that crosses multiple folders, 296 00:28:35,824 --> 00:28:42,204 multiple news groups, multiple whatever and you have threading like the tree of 297 00:28:42,204 --> 00:28:46,038 the thread across folders and news groups and so on. I mean that's something that 298 00:28:46,038 --> 00:28:50,397 you cannot do with any of the software still today. Maybe you have you 299 00:28:50,397 --> 00:28:54,600 have an answer which software today supports this but for sure nothing I have 300 00:28:54,600 --> 00:29:00,143 found has the kind of features and functionality. Unfortunately it was 301 00:29:00,143 --> 00:29:06,540 written in Pascal and it had a line length limit of 255 characters per line which 302 00:29:06,540 --> 00:29:10,687 made it not very compatible to Usenet standards where lines could have different 303 00:29:10,687 --> 00:29:17,883 lengths so one couldn't continue to use it in today's time and age at least not 304 00:29:17,883 --> 00:29:29,633 easily. Usenet is another network of these BBS days where messages were exchanged by 305 00:29:29,633 --> 00:29:35,379 a system called UNIX to UNIX copy. UNIX to UNIX copy predates the Usenet it was used, 306 00:29:35,379 --> 00:29:39,341 well as the name implies, to copy something between UNIX machines - file 307 00:29:39,341 --> 00:29:44,016 copying - and some of those files that people were copying were internet mail at 308 00:29:44,016 --> 00:29:51,123 the time. And then the Usenet news format was invented. The format is quite similar 309 00:29:51,123 --> 00:29:55,730 to internet mail, which we still know today, but it's not a personal mail 310 00:29:55,730 --> 00:30:00,805 between person A and person B, but it, you could post it to a so-called news group 311 00:30:00,805 --> 00:30:06,099 and there was a hierarchy of news groups which replicated and flooded messages 312 00:30:06,099 --> 00:30:11,412 across the entire network, across the globe. And it was a flooding mechanism 313 00:30:11,412 --> 00:30:17,199 involve to make sure that the messages get replicated and the duplicates get detected 314 00:30:17,199 --> 00:30:23,432 and duplicates are not basically transmitted again or rather shown again 315 00:30:23,432 --> 00:30:32,660 and so on. The routing was originally defined in route maps in UUCP which is a 316 00:30:32,660 --> 00:30:39,777 quite a bit odd over time because it's basically a static source based routing 317 00:30:39,777 --> 00:30:46,174 for the UUCP mails. News as I said they were flooding anyway. Usenet was 318 00:30:46,174 --> 00:30:53,119 quite popular until well into the 90s. I was news master of two news servers for 319 00:30:53,119 --> 00:30:58,411 some time basically doing system administration of those boxes. And just to 320 00:30:58,411 --> 00:31:02,869 give you an anecdote again; into this context we will get to Kommunikationsnetz 321 00:31:02,869 --> 00:31:07,833 Franken, which is a nonprofit organization in the area of Franconia in southern 322 00:31:07,833 --> 00:31:14,713 Germany, where I was active. And at the time internet - like when we actually got 323 00:31:14,713 --> 00:31:21,233 to IP, at some point, IP traffic was so expensive that it was rather difficult to 324 00:31:21,233 --> 00:31:25,729 get a full newsfeed over IP because you've wasted a lot of your expensive bandwidth - 325 00:31:25,729 --> 00:31:30,928 wasted in quotes - but you used it for news and so what we did actually is, we 326 00:31:30,928 --> 00:31:36,051 put up a satellite dish at a building in Nuremberg and we had satellite feeds from 327 00:31:36,051 --> 00:31:42,287 the US. So there were US companies that were streaming compressed Usenet batches 328 00:31:42,287 --> 00:31:48,175 up to a geostationary satellite which has a downlink over Europe and then we got two 329 00:31:48,175 --> 00:31:54,790 megabits of compressed batched news net news in, I would say, let's say 95ish or 330 00:31:54,790 --> 00:32:00,350 something like that, so that was definitely a big improvement. So we we had 331 00:32:00,350 --> 00:32:07,581 a full news feed coming directly from the US without having to pay for all the 332 00:32:07,581 --> 00:32:12,475 International data transfer. Another curiosity is the Floppy Poll/Point. Now 333 00:32:12,475 --> 00:32:19,157 nobody is laughing yet. Well not everyone had phone lines in the 90s, particularly 334 00:32:19,157 --> 00:32:23,910 in eastern Germany. Phone lines were still a rare commodity after reunification 335 00:32:23,910 --> 00:32:28,976 happened in 90. It took some time until people could get connected to the 336 00:32:28,976 --> 00:32:33,159 telephone network. And so what people did is actually they exchanged daily floppies 337 00:32:33,159 --> 00:32:38,560 by postal mail. So basically rather than sending your compressed batches of 338 00:32:38,560 --> 00:32:46,429 messages over modems, because well for a modem you need phone lines, you put a 339 00:32:46,429 --> 00:32:53,147 floppy - I would assume 3.5 inch at the time, not so much four and a quarter inch 340 00:32:53,147 --> 00:33:01,333 - but you put a floppy in an envelope you send it to your BBS and the guy 341 00:33:01,333 --> 00:33:05,927 opens the envelope and puts it in the BBS and he sends you a floppy in return. So 342 00:33:05,927 --> 00:33:09,060 you add one day or something to your transmission but then well the 343 00:33:09,060 --> 00:33:13,708 transmission speed of messages in those networks at the time was sort of one to 344 00:33:13,708 --> 00:33:17,685 two days or maybe even three days anyway so if you add another day what does it 345 00:33:17,685 --> 00:33:23,750 matter? It was such a big advantage that you could get messages like worldwide 346 00:33:23,750 --> 00:33:30,895 messages at all in such a short time and for basically no cost whatsoever. Okay 347 00:33:30,895 --> 00:33:37,639 getting to the internet, yeah. How did I start to access Internet, how did people 348 00:33:37,639 --> 00:33:41,939 start to access the Internet at the time? Well mail and news was sort of the 349 00:33:41,939 --> 00:33:52,571 Internet in the beginning via UUCP, which is nice and fine, but it's not IP, yet. So 350 00:33:52,571 --> 00:33:56,880 what you could do is you could, instead of dialing into a BBS, you could of course 351 00:33:56,880 --> 00:34:02,554 use your modem to dial to the serial port of the TTY of any UNIX machine that's 352 00:34:02,554 --> 00:34:06,151 somewhere else. If you have a UNIX workstation somewhere, that's connected to 353 00:34:06,151 --> 00:34:12,482 an IP network using 10base2 or whatever was the network technology at the time or 354 00:34:12,482 --> 00:34:20,775 FDDI or whatever, x21... then you could attach a modem to a serial part of such a 355 00:34:20,775 --> 00:34:26,105 UNIX box and you just get the login prompt when you connect with the modem to that 356 00:34:26,105 --> 00:34:30,451 box. Like you sit in front of your Linux system today, you have your login prompt. 357 00:34:30,451 --> 00:34:35,851 And then on that workstation you basically you could remotely use that workstation 358 00:34:35,851 --> 00:34:41,160 and then you could run FTP clients or IRC clients or telnet, gopher, whatever on the 359 00:34:41,160 --> 00:34:48,862 text console. That was mostly available to people in the academic sector of course 360 00:34:48,862 --> 00:34:53,700 because they had some UNIX machines at universities. I was too young to be at 361 00:34:53,700 --> 00:34:59,860 university, so I had to use FTP mailers for quite some time. So what's an FTP 362 00:34:59,860 --> 00:35:03,802 mailer? Well it's basically some FTP client that runs on a remote machine 363 00:35:03,802 --> 00:35:07,747 somewhere that's connected to the Internet and that has email access and you can use 364 00:35:07,747 --> 00:35:13,345 input/output over email. So if you want to FTP to some FTP server you send an email. 365 00:35:13,345 --> 00:35:19,847 It says "ftp ftp." and an "ls" and then some hours later you get a response 366 00:35:19,847 --> 00:35:25,649 with the list of the files, yeah? And then after you've got the list of the files you 367 00:35:25,649 --> 00:35:30,394 do the first CD to change into a directory and then you get again the response. And 368 00:35:30,394 --> 00:35:34,556 then finally you know which file you want so you issue a get command over the file 369 00:35:34,556 --> 00:35:41,516 and then you get this long series of UUencoded mails. UUencode is a method of 370 00:35:41,516 --> 00:35:50,271 sending binary 8-bit messages over mails before MIME existed. The MIME format which 371 00:35:50,271 --> 00:35:54,245 we use today for email attachments and so on. That didn't exist at the time, so it 372 00:35:54,245 --> 00:35:58,366 was UUencode before, so yeah. So hours or days later you got that and it 373 00:35:58,366 --> 00:36:04,460 worked perfectly fine, I mean, I was quite happy to be able to use that at the time. 374 00:36:04,460 --> 00:36:09,783 Now, then, if you had dial-up access to UNIX boxes, you could also do something 375 00:36:09,783 --> 00:36:19,216 called SLIP, which is a serial line IP. So you could transport IP over the modem line 376 00:36:19,216 --> 00:36:26,662 and as a result you have IP at home in your apartment! Unbelievable! it was later 377 00:36:26,662 --> 00:36:30,518 superseded by PPP which introduced features such as auto-configuration, 378 00:36:30,518 --> 00:36:34,554 authentication, compression and so on - well there was a compressed SLIP, but yeah 379 00:36:34,554 --> 00:36:39,811 not quite as compressed as PPP - and popular software stack at the time - and 380 00:36:39,811 --> 00:36:47,412 I'm talking about early 90s, mid-90s - is basically Trumpet Winsock on Windows with 381 00:36:47,412 --> 00:36:52,441 NCSA Mosaic as a browser, because Windows back then didn't have TCP/IP, so you had 382 00:36:52,441 --> 00:36:59,356 to install another package to actually have TCP/IP on Windows at the time. If 383 00:36:59,356 --> 00:37:03,506 you didn't have Windows, I will get to that, and I'm talking about the pre-Linux 384 00:37:03,506 --> 00:37:09,120 days here. So what did you do if you wanted to do internet on a PC before Linux 385 00:37:09,120 --> 00:37:14,257 was around? I didn't have a 386 initially, I had a 286. And on a 286 of course you 386 00:37:14,257 --> 00:37:18,396 couldn't run any multitasking operating system because it doesn't have a real 387 00:37:18,396 --> 00:37:24,444 protected mode. So no Linux, no BSD, but there was something called KA9Q NOS. And 388 00:37:24,444 --> 00:37:29,525 now I want to see hands: who has ever heard of or used KA9Q NOS? Yeah! Ok... 389 00:37:29,525 --> 00:37:34,169 *laughs* Audience member shouts: It is a person's 390 00:37:34,169 --> 00:37:36,799 callsign. LaForge: Yes, "It's a person's callsign" 391 00:37:36,799 --> 00:37:41,966 was the comment from the audience, this is correct. KA9Q is Phil Karn in the US and 392 00:37:41,966 --> 00:37:47,135 he wrote a network operating system the KA9Q NOS, the network operating system. 393 00:37:47,135 --> 00:37:51,683 And it is an implementation of - he started actually in the 80s with this on 394 00:37:51,683 --> 00:37:56,645 CPM and then later ported it to DOS - and it implements TCP/IP, SLIP, PPP including 395 00:37:56,645 --> 00:38:02,368 POP3 server, SMTP server + client, IP routing, telnet, ARP and so on. And you 396 00:38:02,368 --> 00:38:08,150 could do all this on DOS. I used it quite a lot at my home. You could do routing and 397 00:38:08,150 --> 00:38:13,336 you had multiple applications at the same time all on top of DOS. It was a fantastic 398 00:38:13,336 --> 00:38:20,132 piece of software. And then you could build a router to ethernet and you could 399 00:38:20,132 --> 00:38:24,290 have multiple other machines in your home and you have more and more cable in your 400 00:38:24,290 --> 00:38:30,101 home. And more and more connected machines, yeah, actually, yeah we will get to that, ok. 401 00:38:30,101 --> 00:38:37,088 PPP superseded that. At some point ISDN came around, particularly in Germany. ISDN 402 00:38:37,088 --> 00:38:41,072 is the digital version of telephony system, so instead of having analog 403 00:38:41,072 --> 00:38:48,154 circuits you now transfer digital bits. That could be audio, digitized audio, but 404 00:38:48,154 --> 00:38:53,351 of course it could be any other transparent digital data. In Germany ISDN 405 00:38:53,351 --> 00:39:00,509 was first put in operation in 1989. Until '93 it used a German protocol standard 406 00:39:00,509 --> 00:39:06,141 called 1TR6, and from '94 onwards the European E-DSS1 protocol standard was 407 00:39:06,141 --> 00:39:13,347 available. It was hugely popularized from 1995 onwards by subsidies. So at the time 408 00:39:13,347 --> 00:39:20,161 if you actually ordered an ISDN connection and at the same time you bought a, let's 409 00:39:20,161 --> 00:39:26,271 say a small PBX or a phone or a modem or something like that, you could [get] 410 00:39:26,271 --> 00:39:33,531 subsidies from Deutsche Telekom. So, I think it went up to 700 marks - not sure 411 00:39:33,531 --> 00:39:39,562 if somebody remembers the exact figures - and so you've got quite a bit of money to 412 00:39:39,562 --> 00:39:44,448 buy equipment to switch to this new technology. So when ISDN you don't have a 413 00:39:44,448 --> 00:39:48,815 modem because there's nothing to modulate or demodulate, it's digital, so it's 414 00:39:48,815 --> 00:39:56,548 called a terminal adapter, and it adapts the bitstream, the synchronous serial 415 00:39:56,548 --> 00:40:04,582 bitstream of the ISDN to your operating system or your computer and there was 416 00:40:04,582 --> 00:40:09,060 something called V.110 as a rate adaptation to do asynchronous serial like 417 00:40:09,060 --> 00:40:17,130 RS-232, sort of, over a synchronous ISDN. Okay and how did we get internet access? 418 00:40:17,130 --> 00:40:22,699 Well, it was, if you were not in academia or something like that, there were a few 419 00:40:22,699 --> 00:40:27,986 commercial ISPs like XLink or EUnet. They were very expensive and of course you 420 00:40:27,986 --> 00:40:34,235 didn't have local dial-in in all the different cities around Germany, but you 421 00:40:34,235 --> 00:40:38,954 had grassroot groups of enthusiasts that established themselves in some 422 00:40:38,954 --> 00:40:46,592 associations to make sure the members can get internet access. In my region in 423 00:40:46,592 --> 00:40:52,440 Nuremberg Kommunikationsnetz Franken was particularly active. They started with 424 00:40:52,440 --> 00:40:57,664 dial-up UUCP services and later IP for non-commercial users - and I have to say 425 00:40:57,664 --> 00:41:04,045 with an extremely high technical standard which I'm still fascinated by today. 426 00:41:04,045 --> 00:41:08,126 Kommunikationsnetz Franken had points of presence in various different cities in 427 00:41:08,126 --> 00:41:12,390 the region because not everybody could call to Nuremberg as a local call and 428 00:41:12,390 --> 00:41:18,080 every user got six static IP addresses, routed to wherever he dialed in. The use of 429 00:41:18,080 --> 00:41:23,238 OSPF in the mid-1990s to make sure you have static IP addresses wherever you dial 430 00:41:23,238 --> 00:41:28,746 in. Some people still don't have that in 2017 and I'm not even talking about the 431 00:41:28,746 --> 00:41:35,354 static IP addresses, but anyway. So about 800 users peak at that association at the 432 00:41:35,354 --> 00:41:41,624 time. And there was an umbrella organization called "Individual Network 433 00:41:41,624 --> 00:41:49,148 e.V." (IN). This was established. Individuals could not become members in 434 00:41:49,148 --> 00:41:52,380 that association so it's - the name is a bit interesting - it's called Individual 435 00:41:52,380 --> 00:41:56,498 Network, because it's about networking for individuals, but the members were the 436 00:41:56,498 --> 00:42:00,970 regional associations such as Kommunikationsnetz Franken, who then 437 00:42:00,970 --> 00:42:07,480 basically used this umbrella entity to negotiate decent rates to get internet 438 00:42:07,480 --> 00:42:12,904 connectivity and so on. And apparently the IN members served more than three hundred 439 00:42:12,904 --> 00:42:17,660 thousand users at some point - so it scaled quite a bit - was dissolved in 2000 440 00:42:17,660 --> 00:42:22,170 when lots of commercialized ISPs were around and also when the remaining member 441 00:42:22,170 --> 00:42:26,740 entities, which many of which still exist today such as Kommunikationsnetz Franken, 442 00:42:26,740 --> 00:42:31,640 they didn't need this umbrella entity to get decent internet rates or tariffs 443 00:42:31,640 --> 00:42:37,740 again. So, with packets which TCP/IP we just need one number that we call at some 444 00:42:37,740 --> 00:42:41,580 point We're not dialing into hundreds of different BBS's anymore but we're actually 445 00:42:41,580 --> 00:42:47,347 connecting always to the same number which is our ISP, and then when we have that 446 00:42:47,347 --> 00:42:52,349 connection we exchange packet data with systems worldwide which brought new 447 00:42:52,349 --> 00:42:57,634 purpose to lease lines. Analog leased lines were basically telephone lines that 448 00:42:57,634 --> 00:43:02,810 were permanently switched, or actually permanently wired at the exchange. So you 449 00:43:02,810 --> 00:43:06,963 had two wires of copper between one location and another location and they 450 00:43:06,963 --> 00:43:10,514 were physically connected you could apply a DC voltage and the DC voltage would come 451 00:43:10,514 --> 00:43:16,617 out at the other end. You could get this from Deutsche Post or Telekom at the time. 452 00:43:16,617 --> 00:43:23,626 When I could finally afford one in '98 for 900 marks installation cost and in my case 453 00:43:23,626 --> 00:43:31,000 180 marks per month, was sixty marks per hop. Hop means: telephone exchange. So 454 00:43:31,000 --> 00:43:35,105 if between the other end where you want to connect to and where you are, are three 455 00:43:35,105 --> 00:43:40,000 telephone exchanges, you had three times sixty marks or 180 marks per month. And 456 00:43:40,000 --> 00:43:43,929 then I connected to a system that looked like this, which is called the Hub 457 00:43:43,929 --> 00:43:48,532 Nuremburg of this Kommunikationsnetz Franken, which is in the basement of one 458 00:43:48,532 --> 00:43:55,391 of the members. You have basically a PC running Linux of FreeBSD, no it was BSD 459 00:43:55,391 --> 00:44:01,240 actually, with like a 16-port serial card and various modems stacked on various 460 00:44:01,240 --> 00:44:05,955 shelves to interconnect all these different leased lines and which then had 461 00:44:05,955 --> 00:44:11,987 one ISDN leased line with 128 kilobits to some internet uplink. Yeah that's the 462 00:44:11,987 --> 00:44:20,324 obligatory ISDN network termination and telephone sockets, which brings us to ISDN 463 00:44:20,324 --> 00:44:27,990 leased lines. There was a product called SPV "Semi-Permanente Festverbindung", 464 00:44:27,990 --> 00:44:32,770 which is not really a leased line - it's semi-permanent - and it's basically a 465 00:44:32,770 --> 00:44:37,630 flat-rate call to one specific destination telephone number, which you could get in 466 00:44:37,630 --> 00:44:42,433 national 1TR6 ISDN and which was rather inexpensive and what many people used who 467 00:44:42,433 --> 00:44:47,910 wanted more than the ISDN speeds. Okay I have to speed up a bit, time is running 468 00:44:47,910 --> 00:44:52,505 out! The first step of abusing analog lines, which we did, is by deploying a 469 00:44:52,505 --> 00:44:58,122 device called an ICU-T, which is the inverse of an ISDN NTBA. So in ISDN you 470 00:44:58,122 --> 00:45:01,621 still have the telephone exchange and you have a network termination, the NTBA, on 471 00:45:01,621 --> 00:45:09,290 your line. And basically the the ICU-T was a single line telephone exchange side of 472 00:45:09,290 --> 00:45:13,040 this protocol. So you could use an analog line which you normally used for analog 473 00:45:13,040 --> 00:45:17,222 modems but you remove the two analog modems you put an NTBA on one end, you put 474 00:45:17,222 --> 00:45:21,629 the ICU-T on the other end and suddenly we can get 128 kilobits over that line which 475 00:45:21,629 --> 00:45:26,438 previously you could only do 33.6 without having to pay any additional cents or 476 00:45:26,438 --> 00:45:31,435 money to Deutsche Telekom, of course. And then there was some special ISDN routers 477 00:45:31,435 --> 00:45:35,953 which could use the signaling channel, the 16 kbps signaling D-channel on ISDN also 478 00:45:35,953 --> 00:45:41,944 for data, so you get 128 + 16 kilobytes of data, because well, there's no signaling, 479 00:45:41,944 --> 00:45:46,024 you're not dialling anyone so you can as well use that. Now this is sort of the 480 00:45:46,024 --> 00:45:50,480 hierarchy of the leased line infrastructure at this entity. I'm not 481 00:45:50,480 --> 00:45:54,632 showing every leased line here, but basically I was at the upper left corner 482 00:45:54,632 --> 00:46:00,560 here connecting with 33.6 kbps to this hub Nuremburg, which connects to 128K to a 483 00:46:00,560 --> 00:46:04,949 machine in a Nuremberg building of the University of Erlangen, which then 484 00:46:04,949 --> 00:46:09,250 connects over X21 to the University of Erlangen, where then all kinds of other 485 00:46:09,250 --> 00:46:14,003 leased lines come together. That was the the architecture of what we deployed 486 00:46:14,003 --> 00:46:18,330 there. Some more pictures: this is in Fürth, a neighbor city of Nuremberg. The 487 00:46:18,330 --> 00:46:24,680 collection of telephone outlets and the collection of modems and the machine - oh 488 00:46:24,680 --> 00:46:29,488 there was, I'm missing one picture sorry for that - anyway you can see a pile of 489 00:46:29,488 --> 00:46:34,220 modems here and some more modems here and the machine over there. And then we went 490 00:46:34,220 --> 00:46:38,840 into phase two of abusing analog telephone lines, when the first DSL modems came out. 491 00:46:38,840 --> 00:46:45,809 So we imported some Ascend DSLpipes in '99 from the US and with some firmwares you 492 00:46:45,809 --> 00:46:49,602 could operate them back to back without the DSLAM so basically you operate one DSL 493 00:46:49,602 --> 00:46:54,370 modem at one end of the leased line and another DSL modem at the other end, and if 494 00:46:54,370 --> 00:46:58,260 you are close enough like with a single hop at the single telephone exchange you 495 00:46:58,260 --> 00:47:04,300 could get up to 2.3 megabits symmetric over your analog line. And that in 1999 496 00:47:04,300 --> 00:47:09,701 was quite a lot of speed, especially if you're not paying for traffic or anything 497 00:47:09,701 --> 00:47:14,274 like that. Some less alternative, less expensive one alternatives came out. Okay! 498 00:47:14,274 --> 00:47:24,500 Before I wrap up, a short detour or one thing still to mention. Another phenomenon 499 00:47:24,500 --> 00:47:29,730 back then - I'm not sure if this happened in other cities too - and in my area in 500 00:47:29,730 --> 00:47:35,041 Fürth we had an entity called Falcons Maze, which was called an online bistro. 501 00:47:35,041 --> 00:47:41,726 I became a regular there around '94. They initially had four DOS PCs, each of them 502 00:47:41,726 --> 00:47:46,884 with a modem and with a dedicated call- charge meter. And you could basically go 503 00:47:46,884 --> 00:47:50,564 there, it's a cafe, you can have, you know you can eat and drink and so on, and you 504 00:47:50,564 --> 00:47:55,614 can sit at the PC and you can then from there dial into BBSs and basically do 505 00:47:55,614 --> 00:47:59,250 things if you didn't have a modem or a PC at home. But the interesting part of 506 00:47:59,250 --> 00:48:02,862 course was that there all the other peoples were hanging out, the other BBS users, 507 00:48:02,862 --> 00:48:08,810 sysops and so on. At some point the PCs were networked with 10base2, so people 508 00:48:08,810 --> 00:48:14,457 could play doom when it came out, I think in - not sure when it reached us in 509 00:48:14,457 --> 00:48:20,473 Germany - '94 maybe or so, and yeah. The internet became more popular. It started 510 00:48:20,473 --> 00:48:26,320 subsidiaries and we set up ISDN SPVs, the "semi-permanente Verbindung" as an 511 00:48:26,320 --> 00:48:33,278 internet uplink from there, so that also, I mean, you can find some sources that 512 00:48:33,278 --> 00:48:36,976 this apparently, allegedly was the first internet cafe. I'm not sure if anyone else 513 00:48:36,976 --> 00:48:41,350 has contested that. Something like that. Anyway, after lots of anecdotes I want to 514 00:48:41,350 --> 00:48:46,720 give you some time for Q&A. To summarize: the first decades of wide area 515 00:48:46,720 --> 00:48:51,510 communications were powered by a community of enthusiasts or rather communities that 516 00:48:51,510 --> 00:48:56,359 were disjunct and not connected, largely motivated by non-commercial motives. Of 517 00:48:56,359 --> 00:49:02,120 course there were commercial BBSs but by far not without much corporate or 518 00:49:02,120 --> 00:49:06,914 government influence, right? There was no Google and there was no ministry that was 519 00:49:06,914 --> 00:49:12,583 putting censorship or something like that. And the BBS community is a distinct 520 00:49:12,583 --> 00:49:18,370 subculture so it has different norms and it has different values, different from 521 00:49:18,370 --> 00:49:22,557 the ham radio guys, different from free software guys, of course some overlap, but 522 00:49:22,557 --> 00:49:28,337 still a separate community with separate norms. What I personally think is the big 523 00:49:28,337 --> 00:49:37,124 loss, other than the loss of picture on the screen, is that back then the networks 524 00:49:37,124 --> 00:49:40,500 were distributed. There was no single point of failure. The infrastructure was 525 00:49:40,500 --> 00:49:45,286 owned and operated by its users, by individuals. The connection speeds were 526 00:49:45,286 --> 00:49:50,493 symmetric and there was no, like, data center versus consumer separation that we 527 00:49:50,493 --> 00:49:55,440 have in the internet day and age of today. And that's, yes, I really think this 528 00:49:55,440 --> 00:50:02,590 autonomy and decentralization is a big loss to society or the community as a 529 00:50:02,590 --> 00:50:07,854 whole. Ok, some pointers: if you want to read up more or look at some ANSI artwork 530 00:50:07,854 --> 00:50:12,940 or log into BBSs, the telnet BBS guide I can highly recommend that. You can also 531 00:50:12,940 --> 00:50:19,891 find the BBS I looked into. Ok, good. Which brings us to the point where we can 532 00:50:19,891 --> 00:50:24,000 have some questions. 533 00:50:24,000 --> 00:50:34,659 *Applause* 534 00:50:34,659 --> 00:50:40,930 Herald: The microphones here in, 3, 1, 2 and 4, but first we have questions from 535 00:50:40,930 --> 00:50:43,800 the signal angel. So what's the question for? 536 00:50:43,800 --> 00:50:47,022 Signal Angel: The internet wants to know, "What was the highest phone bill you ever 537 00:50:47,022 --> 00:50:51,978 got back then?" LaForge: To be honest, I don't remember 538 00:50:51,978 --> 00:51:00,758 but for sure it was four digits. I'm quite sure it was. It was quite devastating, 539 00:51:00,758 --> 00:51:04,590 yes. Hearld: There is another question from the 540 00:51:04,590 --> 00:51:06,246 internet. Signal Angel: And there's another 541 00:51:06,246 --> 00:51:12,924 question, "You mentioned that there are very few books around those topics. Which 542 00:51:12,924 --> 00:51:16,774 ones would you recommend regarding BBS, Usenet and so on?" 543 00:51:16,774 --> 00:51:22,263 LaForge: I cannot respond to this directly I don't remember that. I can put it 544 00:51:22,263 --> 00:51:26,736 together and people can reach out to me or I put it in the slides when I submit 545 00:51:26,736 --> 00:51:33,067 them into the frap system, sorry for that. Herald: So we have a question from the 546 00:51:33,067 --> 00:51:38,019 microphone number two please. Mic 2: Yes, back in the 90s most of the 547 00:51:38,019 --> 00:51:43,367 voice was uncompressed and actually direct. Modern technologies usually, I 548 00:51:43,367 --> 00:51:48,054 think, voice always compressed transferred over IP. Do you know for any modern 549 00:51:48,054 --> 00:51:53,390 modulation formats the text can survive several codecs voice codecs or data 550 00:51:53,390 --> 00:51:57,199 transmission? LaForge: I'm not the expert on that 551 00:51:57,199 --> 00:52:03,148 subject. I know there are some codecs, yes, but they are extremely slow. So you 552 00:52:03,148 --> 00:52:10,442 are happy if you get something like 1200 or maybe 2400 bps of data through a modem 553 00:52:10,442 --> 00:52:14,687 that survives multiple codecs and then of course always the question of which 554 00:52:14,687 --> 00:52:20,242 codecs. Herald: Okay microphone number four 555 00:52:20,242 --> 00:52:22,570 please. Mic 4: Okay I don't have a question to 556 00:52:22,570 --> 00:52:26,319 Herald actually, but thanks for the talk. I would like to ask the audience because 557 00:52:26,319 --> 00:52:30,490 many, I think, users and operators of BBSs are here. Who wants to meet this evening, 558 00:52:30,490 --> 00:52:34,944 at I would say nine o'clock, in one of the seminar rooms for talk about the back old 559 00:52:34,944 --> 00:52:41,619 times? Yeah, so I will try to lock a self- organized session at the seminar room 560 00:52:41,619 --> 00:52:46,333 1415, I think it's called, at 9 o'clock. LaForge: Ok, thank you very much. 561 00:52:46,333 --> 00:52:49,472 Mic 4: So, see you there and talk about the good days of and some more stories I 562 00:52:49,472 --> 00:52:52,228 think. Herald: There are still more people 563 00:52:52,228 --> 00:52:59,525 queuing up. Microphone number 4, please. Mic 4: I've got a question about the 564 00:52:59,525 --> 00:53:05,187 political bulletin board systems. Could you tell us a bit about the CL-Net and the 565 00:53:05,187 --> 00:53:11,116 fascist clone the Thule-Net? What was the dynamics back then and the fights? What 566 00:53:11,116 --> 00:53:16,682 were the conflicts in those boxes? LaForge: I have to admit I cannot say too 567 00:53:16,682 --> 00:53:22,189 much about it. I know, of course, CL-Netz was a network mainly for left-wing 568 00:53:22,189 --> 00:53:26,590 political activists and groups and yes there was Thule-Netz, a right-wing 569 00:53:26,590 --> 00:53:29,780 Network, and I knew there was discussions and so on and there were people trying to 570 00:53:29,780 --> 00:53:36,462 hack each other's mailboxes and so on, but I was not participating or involved 571 00:53:36,462 --> 00:53:43,094 in these discussions to an extent that I can really comment on it sorry. 572 00:53:43,094 --> 00:53:46,150 Herald: Microphone number one, please. Mic 1: Hi Harald. I still remember when I 573 00:53:46,150 --> 00:53:50,750 started with an acoustic coupler. I did that because there was a severe threat of 574 00:53:50,750 --> 00:53:55,486 punishment if you used an illegal modem at the time from the Deutsche Bundespost. So 575 00:53:55,486 --> 00:54:00,010 I was actually never aware that a little bit later you could actually do an end, 576 00:54:00,010 --> 00:54:05,552 back to back DSL modem connection over an analogue exchange. So at that time you did 577 00:54:05,552 --> 00:54:09,950 that, what was the the punishment situation from the Bundespost or whatever 578 00:54:09,950 --> 00:54:14,271 it was called at the time if they would have ever caught you doing that? Do you 579 00:54:14,271 --> 00:54:17,010 remember? LaForge: I have no clue. Yes, it sort of, 580 00:54:17,010 --> 00:54:25,363 and I mean the... How can I say? The the criminal offense, I think, stopped in '92 581 00:54:25,363 --> 00:54:30,331 when Deutsche Post was privatized. So until '92 it was a criminal offence to 582 00:54:30,331 --> 00:54:34,730 operate a non-approved modem at the German telephone network, because was government 583 00:54:34,730 --> 00:54:39,825 owned. It was a crime, not a minor offence. But afterwards I don't really 584 00:54:39,825 --> 00:54:44,850 know to be honest. I don't think anyone bothered at the time and nobody, I mean 585 00:54:44,850 --> 00:54:49,994 the, we never had any trouble with these DSL things and so on, that we did over 586 00:54:49,994 --> 00:54:53,823 analog circuits. Herald: Microphone number two, please. 587 00:54:53,823 --> 00:54:58,725 Mic 2: Okay, hello I'm from Taiwan and I just want to share something interesting 588 00:54:58,725 --> 00:55:05,200 for everyone. In Taiwan is a small country in Asia. We are still using BBS. The 589 00:55:05,200 --> 00:55:12,090 largest is named PTT and exported to use SSH or WebSocket you can edit, and the 590 00:55:12,090 --> 00:55:16,580 source code is open available on GitHub. Everybody can search it. Thank you. 591 00:55:16,580 --> 00:55:23,593 LaForge: Thank you very much. It's actually not just for Taiwan, but you can 592 00:55:23,593 --> 00:55:27,870 find many, I mean maybe it's more popular there still, but you can find many BBSs 593 00:55:27,870 --> 00:55:33,049 that are still in operation today in many different countries even also with BBS 594 00:55:33,049 --> 00:55:38,240 software that's free software that's maintained now on GitHub or on other 595 00:55:38,240 --> 00:55:43,240 repositories with contributors and so on. So the community still lives, but I think 596 00:55:43,240 --> 00:55:48,230 at least internationally it's very small and I'm happy to hear if it's larger in 597 00:55:48,230 --> 00:55:52,480 some countries. Herald: You have still time for questions. 598 00:55:52,480 --> 00:55:57,820 Microphone number four, please. Mic 4: So you talked about restoring 599 00:55:57,820 --> 00:56:05,181 decentralization. So, what old systems would you like to see coming back? 600 00:56:05,181 --> 00:56:09,030 Something like the Usenet? I mean it's still there, but you can't access it 601 00:56:09,030 --> 00:56:13,290 without paying a lot of money to some big gateway. So, which technologies would you 602 00:56:13,290 --> 00:56:17,374 like to revive or do you think are realistic to revive to have 603 00:56:17,374 --> 00:56:21,640 decentralization again? LaForge: I don't think the technologies 604 00:56:21,640 --> 00:56:26,248 necessarily need to be revived because they are, to a large extent, old and 605 00:56:26,248 --> 00:56:32,902 people are smarter and the, how can I say, the capacity and the computational 606 00:56:32,902 --> 00:56:37,141 complexity of what you can do today and so on is much better. So we can have much 607 00:56:37,141 --> 00:56:42,576 better technology. But the thing that I would like to see revived is more 608 00:56:42,576 --> 00:56:47,855 decentralization and more people operating their own technology and that's just, I 609 00:56:47,855 --> 00:56:53,529 think, I don't really have a plan and I'm not saying I have a vision I'm just saying 610 00:56:53,529 --> 00:56:58,620 it has a problem, this development, that basically it's a consumer / producer model 611 00:56:58,620 --> 00:57:03,510 and especially with content delivery networks and with attacks on network 612 00:57:03,510 --> 00:57:08,356 neutrality and and all these topics, it's always moving in one direction. It's 613 00:57:08,356 --> 00:57:12,796 basically turning the user into a stupid consumer and and making sure all the 614 00:57:12,796 --> 00:57:20,214 control and all the content, and so on, is in the hand of large corporations. 615 00:57:20,214 --> 00:57:28,543 *Applause* By the way, one interesting anecdote about 616 00:57:28,543 --> 00:57:33,644 the... I talked about the asymmetry of the speed, right? And with DSL at this ADSL 617 00:57:33,644 --> 00:57:38,207 and the popular technology is always the downlink is bigger than the uplink. I know 618 00:57:38,207 --> 00:57:45,110 in Brazil a lot of people, basically in small, like small size ISPs, they did it 619 00:57:45,110 --> 00:57:50,290 the opposite way around! So they did one modem with basically a large downstream 620 00:57:50,290 --> 00:57:55,380 and small upstream and then they, on another line next to it, they inverted it 621 00:57:55,380 --> 00:57:59,130 by using a master modem on one side and a slave modem on the other so then again he 622 00:57:59,130 --> 00:58:04,289 had symmetric speed. So, some people had creative ideas to work around some of the 623 00:58:04,289 --> 00:58:09,902 technological restrictions. Herald: So microphone number two, please. 624 00:58:09,902 --> 00:58:16,090 Mic 2: I also from Taiwan and I want to add something for my friend. Like, there 625 00:58:16,090 --> 00:58:25,636 are still like half million people come here to BBS called PTT, yeah, today. And 626 00:58:25,636 --> 00:58:34,345 like, there's a, there are 100,000 people online now, yeah. So, I think the 627 00:58:34,345 --> 00:58:39,255 community is now like... Herald: What ist your question? Can you 628 00:58:39,255 --> 00:58:42,302 please phrase the question? Mic 2: I just want to add something for my 629 00:58:42,302 --> 00:58:46,642 friend, yeah. LaForge: Okay, thank you. 630 00:58:46,642 --> 00:58:54,641 Herald: Microphone number one, please. Mic 1: *cough* You talked about content of 631 00:58:54,641 --> 00:59:01,551 these mailboxes. Isn't it that the Freifunk community today is a possible way 632 00:59:01,551 --> 00:59:11,900 to get this freedom back from what you had in your mailboxes? The services they were 633 00:59:11,900 --> 00:59:19,290 offered there, the Freifunk could do the same today with user own structures and so 634 00:59:19,290 --> 00:59:21,571 on. LaForge: That's very correct yes. Freifunk 635 00:59:21,571 --> 00:59:26,267 definitely is much more in the spirit of the community owned and community run 636 00:59:26,267 --> 00:59:31,440 systems, and I see lots of similarities between the BBS community and what 637 00:59:31,440 --> 00:59:34,690 Freifunk is doing today. It's correct. Mic 1: Are you are you doing something 638 00:59:34,690 --> 00:59:37,630 with Freifunk? LaForge: Me personally? No, I'm not 639 00:59:37,630 --> 00:59:40,480 involved. Mic 1: Okay. 640 00:59:40,480 --> 00:59:47,203 Herald: I think microphone number two is waiting way too long. 641 00:59:47,203 --> 00:59:53,270 Mic 2: Hello, thanks for the talk. You mentioned that most people didn't have a 642 00:59:53,270 --> 00:59:59,668 TCP/IP capable operating system at this time and I started to read recently about 643 00:59:59,668 --> 01:00:06,313 an operating system called Xenix, X-E-N- I-X, that was actually developed by 644 01:00:06,313 --> 01:00:14,609 Microsoft and published in 1983 that could run on IBM PC compatible machines on the 645 01:00:14,609 --> 01:00:20,854 x86 processors, and I hear that in the Russian BBS systems at least it was very 646 01:00:20,854 --> 01:00:26,480 popular. Did you encounter any Xenix operating systems at that time? 647 01:00:26,480 --> 01:00:30,886 LaForge: No I personally did not encounter Xenix. I read about it, yes, and I know it 648 01:00:30,886 --> 01:00:35,860 I could have possibly run it on my 286 machine, but I mean, I don't think it was 649 01:00:35,860 --> 01:00:40,097 something that was readily available for affordable price to individuals, but maybe 650 01:00:40,097 --> 01:00:44,280 I'm wrong. No, certainly not, okay, some people are heavily shaking their heads. 651 01:00:44,280 --> 01:00:46,580 Mic 2: I think this is why it was popular in Russia... 652 01:00:46,580 --> 01:00:49,150 *Laughs* LaForge: Possibly. I do not want to 653 01:00:49,150 --> 01:00:52,440 comment on that... Herald: We have time for one more 654 01:00:52,440 --> 01:00:56,596 question. Microphone number 4. Mic 4: I just wanted to note, in the wiki 655 01:00:56,596 --> 01:01:00,976 the meeting is up. Search for BBS and this evening at 9 o'clock I think we can talk 656 01:01:00,976 --> 01:01:05,482 about all the details of running DSL on modem lines. I've also got some more 657 01:01:05,482 --> 01:01:10,284 details on that and a lot of these modems left if you need some. But I think, so see 658 01:01:10,284 --> 01:01:13,710 you Harold at 9 o'clock LaForge: Yeah definitely! Thanks! 659 01:01:13,710 --> 01:01:16,090 Mic 4: Ok, everybody welcome. LaForge: Thank you! 660 01:01:16,090 --> 01:01:17,480 *Applause* 661 01:01:17,480 --> 01:01:20,222 Herald: Thank you very much for the talk. 662 01:01:20,222 --> 01:01:25,425 *34C3 Music* 663 01:01:25,425 --> 01:01:43,000 subtitles created by c3subtitles.de in the year 2020. Join, and help us!