Martin was an early influencer in my life. Here I am 30 years later and I still love technology.
I have been searching for a copy of his Blue Board software for years so I can setup a memorial BBS site over telnet in Martin's honour. I even managed to contact the owner of the original Sota Software who published Blue Board, but I haven't heard from him since. If anyone knows where I could find a copy I'd be very grateful https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Board_(software)
Fantastic. I miss the BBS scene and I miss FidoNet. I've been writing a lot of Go lately and I sometimes daydream about writing a FidoNet-compatible mailer in it. I wonder if there's anybody left to talk to.
The ubiquitous of communication today removes a lot of the magic of the BBS, at least to me.
On the other hand, I think there is a compelling narrative for continuing simplification of interfaces. There is no reason that 90% of what is posted, read, and written on hn couldn't be totally done in a simple terminal interface.
Mobile phones collapsed complex desktop interfaces down to a single column. Bots and sensors are making things even simpler than that. We are going from complicated back to simple again, at least from the user's viewpoint.
I think what is really lacking today is small communities tied to a physical locality as in BBSes. Social media today focused so much on "contact anyone" that something was lost along the way. Sure you can make lists or subgroups, but the hierarchy is flipped. I think somewhere out there is a niche for a web/mobile BBS-esque site where people can sysop their own local communities and select from a list of features like conversations, events, games, mail, etc.
Also, the barrier for entry is so much lower now. Having a working modem and terminal program and the phone numbers of some local FidoNet BBSes was just so much harder to organize than an email or web client is today. The high barrier helped elevate the level of conversation on things like Fido's Echomail (akin to Usenet for Fido BBSes).
Commodore actually bought an LCD manufacturer in the early 80's as part of Tramiels obsession with vertical integration. And as one result of that they built a prototype portable machine using an LCD in 1984 (NOT a C64 compatible, though). It was presented at Winter CES in 1985, but never made it to production:
Commodore seems like the kind of company that only ever succeeded despite its management. That laptop as described is ahead of its time and amazingly affordable ($500) and they killed it in the cradle. The most amazing part is that it apparently was going to run on 4 AAs for 5 hours.
I am (very slowly) writing software for a MSX BBS; I have the same setup I ran a BBS on for many years in the 80s. Except for the modem being connected to a landline, it is connected to the internet. Well it will be when it works. It has been a long standing dream since I watched (begin 80s) some guys who taught me games in assembly, create BBS software in Pascal and run BBSs from circuit boards from MSX computers they had hanging from their ceiling to save space (and it looked cool to me) in their tiny attic at their parents place.
Trunking makes it unlikely you'll achieve much more than 56k without the phone company being "cooperative" (setting up DSL). Even 56k is/was a major feat given that the analog signals would typically get digitally compressed into 64kbps channels.
If you could somehow get a "pure" un-trunked copper line end to end, it'd be down to distance and how clean the switch connections are - e.g. back when I was running an ISP in the mid 90's the local telco often delivered multiple Mbps leased line connections by simply hard-wiring "normal" copper subscriber lines on the switches in between, but of course that let them test and ensure the connections were clean enough and take appropriate action if they weren't.
The 56K modems of 20 years ago were near the theoretical limit of bandwidth on a conventional phone line. They required the far end (the ISP) to have a digital connection to the telco; i.e. you can't have 2 56K modems call each other and connect at 56k.
Depending on the telco setup; your analog telephone call is encoded into 64k digital, and some signaling schemes used one of the 8 bits for signaling, leaving only 56K for digitizing the audio.
For analog-to-analog calls the best rate was 33.6K.
Your lower bound is much too high. In our development country re network access (Germany) we still have areas getting "DSL light" with rates of 384kbit/s down and 64 kbit/s up (but equal pay...)
Martin was an early influencer in my life. Here I am 30 years later and I still love technology.
I have been searching for a copy of his Blue Board software for years so I can setup a memorial BBS site over telnet in Martin's honour. I even managed to contact the owner of the original Sota Software who published Blue Board, but I haven't heard from him since. If anyone knows where I could find a copy I'd be very grateful https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Board_(software)