AppleWorks 6 is dropping its telecommunications module, which is just a character-based terminal emulator. It makes sense since most Internet connections are PPP based (or some sort of leased line). There just aren't any services that provide dial-up shell accounts. When I think about this, it's a little sad that these tools are fading away.

One of the really good programs was ZTerm. A wonderful terminal emulator that was used by a lot of people on the Mac OS. Back then just about everything was some sort of shell account. You dial in, connect, log in and can start working with a command line interface. That's how I accessed my school Unix account (and got on the Internet, although back then that was primarily e-mail and UseNet), that's how I accessed various BBSes, that's how I accessed the BMUG BBS.

Much like having your own personal web site where you can put up discus- sion boards, chat boards, games and such, back then had their own Bulletin Board Systems. Mostly young people with a spare computer and a couple of phone lines could up a little community running out of their home. You might only support only one or two people dialing it at once, but there wasn't any real-time chatting, it was all bulletin board where you could read messages and post messages. There were file areas to download and upload files. And each bulletin board was very personal, a reflection of the sysops (System Operators) and the members.

Eventually they developed networks of BBSes, such as FidoNet or BITNET. Basically some discussion boards would be common to all the BBSes (well, the ones who wanted to carry them). Each BBS would dial up to another BBS to exchange messages for those boards, and in that way you could have hundreds of people participating on the same boards. UseNet is an outgrowth of this, and early on there were gateways to bridge UseNet traffic with FidoNet and BITNET.

ZTerm was *the* tool on the Mac OS. I used it for a couple of years until I reformed and decided not to use it since I hadn't payed the shareware fee, then I used ClarisWorks 1.0 or 2.0. One of the big features was its zmodem support. To transfer files you could do an ASCII dump which involves displaying the file on the screen and using your terminal program to save the output, which only works for ASCII files (like binhex).

Early protocols for file transfer of binary files were Kermit, X-modem, Y-modem, and some proprietary protocols. Kermit was a bit before my time and I think I only used it a handful of times. X-modem was really popular when I first started, and every BBS supported it. X-modem was one file at a time, in 128-byte chunks. This was pretty good considering we all had 300 baud to 2400 baud modems (compare with 56000 baud of a 56k modem). Actually it was a little inefficient at 2400 baud, and worse with faster modems. So they improved it with X-modem 1k which sent data in 1kb chunks.

Y-modem took that and introduced multiple file support. Now we could type "sy cindy*.gif" to download all the Cindy Crawford pictures on a site at one time. :-) Useful for overnight downloading. 2400 baud was about 800 kb an hour and GIF files aren't all that small. The next step was the Z-modem protocol, which introduced better compression and the ability to resume a file transfer. That was a big deal, although it didn't work all the time. But when you start downloading a 5 MB program and the next morning you find out it errored out after 4.5 MB, it's quite a relief to be able to resume the download to get the last 500 kb.

Wow, those were early days. I bet my brother has no concept of what I'm writing about. All this stuff is much easier to do nowadays, although we've traded that with other complexities like Java and stupid web sites. There will always be a bleeding edge that's hard to use for the layperson. I'm glad 99% of people don't have to deal with a terminal program to use the Internet, but I do miss those simpler times.