News items for tag bbs - Koos van den Hout

Op artikelen op olduse.net kwam ik een echt VT220 font tegen. Ik dacht gelijk aan het gebruiken van iets vergelijkbaars voor bbs.idefix.net omdat dat natuurlijk eigenlijk in de VGA font stijl moet van de topdagen van de BBS geschiedenis.

Het kostte even zoeken naar het passende font, maar dat is er (vast een extractie uit een IBM VGA rom): Perfect DOS VGA 437 font en daarna wat aanpassingen aan de stylesheet, en nu is bbs.idefix.net in de juiste stijl.

Update: Iets meer werk toch: ik wil momenteel dat om 'historische' redenen de verwijzing http://bbs.idefix.net/ nog werkt maar wel de browser hint om te upgraden, zodat deze pagina met een oude browser te bezoeken is maar een recentere browser vanzelf https wil. De upgradehint ('upgrade-insecure-requests') zorgde er voor dat de http versie een font wilde laden vanaf de https versie en dat moest even aan de ontvangende kant toegestaan worden.

For a number of years between 1993 and 1997 I not only had a BBS running at home but also an IBM RT 6150 computer. It was a bigtower I got for free including the system floppy disks. I had to reinstall it because I had no idea of the root password and the only contact at the previous owners wasn't willing to give it up. So I swapped 1.2 megabyte 5.25 inch floppies for a while until I had a complete running system with AIX complete with graphical environment and a working TCP/IP stack.

The IBM RT 6150 I had came with 3 builtin harddisks (full-height). For as far as I remember those were 70 megabyte each. Eventually I had enough AIX installed to also have a working compiler.

One downside of this system was the powerusage. It used quite a lot of electricity.

The rest of BBS Koos z'n Doos also used a lot of power. When I moved out of my parents' house in a December month the effect on the electricity bill was remarkable. Next December my parents got a call about what changed because the electricity bill had halved. And I did put 'computers' on the form for the new electricity contract but that same december I received a bill because the electricity for that house was double what the electricity company expected.

For ages the whole 'right to be forgotten' issue was something happening to other people for me. The worst I do on my website is name spammers that keep sending me unsollicited e-mail.

This changed when I started playing with old files from BBS Koos z'n Doos including old BBS lists.

A few years after I started putting these on-line I received a request to remove a name from the lists. This person advertised running a 'hardcore sex' BBS in the 1990s. But in 2013 the rather unique name of this person showed up with a decent company and in this BBS list.

I could imagine that this person had no idea in the 1990s what someone might do years later with that information. At the same time it felt bad to 'change history'. Those were original files, it felt bad to change them. But after consideration I changed the name to spaces.

I also received notice from the google webmaster program that some search results are hidden on bbs.idefix.net. I have no idea which ones or what names I should mask.

The whole 'right to be forgotten' is a typical 'shades of gray' subject.

Time to count IPv6 visitor percentage to different websites again:

Site	July 2009	July 2010	July 2011	July 2012	July 2014
http://idefix.net/ my homepage	1%	2%	2%	3%	4%
http://netwerk.pcgg.nl/ hcc!pcgg netwerkgroep	2%	2%	2%	3%	1%
http://weather.idefix.net/ weather maps	< 1%	5%	6%	7%	6%
http://bbs.idefix.net/ BBS files		1%	1%	1%	3%
http://webcam.idefix.net/ the webcam	< 1%	1%	< 1%	2%	2%
http://www.virtualbookcase.com/ The Virtual Bookcase	< 1%	1%	1%	4%	87%
http://www.camp-wireless.org/ Camp Wireless	< 1%	1%	1%	3%	70%
http://weatherstation.idefix.net/ Weather station Utrecht Overvecht					1%

Interesting numbers. Results for The Virtual Bookcase and Camp Wireless are totally skewed thanks to some IPv6 bot constantly checking the site from constantly changing IPv6 addresses .. but without privacy extensions enabled.

Method: unique IPv6 addresses seen in the whole month / total unique addresses seen in the whole month.

Ik kwam wat papieren tegen van het BBS Koos z'n Doos en de vlakke scanner is weer beschikbaar, dus ik heb die papieren weer eens gescand. De rekening van de harddisk uit Februari 1993 en de kerstkaart uit December 1993 zijn nu echt goed gescand en beschikbaar in hoge resolutie.

Wat ik ook nog tegenkwam was een rekening voor een ROM upgrade van het SupraFax 14k4 modem uit December 1993. Opvallend, de aanschaf van het SupraFax 28k8 modem was Juli 1994. Ik weet op dit moment niet precies wat de reden was van de ROM upgrade, ik ga er van uit dat het te maken had met het definitief worden van de v32.bis standaard. De SupraFAXModem 14400 pagina op Wikipedia Engels geeft hierover geen informatie.

Good rant by Jason Scott on The Quiet Wikideath of BBS History - ascii.textfiles.com. I helped my bit by copying a few BBS doorgame articles from Wikipedia to the BBS wiki. I hope initiatives like Break Into Chat help preserve more history.

I think the big issue with early personal computing history is that storage was expensive back then so older stuff had to be thrown out. Now we all have permalinks and nothing gets thrown out. And when a digital archive is in danger of going away, Archive Team will rescue it.

In a usenet discussion mentioning fidonet adresses and the fact that ipv6 addresses are that much bigger I had to look in the original Fidonet technical standard 001 how big zone / net / node (and point) addresses could be. Those are all 2-byte unsigned numbers, which gives us:

• Potential fidonet node addresses: 65536*65536*65536 = 281474976710656
• Potential fidonet point addresses: 65536*65536*65536*65536 = 18446744073709551616

To compare:

• Potential IPv4 addresses: 256*256*256*256 = 4294967296
• Potential IPv6 addresses: 2^128 = 340282366920938463463374607431768211456

So Fidonet was by design bigger than IPv4. And I'll keep promoting IPv6!

I'm skipping all kinds of 'overhead' and 'reserved' addresses.

A while ago somebody pointed me at the BBS wiki at wikia.com where I created a page about BBS Koos z'n doos.

Since then I visited the BBS wiki on and off. I would like for that site to get some more activity so to people who remember BBSes and people who ran BBSes: go over to the BBS wiki at wikia.com and update it with your bit of BBS history.

I came across this video announcing the BBS documentary on G4TV. A somewhat younger Jason Scott introducing the BBS documentary and hoping other, better BBS documentaries will be made after he releases his one.

Update: Ok, this is weird: when this video is on my homepage the embed gets replaced by the video embedded from snotr recently but when this embedded video is on itself I see the right video. Must be some conflict in the embed code. And it only happens on one browser, with a different system with the same Ubuntu version shows the right video.

Time to count IPv6 visitor percentage to different websites again:

Site	July 2009	July 2010	July 2011	July 2012
http://idefix.net/ my homepage	1%	2%	2%	3%
http://weather.idefix.net/ weather maps	< 1%	5%	6%	7%
http://netwerk.pcgg.nl/ hcc!pcgg netwerkgroep	2%	2%	2%	3%
http://bbs.idefix.net/ BBS files		1%	1%	1%
http://webcam.idefix.net/ the webcam	< 1%	1%	< 1%	2%
http://www.virtualbookcase.com/ The Virtual Bookcase	< 1%	1%	1%	4%
http://www.camp-wireless.org/ Camp Wireless	< 1%	1%	1%	3%

Interesting numbers. Websites with a more 'general' audience are now also growing this year.

Method: unique IPv6 addresses seen in the whole month / total unique addresses seen in the whole month.