Change in computers as a hobbiest... 2846
Well, the author of CygnusEd was a regular at club meetings, so I might have slipped him a suggestion...
I began calling bulletin boards in 1985. I never called a BBS outside of Sweden, however, so my sense of what is common is naturally based on what the BBS scene looked like in Sweden at the time.
In Sweden 1985--1993, there were the usual soup of Fido, Opus and RABBS systems, but what ultimately prevailed as my favourite type of BBS was the more discussion friendly `KOM' type systems.
Bernd Felsche Certainly some basic understanding is desirable, but where does it end? I have no idea how my word processor stores and parses the stuff I...
KOM (or COM as it was sometimes called when used with English commands) was originally developed under TOPS-10 by Torgny Tholerus (TTQ) and Jacob Palme (JPQ?), then at the Stockholm Computer Centre (QZ). I believe the system was running in 1978. It was later ported to TOPS-20.
Access to KOM on the machine ODEN was available not only to researchers, but also at a discount to members of microcomputer computer clubs, specifically ABC-klubben (The ABC Club, named after the Luxor ABC series of micros).
KOM spread to many universities in Sweden and I know for sure that it was running on AIDA in Uppsala, NADJA (?) at KTH in Stockholm and LINUS in Linksping. I'm sure there were many other installations, perhaps even abroad.
I believe there was an English version of KOM, COM, also available on ODEN and open to anyone who could access the machine. I believe ODEN and the Swedish University Network (SUNET) was available on X.25 in the early 1980s, which means it would have been reachable from the Tymnet in the US, for instance. The DTE addresses were 2405-0153-10 and 2405-0203-15, if I read things right. I'm sure someone will correct me on this.
Incidentally, SUNET nodes was not available by TCP-IP until 1988!
Naturally, since it was regarded as so user friendly, the user interface ideas of KOM spread to the microcomputer bulletin boards as well, the first clone being (I believe) MicroKOM on CP-M and later MS-DOS.
Later KOM clones for micros were, for example, TCL (The COMmon Link) and HKOM on MS-DOS and NiKOM and NT on the Amiga. Undobtedly, there were many more KOM clones.
Some of these systems, notably TCL and K2, had Fidonet capabilities, but many were used just as local bulletin boards.
When the last PDP-10s in Academia were being shut down in the early 1990s, some of the KOM lovers at the Linksping University computer club, Lysator, wrote a client-server based KOM clone, LysKOM, that is still running in many installations.
The most popular LysKOM client is written in Emacs Lisp and runs inside the Emacs text editor, but there are at least three TTY clients in the same spirit as the original KOM, at least three GUI clients running natively under Windows and two different WWW frontends.
Right now the LysKOM installation running at Lysator has 88 visible users logged in. There are over 1.5 million messages in the database in over 500 local conferences with several thousand users.
Other attempts to save the KOM culture were SklaffKOM, a clbuttic monolithic system running under Unix, and lately EasyKOM and OpenKOM, client-server systems with all the new buzzwords such as SOAP, Java, C#, et cetera.
The thing is; it doesn't add more stuff to study if you have a basic understanding. It actually saves time and...
What set KOM apart from other bulletin board software was the user interface and the focus on discussion threads, which, I'm told, was unheard of at the time (1976--1978).
Michael Widerkrantz Interesting. The command-line interface in MBBS and BBBS is based on the same principle. You only need to type enough of the command to differentiate it from the other...
A KOM user subscribed to conferences and could easily follow threads in a conference just by pressing carriage return. It was easy to skip over uninteresting comments and to directly go to another conference.
An important principle was that all commands was availableall the time-, unlike the menu systems many bulletin boards used.
The system always suggested the next command it would carry out by presenting it as a prompt, like this:
(Read the) next reply -
I hear you, brother. Ironically, these people wind up spending every bit as much time "learning the computer". Unfortunately, their form...
This is a small made-up session log describing how a typical KOM session might have looked like:
What is your name? = mi w
Michael Widerkrantz Lysator Pbuttword:
You have 1 unread letter. You have 2 unread entries in Free forum.
There are 22 other people present.
Michael Widerkrantz Lysator - 1 unread.
Text 4711, 1993-01-17 23:41, from Helena Cardell Recipient: Michael Widerkrantz Lysator Recipient: Helena Cardell
Change in computers as a hobbiest... 2847
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