Re: Did you Know? Car-Seat.Org 10th Anniversary Factoid #1
Factoid #2:
I started my first BBS forum around 1983 or 1984. It was called "The Wall", named after the Pink Floyd album from a few years earlier. You could leave "graffiti" on the wall for other members to see. My original "screen name" was "The Rook".
Some comparisons of The Wall at its peak 25 years ago with today's Car-Seat.Org:
Computer: The Wall ran on an Apple II+ with 48 kilobytes of memory and 1MHz 6502 processor. Car-Seat.Org runs on a distributed server cluster of computers with many gigabytes of memory and multiple processors running at a few Ghz.
Connectivity: The Wall had a Hayes 300bit/s modem that hooked up to an analog phone line. Car-Seat.Org's provider has redundant high speed connections measured in billions of bits/s.
Storage: The Wall's database was around 250 kilobytes, stored on a Rana Elite floppy disk drive. There were probably 1000 posts in the database at most. Car-Seat.org's database is almost 2 Gigabytes, stored on redundant ultra high speed SCSI and solid state hard drives. There are over 1 million posts in the database.
Bandwidth: The Wall was text-only, black and white (unless you used a "green screen" monitor!). It probably transferred less than 1 megabyte on its best day. Car-Seat.Org transfers over 5 gigabytes on peak days.
Members: The Wall had at most 100 members. One member could dial-in at a time to browse and post messages. On a good day, perhaps 15 unique members might visit. Car-Seat.org has over 10,000 members and over 1,000 members and guests are visiting simultaneously at peak times during the day. On a good day, Car-Seat.Org has 15,000 unique visitors.
Most users of The Wall were male in the 12-18 year-old demographic. Most topics centered around music and high school, as you might imagine. Car-Seat.Org members are overwhelmingly female, mostly in the 25-44 age groups. Child Passenger Safety, children and daily family life dominate the topics.
"The Wall" ran through mid 1986 until it was closed due the sysops going to college and obsolete technology (newer BBS software had color, graphics and hard disk drives allowed more storage but that was way too much $$$). I wonder what kind of forum I will be running 25 years from now?