On Fri, 26 Jun 2009 18:32:37 -0500, Ron Hunter wrote:

I have been kicking around on the internet, and before that on Fidonet
for about 25 years, and have grown a pretty thick skin, and a back that
sheds flames, and insults pretty well.

So that explains it, I've got at least 1/2 dozen years on you so
you're a newbie! And that's just considering modem use. My first
computer (completely hand built) preceded that by a good number of
years and it had no OS, just a simple monitor that had to be loaded
from paper tape, and the boot code to load the tape I/O routine into
memory had to be hand toggled into that same memory which at the
time was a whopping 8k bytes, soon to be expanded to 24k so I could
run a better BASIC interpreter. The first improvement for that
ancient system, before the added memory was a monitor in EPROM which
retired the paper tape.

I used several of those BBS networks, some of which were really
large multi-user BBS systems, and they often networked with other
multi-user BBSes. I even ran one (single user, non-network) for a
while. But before that was the first BBS, Ward and Randy's single
user system in Chicago back in the late 1970s. No charge to use it,
but at 300 (with luck) and more often connecting at 110 baud, long
distance rates made it only an occasional and very brief indulgence.


Getting all that upset about something on newsgroups
isn't worth the trouble.

There are a couple of guys from the old BBS networks that
habitually got themselves vacations from the moderated BBSes due to
repeatedly being abusive. A couple were quite knowledgeable and the
others much less so, though they didn't realize it. I've seen them
here in newsgroup_land. In some ways, not much has changed.