Can you help this site in its attempt to preserve BBS history?

This is an appeal to all that are collectors of old computers and the old software of the BBS days. If you have old tapes or disks with BBS logs or anything related to BBS of bygone days that may be usefull to this site, please upload or donate it.

Here is what Jason Scott has said to ask for help in preserving this valuable information:

" Thanks for asking about how to help.
TEXTFILES.COM represents a multi-hundred-dollar cost to me each month, taking into consideration hosting and other concerns. To be honest, I can take it. I'm at an excellent job at a wonderful company and they pay me well enough to allow me this and other nice hobbies. This isn't to say I'll turn your money away, of course, but it shouldn't be your primary concern.

What is of primary concern to me is saving the files and text from the 1980's, and that text is located on now-aging disks, tape, and even, I dare say, 10 and 20 meg hard drives. When those media go, that's the end of that data, and I know I haven't gotten every important file ever created. If you've got some old disks that have files you never did anything with, please consider sending them or a copy of them to me. That stuff is precious; and it is rare; and it is finite. That's what matters.

If you're really a glutton for punishment, consider becoming a textfiles.com mirror. I could use more in other countries, than the US, which is pretty well sewed up. I can give details of the size and other matters.

Finally, if you're from that time, please consider mailing me about your experiences and what you learned from your time on the BBSes. Consider writing essays; consider sharing what you went through with the world. I'll happily provide a forum.

Thanks for caring."

Jason Scott
Proprietor, TEXTFILES.COM


My name is Jason Scott. Since I was 9 years old, I have had a fervent love of computers and technology, bounded only by realities of economics and time. From the BBS world of the 80's to the early wonders of the Internet and to the Web and beyond, I've dabbled and dosed myself in whatever hot new computing fads and freakishness this wonderful world could come up with.

As I entered into my late 20's, I realized I had been a part of many great things, and the perspective I had gained since that time gave me ideas. The most potent of these ideas has been to spread the feelings, horrors and astonishments of computing's history to people who came into it late, or never came into it at all.

I wasn't a Big Player in the Turning Points of the last 20 years, but I was a good listener and a good watcher, and I hope that what I do bring to you will both excite and intrigue. If you were there, we'll reminisce together. And if you weren't there, do I have a story to tell you....


Web Site: http://timeline.textfiles.com/
MAIL JASON: jason@textfiles.com

For anyone who isn't familiar with BBS, drop into this fantastic website and explore, I guarantee that it will be an eye opener experience !

Thanks to any and all that may be able to contribute

Have you ever been playing a video game, minding your own business, when something so awesome happens that you want to tell everyone you know about it? But then you come to find that no one gives a shit? Well, we feel your pain, and as a result, we have compiled this list of ten of the most awesome things that ever happened in a video game. Feel free to peruse the list an take solace in the fact that there are, in fact, other people that are nearly as nerdy as you are!


10. NBA Jam Tournament Edition– Play as Bill/Hillary Clinton, George Clinton, Al Gore, Prince Charles, the Beastie Boys, DJ Jazzy Jeff & the Fresh Prince


Bill "The Thrill" Clinton taking it to the proverbial hole yet again.

Never before and never again since has there been a secret character list that includes a cast as diverse as the President, Vice President and First Lady of the United States, George “P Funk Clinton”, and the GD Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. While playing as these characters doesn’t dramatically change the overall experience, there is a certain surreal quality to seeing Hillary Clinton perform a windmill slam-dunk from the free-throw line in DJ Jazzy Jeff’s face while Al Gore sets the pick on Will Smith.

9. Resident Evil 2 – Alternate play-through


I would rather eat a glass bottle of tobacco juice than enter a town full of zombies.

Resident Evil games are known for their secret weapons and characters, but perhaps the coolest secret ever in an RE game has to do with the alternate play-through in Resident Evil 2. After completing the game as either Claire or Leon, you can then play a whole new scenario as the opposite character following in the footsteps of and occasionally crossing paths with your original character. This made for four totally unique gameplay experiences in an already awesome game, something that is still unprecedented today.

8. GTA San Andreas/Tomb Raider – Hot Coffee mod, Nude Raider patch


This is offensive, but carjacking, stealing and murder is significantly less so. I guess.

Both of these cheats require a little bit of work on the part of the gamer, and as a result, only the horniest of gamers have ever gone to the trouble. But that doesn’t change the political shit-storm that resulted from the discovery of these two cheats, one that unlocks a cartoony and relatively harmless sex minigame, and one that unclothes what was at one time the biggest sex symbol in gaming. It’s funny that people would take such great offense at a little bit of nakedness in lieu of the graphically violent and depraved cop-killing, gang-banging gameplay of GTA, but we live in a repressed nation. And as for Lara Croft, it’s not as if Tomb Raider was the success it was because of the gameplay.

7. Final Fantasy VII – Ultimate weapons


This one right here is a real controller-snapper.

Challenging boss fights are nothing new to Final Fantasy enthusiasts, but the optional Ultimate Weapon battles in FFVII may go down in history as one of the most ridiculously impossible fights in gaming history. Each of the three Ultimate Weapons is capable of decimating your entire party in seconds, if you can even find them in the first place. You have to be so overpowered and prepared that the awesome rewards you get for defeating the Ultimate Weapons aren’t particularly useful in the end, as even the game’s final boss will seem like a bitch in comparison. But the sense of accomplishment you will get from taking them on and winning is priceless. Your hours, perhaps even days of hard work will be well worth the effort, despite having virtually no value or importance in the real world.

6. Double Dragon – Billy Vs. Jimmy


Two emo pansies having a slap fight at the Good Charlotte concert.

Double Dragon was one of the earliest brawlers that let you and a friend work together to beat the shit out of wave after wave of mindless enemy thugs, hell bent on stopping you from saving the babe from the evil criminal mastermind. (Nearly every game in the 1980s was about saving babes, you’ll remember.) Billy and Jimmy really had to work together as a team to make it to the end, so imagine your surprise when there’s only one babe to go around and she’s not into the whole tag-team thing. This forces you to face off against one another in a battle for Marion’s love and the coinciding bragging rights that come along with being the ultimate Dragon Master. So much for the whole “bros before hos” thing.

5. Metal Gear Solid – Psycho Mantis reads your mind


Yes I do, thanks for asking. Wait, HOW THE F**K DO YOU KNOW THAT?!

Every once in awhile a game will break the fourth wall and address the player directly, though never in such a bizarre and initially unnerving way as Psycho Mantis, a boss character in Metal Gear Solid. When I first encountered him, he said something to me about liking Castlevania and Suikoden, as well as making mention of how wise I was for saving often. I was completely weirded out until I realized that he had “read” this information off of my memory card. Just to be more of a dick, he then proceeds to “read” your controller inputs, dodging your attacks nine times out of ten, although switching controller ports mixes him up and makes him a sitting duck. To this day, I haven’t been as taken aback by a game as I was the first time I battled Psycho Mantis, an experience that made me question the amount of time I was spending playing games in the first place.

4. Mortal Kombat – Challenged by Reptile


You have officially earned the honor of being torn in half by a cheap-ass opponent!

Back before the internets were as commonplace as they are now, secrets traveled by word of mouth in the schoolyard, and required one to see with one’s own eyes before believing them. One such secret involved a character called “Reptile” that would randomly challenge players in the game everyone was already talking about for its insanely gory “fatalities”, Mortal Kombat. Basically, you’d get little hints here and there that didn’t make much sense at first, like one that read “Look to la Luna”. Later, when one was fighting on the “The Pit” stage, you might see an object pass by the moon (La Luna, duh). This was your cue to perform a double flawless fatality (no easy task) so you could have the pleasure of getting your ass kicked by a poison spitting lizard man. Awesome! Then you get to go tell all your nerdy little friends about it, who of course will not believe you.

3. Metroid – Suitless Samus


I still don't understand what the shoulder pads are for. Image By Ivan Flores

Try being a young boy and finding out that your badass missile-launching bounty hunter that just pwned the space pirates and rid the universe of Metroids was A F**KING CHICK! This kind of thing just didn’t happen, and the fact that there was no mention of it prior raised many a question, not the least of which was “Is it cool/fun to pretend to be a hot babe for a few hours out of the day?” How many tyrannies in their late twenties are there out in the world today that are still searching for the answer to this question, all thanks to Nintendo and Samus Aran? Also, just who in the goddamn hell is “Justin Bailey” anyway?

2. Castlevania: Symphony of the Night – Castle Flip


Dancin' on the ceiling like a vampire Lionel Richie in Hell.

A few sad losers may have missed this one, which would have resulted in missing out on half of the entire game. Essentially you have to equip an item called “holy glasses” before entering the final boss fight, which will allow you to see the evil force that is secretly controlling your enemy. Defeat this and you unlock an inverted version of the entirety of Dracula’s castle, which is really a marvel of modern game design to work both right side up and upside down without the player having ever guessed that it was built that way. The inverted castle is no repeat either, but rather, a more twisted version with different, tougher enemies and bosses to battle against. The day this secret was discovered, the collective nerdgasm was so powerful that the very Earth trembled, causing minor tremors worldwide and making a vase fall off the fireplace mantle at Bobby Wilcox’s mom’s house in Long Island, New York, which was, according to Bobby, “totally not his fault”.

1. Super Mario Bros., Super Mario World, Super Smash Bros. Brawl – Warp pipes, minus world, Mario masks, Mario Vs. Sonic/Snake

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention some of the many secrets that have been brought to us by our dear old friend Mario. Warp zones may not seem like anything special today, but back in 1985, stumbling across the warp pipes to new levels was a particularly thrilling experience. In particular, the warp pipe leading to the mysterious and ultimately unbeatable “minus level”. By the time Super Mario World came out for the NES, the non-linear formula had been perfected to allow for greater exploration. So much so, in fact, that if anyone actually went to the trouble of mastering 100% of the game, you would find that all the koopas in the game are now wearing Mario masks! Creepy.


Mario & Sonic: Responsible for more crappy fan art than anything since Star Wars!

As for the upcoming Super Smash Bros. Brawl, it’s no secret that Mario and Sonic will finally get to battle it out against one another, something that gamers have been waiting years for. (And no, Mario and Sonic at the Olympic Games does not count for reason of sucking horribly.) Not to mention the fact that Snake from MGS will also be playable. But since Nintendo has never been known to blow their wad of secrets before the game is on the shelf, what other surprises remain to be found? Pray to J it isn’t another nude code/patch, because as lovable as fat, mustachioed plumbers and hedgehogs with “attitude” may be, most people have little or no desire to see them naked. I hope.

Happy gaming

Here is the Photographs of Wikileaks Server which is Located at Bunker in Stockholm (Capital of Sweden). The servers are actually hosted by Stockholm based “Banhof ISP”, a server lab located in a nuclear bomb shelter, situated 100ft under a rock mountain.
























These Astonishing photographs were taken by Swedish photographer Jaan Lipka.

Only comment I can make is, "Is this a setting for a sci-fi movie and if not can I move in?"

Controlling Times Square’s Screens With a Phone, for Real This Time



A man from Toronto will try to take over a 5,000-square-foot screen in Times Square with his phone on Tuesday night March 22, 2011, replicating a hoax video that drew millions of viewers online.

Adi Isakovic called MTV last fall to propose a deal: he would stream live video, text messages and other content directly from his phone onto the company’s gargantuan video screen in Times Square. The demonstration would give Mr. Isakovic the chance show off a technology he had been developing for years, while MTV would place itself at the forefront of a movement, attracting a wave of innovators eager to develop the next generation of public art and advertising.

He never heard back.

But last Monday Mr. Isakovic, a 27-year old from Toronto, watched a video online in which a man seemed to do exactly what he had suggested. The video was a viral hit; over 2.7 million people have watched it since it was posted. It also turned out to be a hoax intended to market a movie. Still, Mr. Isakovic, who runs a two-person technology start-up called TubeMote, decided that his moment had arrived.

Over the course of several frantic days he persuaded an agency that sells advertising space on an 5,000-square-foot screen on West 47th Street and Seventh Avenue to give him a few heavily discounted minutes to show what he could do. He and his wife and business partner, Tania Nardandrea-Isakovic, drove to New York over the weekend and put their system through its final tests and tweaks. At 8 p.m. on Tuesday, Mr. Isakovic will attempt to take over the screen in Times Square with his phone.

If the demonstration is successful, it will be a watershed moment for the TubeMote. The company wants to allow people to use their phones as universal remotes, controlling not only their televisions and home security systems, but also public screens in elevators, on stadium scoreboards and, of course, in Times Square. It is a vision whose potential applications remain cloudy, but Mr. Isakovic says he believes that interactive public screens will be increasingly integrated into campaigns by advertisers looking to engage potential consumers directly. It is negotiating deals with several clients, said Mr. Isakovic. Among those is Adapt Media, a Canadian advertising agency that is working with TubeMote on a campaign where people could use their phones to post messages about the tsunami in Japan on public screens while also donating to relief efforts.

Mr. Isakovic’s partners seem to be motivated by equal parts curiosity and generosity, rather than a shared conviction that his goals are realizable.

“We wanted to help him out,” said Tony Sinodinos, chief executive of Spectacular Design Group, which runs the screen. “Whether or not I believe it is another thing.”
But it is clear that for Mr. Isakovic the stakes are higher than a fledgling business venture. He has been rolling this dream around in his head for much of his life, and said that the obsession had become the primary aspect of his life. When contacted by this reporter by e-mail, he agreed to an interview, but warned that he often worked himself into such a lather while programming that he lost the ability to communicate.

“Something happens to me when I focus deeply enough to create a complete hyper-dimensional model of a problem domain in my mind. It is almost as if different groups of neurons in my brain fire asynchronously, and if I try to speak I sound pretty crazy and confused,” he wrote. “So I hope I am not in that state when you call.” (Luckily, he was not.)

Mr. Isakovic’s first venture into interactive technology came when he was 16. He started a company to develop interactive video screens that would be installed in the back of taxis. In the end it was a failure from both a marketing and technical perspective.

“When the car went over a bump, the system would crash,” he said. “There was pretty much nothing useful about it.”

Of course, the idea of screens in taxis hardly seems far-fetched in present-day New York, where they are now are required by law — and are the only way that many passengers can calculate a 20 percent tip. Mr. Isakovic is confident that, 10 years from now, the idea of communicating with ubiquitous interactive screens will feel similarly obvious.

“I think it would be ideal,” he said. “I think it would make cities beautiful.”

He has talked a way into his chance to test out his dream. Now he just has to prove he can pull it off.

One of the most complex efforts toward a quantum computer has been shown off at the American Physical Society meeting in Dallas in the US.

It uses the strange "quantum states" of matter to perform calculations in a way that, if scaled up, could vastly outperform conventional computers.

The 6cm-by-6cm chip holds nine quantum devices, among them four "quantum bits" that do the calculations.

The team said further scaling up to 10 qubits should be possible this year.

Rather than the ones and zeroes of digital computing, quantum computers deal in what are known as superpositions - states of matter that can be thought of as both one and zero at once.

In a sense, quantum computing's one trick is to perform calculations on all superposition states at once. With one quantum bit, or qubit, the difference is not great, but the effect scales rapidly as the number of qubits rises.

The figure often touted as the number of qubits that would bring quantum computing into a competitive regime is about 100, so each jump in the race is a significant one.



"It's pretty exciting we're now at a point that we can start talking about what the architecture is we're going to use if we make a quantum processor," Erik Lucero of the University of California, Santa Barbara told the conference.

The team's key innovation was to find a way to completely disconnect - or "decouple" - interactions between the elements of their quantum circuit.

The delicate quantum states that they create must be manipulated, moved, and stored without destroying them.

"It's a problem I've been thinking about for three or four years now, how to turn off the interactions," UCSB's John Martinis, who led the research," told BBC News.

"Now we've solved it, and that's great - but there's many other things we have to do."

Qubits and pieces


The solution came in the form of what the team has termed the RezQu architecture. It is basically a blueprint for a quantum computer, and several presentations at the conference focused on how to make use of it.

"For me this is kind of nice, I know how I'm going to put them together," said Professor Martinis.

"I now know how to design it globally and I can go back and try to optimise all the parts."

RezQu seems to have an edge in one crucial arena - scalability - that makes it a good candidate for the far more complex circuits that would constitute a quantum computer proper.

"There are competing architectures, like ion traps - trapping ions with lasers, but the complexity there is that you have to have a huge room full of PhDs just to run your lasers," Mr Lucero told BBC News.


The team has been steadily increasing the complexity of their quantum devices

"There's already promise to show how this architecture could scale, and we've created custom electronics based on cellphone technology which has driven the cost down a lot.

"We're right at the bleeding edge of actually having a quantum processor," he said. "It's been years that a whole community has blossomed just looking at the idea of, once we have a quantum computer, what are we going to do with it?"

Britton Plourde, a quantum computing researcher from the University of Syracuse, said that the field has progressed markedly in recent years.

The metric of interest to quantum computing is how long the delicate quantum states can be preserved, and Dr Plourde noted that time had increased a thousand fold since the field's inception.

"The world of superconducting quantum bits didn't even exist 10 years ago, and now they can control [these states] to almost arbitrary precision," he told BBC News.

"We're still a long way from a large-scale quantum computer but it's really in my eyes rapid progress."

The problem I think is, trying to remember what commands run on what System and OS. Sometimes I need to get the OS' manual out to remember what commands to enter . The problem starts when You get to OS/Systems that never been released in the West. Japanese and Soviet/Eastern Europe spring to mind.

The difference between Amiga, Dos & mac is well known. But then you start getting in the murky waters of early 80's Computing, Where Basic (2 billion different versions ), CP/M ( Also Almost 2 billion versions ) GEM, and other Propriety OS's where supreme.

As a example, The Difference of changing a Directory between Atari's A800 Dos and CP/M where Huge. I think Today's Kids have it way to easy.

Where to Start. I've started My Emu road way back in 1998/9. It started with A5200 Emulation on WIN95. Then a month later Got my first taste with MAME, If I remember Correctly it was with 0.33B (something). Hell I remember being almost to get the whole Mame Romset on a CD and have room to spare.

courtesy of:

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http://www.onlineschools.org

I like these infographics as a means of emphasizing a blog what do you think?
(edit HT: I changed the pics over for you )

AROS (Arrow OS)
If you loved the Amiga you will love this new OS



You may have fond memories of the Amiga. The dazzling graphics and crisp sound (when PCs were faffing around with text mode and beeps), the super-fast multi-tasking, and the, er, lack of protected memory…
Well, forget that last one. It was one of the best-loved computers of all time, and it still has many fans today.

AROS - the Amiga Research Operating System - is intensely fast. Blisteringly so. It apes the Amiga design, both superficially and with its inner workings, and is designed to be source compatible with AmigaOS 3.1 (software written for the old Amiga OS should only need a recompile to work).
AROS has great potential as a light and fast OS for low-end netbooks and tablets



Short introduction to AROS

Introduction

The AROS Research Operating System is a lightweight, efficient and flexible desktop operating system, designed to help you make the most of your computer. It's an independent, portable and free project, aiming at being compatible with AmigaOS at the API level (like Wine, unlike UAE), while improving on it in many areas. The source code is available under an open source license, which allows anyone to freely improve upon it.

Goals

The goals of the AROS project is it to create an OS which:

Is as compatible as possible with AmigaOS 3.1.
Can be ported to different kinds of hardware architectures and processors, such as x86, PowerPC, Alpha, Sparc, HPPA and other.
Should be binary compatible on Amiga and source compatible on any other hardware.
Can run as a standalone version which boots directly from hard disk and as an emulation which opens a window on an existing OS to develop software and run Amiga and native applications at the same time.
Improves upon the functionality of AmigaOS.
To reach this goal, we use a number of techniques. First of all, we make heavy use of the Internet. You can participate in our project even if you can write only one single OS function. The most current version of the source is accessible 24 hours per day and patches can be merged into it at any time. A small database with open tasks makes sure work is not duplicated.

History

Some time back in the year 1993, the situation for the Amiga looked somewhat worse than usual and some Amiga fans got together and discussed what should be done to increase the acceptance of our beloved machine. Immediately the main reason for the missing success of the Amiga became clear: it was propagation, or rather the lack thereof. The Amiga should get a more widespread basis to make it more attractive for everyone to use and to develop for. So plans were made to reach this goal. One of the plans was to fix the bugs of the AmigaOS, another was to make it an modern operating system. The AOS project was born.

But exactly what was a bug? And how should the bugs be fixed? What are the features a so-called modern OS must have? And how should they be implemented into the AmigaOS?

Two years later, people were still arguing about this and not even one line of code had been written (or at least no one had ever seen that code). Discussions were still of the pattern where someone stated that "we must have ..." and someone answered "read the old mails" or "this is impossible to do, because ..." which was shortly followed by "you're wrong because ..." and so on.

In the winter of 1995, Aaron Digulla got fed up with this situation and posted an RFC (request for comments) to the AOS mailing list in which he asked what the minimal common ground might be. Several options were given and the conclusion was that almost everyone would like to see an open OS which is compatible with AmigaOS 3.1 (Kickstart 40.68) on which further discussions could be based, to see what is possible and what is not.



So the work began and AROS was born.

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http://aros.sourceforge.net

If you are into creating crazy or funny looking avatars then you will like this new service called Eightbit.me. The name instantly suggests that the service has got something to do with 8-bit. That’s true. It helps you create an 8 bit avatar of yourself. And they actually look pretty cool! You need to sign up with them via Twitter (uses OAuth) and then you can create a full-body avatar that shows a slight movement too. Their homepage displays some examples of user avatars.



Overall this is a nice service to play with and I couldn’t find anything else apart from letting you create 8-bit full body avatars. Their homepage also plays music automatically which will remind you of video games, like Mario.
Features
8-bit avatar maker online
Create 8-bit avatars with distinct colors.
Avatars are full body and show movement.
Sign in via Twitter to access the service.
Similar tools: ClayYourself, ThatsMyFace, AvatarizeYourself, Navilator and MpChange.

Take a look at the pictures below and see if you can identify this device. As you can see there is a light display on the cover which indicates a binary progression from 1 (20) to 32768 (215)

Is this a home brew binary counter of some sort? When was it manufactured?

Blinking Lights?

Housed in a box with "Magnavox" on the lower front corner and measuring 12" x 5" x 5" (30.48cm x 12.7cm x 12.7cm), this tightly packed assemlage of components performed a function I cannot identify. The most interesting thing about this unit is the set of front panel lights, numbering 1 through 32768, the first 16 powers of 2, if you count 20. On the underside of the box is the ID label, but I cannot quite read the handwriting. On the back are two RCA jacks, a reset button (?), and an AC powercord















Found Here:

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http://www.vintagecomputer.net/magnavox_mystery.cfm