21 minutes was the transfer time at 2400 baud but you used the 300 baud price. $7.88 to see it at $22.50/hour.

$36.25 to see it at 300 baud (174 minutes at $12.50/hour)

BBS lists were published in computer magazines and on other BBS systems in the same area code, generally. Once you found one you quickly found links to others in your area.

Some guy in your city would just leave his computer on all day and you could call it over a regular phone line with your modem. Only one person at a time could connect and if someone else was on that board you just got a busy signal.

Terminal software and later modems themselves had “autodial” features that would keep trying to call until they eventually connected, so if you wanted to call a specific board you’d just wait while your computer dialed and hung up and dialed and hung up over and over again until it heard a modem on the other end. It was a huge technical innovation when US Robotics invented a modem that could detect the busy signal, allowing it to try the next attempt much sooner. Earlier modems just waited 30 seconds for either a connection or nothing and timed out before trying again.

In the late 80s BBS software started supporting interconnections where you could call your local BBS and send an email to a user on a completely different BBS, even in a different city. This could take multiple days to send and then more days again for any potential reply. It felt like Star Trek at the time.

I just went through a house move and unearthed a spiral-bound CompuServe user's manual from 1985. I have hand-written notes on the inside cover with the billing rates around that time. Cost was broken down in two tiers, prime time and after hours and then further by the speed you connected.

300 baud cost $12.50/hour in prime time and $6/hour in the evenings. 1200 baud cost $15 and $12.50. 2400 baud cost $22.50 and $19. Minimum wage at the time was $3.35/hour. Inflation-adjusted that's $55/hour for a 2400 baud prime time connection.

2400 baud modems were brand new in '85 and it would still be a few years before they were widely used. I'd been running a BBS since '82 so I always wanted to be ahead of the curve for speed and compatibility.

This was sort of the beginning of the end for CompuServe's real success. 1985 was also when local BBSs started to figure out how to federate and link up. FidoNet was really starting to take off and if you were a CS Major you probably had access to the proto-internet in the computer lab on campus at your college. It wouldn't be until 1990 before the first search engine existed, though.

I took a bunch of terrible photos of the book but then found that Internet Archive has the whole thing scanned in great quality.

Here's some photos of the book I have here because the artifact is kinda cool just itself: https://imgur.com/a/XQWi9cK

Here's the scan: https://archive.org/details/compu-serve-information-service-users-guide/mode/2up

That first photo on Imgur of the book's cover is 3.1mb. It would take 174 minutes to download that file at 300 baud. A blistering 21 minutes at 2400 baud. It would require 3 floppy disks to store it.

The text of this Lemmy post? 1,884 bytes which would take 6.3 seconds to send at 300 baud.

The Karate Kid was released 40 years ago

And now guyrocket is too embarrassed to admit they thought they were making a funny joke and didn’t realize they were 32 years too late to the punchline.

My iPhone has never intentionally made noise

You literally used the word "than" in your comment just now.

You've used some phrasing that I am not really following. What exactly do you mean by "stable" in regards to an email address? And what is an "unknown" domain?

I do this for every website, not just financials. As long as you have a quick and easy way to create the email aliases and you’re using a password manager I think it can be an easy and effective boost to security.

Just to be clear, the "reason" here is that your expectations are not correctly aligned with the project goals.

Does your city police department plow the roads?

I wonder why the NYPD owns a dump truck

Even if all that is true, Stewart is still 100% correct here

Also as a pipeline of fresh meat for the military

Permanently Deleted

Thanks for helping demonstrate the dynamic I was describing

I've learned to keep my mouth shut when my liberal/progressive friends discuss gun control. The left side of that debate is marbled with misunderstandings, misrepresentations of fact, and flawed reasoning.

Gun control isn't a very important issue to me, but much of the liberal side of the debate just makes me cringe. I've learned to just shut up about it, though, because when I speak up I usually get shouted down and abused for going against the groupthink.

No fucking way I ever vote Republican again, though.

I’m so happy he lived to see the discovery of the particle and the confirmation of his theory

Full totality here on a mostly cloudy day. We did get a few peeks of the sun, but mostly it just got dark and cold for 3 minutes.

This looks like an attempt to reproduce the web-of-trust functions provided by Keybase.io. Keybase has historically been a great resource that fills the same role as the PGP/GnuPG web of trust for a much broader range of identity attestations.

An open implementation of this concept has been sorely needed since Keybase got bought and shitcanned by Zoom during the COVID lockdown. Zoom wanted to aqui-hire all the Keybase devs to boost development on their lacking encryption and security. Sadly, Keybase has basically been abandonware since then.