Broadband Internet Options?

[Robert Maxwell]

Jolly_St_Picard said:

Robert Maxwell said:

Jolly_St_Picard said:

Robert Maxwell said:
Whatever happened to the vast amounts of dark fiber that were laid during the Internet bubble, then sat dormant as the Internet didn't explode quite the way everyone expected? I know Google was buying up a bunch of it, but surely there is still quite a bit left untapped.

I'm with J. Allen on this, though. This is a situation very much like Y2K, it's just flying under the radar at the moment. I suspect this problem is helping drive corporate opposition to net neutrality, though. Nobody wants to lay out big sums of money unless they can use their infrastructure to create walled gardens.

Regardless, nobody wants to be caught with their pants down on this one, and I expect we'll just hear every few years that we're "nearing capacity," while it's still always growing.

Y2K was media hype and nothing more.

If you're saying there never was a "Y2K problem," then you're mistaken. There most certainly was--many software companies spent a lot of man-hours patching their software to deal with it, too.

The media did exaggerate its potential effects, though, and I think that's what is happening here. A lack of capacity isn't going to shut down the Internet or anything like that. At worst, people will experience slowdowns if they happen to be routing through a saturated network segment. Implementing QoS and smarter routing algorithms would solve a lot of that problem, anyway.

95% of Y2K was nothing more than media hype. I'm a programmer and know from experience.

Thank you for playing.

I'm also a programmer, and think you are exaggerating the exaggeration. Many people worked very hard to ensure there were no major economic disruptions due to Y2K. The media focused on the wrong things ("Cars won't start!" "Planes will fall out of the sky!"), but there most certainly was a problem, and it was important enough for various software companies to spend billions of dollars heading it off. Most companies don't like to spend billions of dollars on remediation when they don't have to.

The media was wrong about what would happen if Y2K wasn't dealt with. They were not wrong about it being a real problem, though. Unfortunately, because the world didn't go to hell when the clock rolled over to January 1, 2000, people are under the impression that Y2K wasn't a real problem.

 

[Paxil]

Another programmer here who knows Y2K would have been a serious problem if much attention hadn't been focused into fixing things ahead of time.

 

[Robert Maxwell]

Paxil said:
Another programmer here who knows Y2K would have been a serious problem if much attention hadn't been focused into fixing things ahead of time.

I think the perspective of any given programmer or IT worker with regard to Y2K is framed by their personal experience with it. If you were only working with modern software and tools circa 1997-1999, Y2K wouldn't have even been a factor. If, on the other hand, you were working with a bunch of legacy code (like me), it was a much, much bigger deal.

Hell, I was administering a message board back then, and spent a little time fixing the code so it would display "2000" instead of "100" as the year. Even relatively simple programs needed some fixing. When you're talking about tens of millions of lines of legacy code, the costs increase exponentially.

 

[Amaris]

Robert Maxwell said:

Paxil said:
Another programmer here who knows Y2K would have been a serious problem if much attention hadn't been focused into fixing things ahead of time.

I think the perspective of any given programmer or IT worker with regard to Y2K is framed by their personal experience with it. If you were only working with modern software and tools circa 1997-1999, Y2K wouldn't have even been a factor. If, on the other hand, you were working with a bunch of legacy code (like me), it was a much, much bigger deal.

Hell, I was administering a message board back then, and spent a little time fixing the code so it would display "2000" instead of "100" as the year. Even relatively simple programs needed some fixing. When you're talking about tens of millions of lines of legacy code, the costs increase exponentially.

Would it have been Renegade software?

That's what I was using around the time, and I knew it was going to fail in the changeover.


J.

 

[Robert Maxwell]

WWWBoard, actually. Even in 1999, it was woefully obsolete, but the posters couldn't bear to get rid of it.

 

[Amaris]

Robert Maxwell said:
WWWBoard, actually. Even in 1999, it was woefully obsolete, but the posters couldn't bear to get rid of it.

WWWBoards. I don't recall that one. At the time I started SysOping my own BBS, they were everywhere. I used Renegade, but I was also familiar with Wildcat, PCBoard, WWIV, AmigaNet/CNET, and so on. I loved Renegade software because of the ease in which I was able to modify settings. I had switched my board (Stardock 212) from WWIV to Renegade, and never looked back...until I had to switch to Synchronet in 2000.


J.

 

[Robert Maxwell]

This is WWWBoard. It's about as simple as you could get. For me, that meant I could add all sorts of stuff to it, because there wasn't that much code to it in the first place.

Eventually, we switched to RPGBoard, then eBlah. Sticking with eBlah, as far as I know...

 

[Amaris]

^ Wow. You were not kidding about the simplicity. Barren seems to fit more appropriately.

Renegade BBS software was great. I wish I had screenshots of my original board. Here is a link to a Renegade BBS main menu. It doesn't look half as good as the one I had, but it'll do.

Ah, the good old days. File Downloads using Zmodem, FidoNet, Tradewars, L.O.R.D.

You know, when I ran my BBS it only had a third the number of users my web based Forum now has, but it was more thrilling, more fun, more involving. I miss that era of computing.


J.

 

[Robert Maxwell]

Oh, you were talking about a bona fide dial-up BBS! Ha. I missed that boat, in all honesty. I lived in the boonies when I was at the right age for that stuff. There weren't any local BBS' for me to dial into. But by 1996 I had discovered the Web.