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Blizzard Births BBS 187

Posted by michael from the havoc-gunstar dept.
Foundryman writes "Nice bit of history at ZDNet about how the blizzard of 1978 led to the creation of the BBS."
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Blizzard Births BBS More

Blizzard Births BBS

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  • why in my day... (Score:4, Funny)

    by faeryman ( 191366 ) on Saturday February 22, 2003 @03:24AM (#5359251) Homepage
    Why, in my day, when it was a blizzard we didn't have no fancy BBS. We had to walk 15 miles (uphill bothways, of course) to the nearest house to trade our warez. All we could afford was one piece of paper though, and we had to write the zeros and ones on it. Bah, kids. Zzzzzzz....

  • Out of Curiosity (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Adolatra ( 557735 ) on Saturday February 22, 2003 @03:24AM (#5359253) Homepage
    Out of curiosity, does anyone know what ultimately happened to the original CBBS referenced in this article?

    • Re:Out of Curiosity (Score:5, Funny)

      by yppiz ( 574466 ) on Saturday February 22, 2003 @03:33AM (#5359285) Homepage
      Few know this, but CBBS, running on its original hardware, is the comments server for slashdot.org.

      --Pat

    • Re:Out of Curiosity (Score:3, Informative)

      by MsWillow ( 17812 )
      I'm not sure what happened to the *original* CBBS hardware, but several years ago, Randy Suess sold me one of the old hard drives, a 10-meg one, that had been used in *a* CBBS. He also sold off a bunch of S-100 boards, and an old chassis, so I suspect the original CBBS hgardware was sold off, over the years, as parts no longer needed.

      Randy's running Chinet [chinet.com] nowadays, and last I heard, Ward had CBBS. You could always ask Randy, if you're curious.
    • I just saw it about 3 hours ago, at the 25th anniversary party. It's not complete, (no floppy drive) but it is being watched over.

      --Mike--

  • my heroes (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Army Eye ( 651245 )
    What are these guys doing these days? Maybe they can come up with something to get the BBS scene going again. I miss it.
    • What are these guys doing these days? Maybe they can come up with something to get the BBS scene going again. I miss it.

      Kinda when the thing called the "Internet" made BBS'es defunct. The long distance charges really sucked.

      Who cares about BBS'es when you can set up telnet accounts for friends along with talk (or IRC).

      • Re:my heroes (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 22, 2003 @03:45AM (#5359316)
        Think "meta" - route around the Internet.

        Work with your neighbors. Build a wireless network using the common pool of equipment. You're not allowed to let other people on the Internet through your connection (check your AUP - many ISPs say something like this), but nothing says you can't let them get to things on your own network!

        Start creating content that only exists on the 'wireless' side of your network. Get other people to do the same. When enough compelling content exists on the "other" net, people will find their own way to get to it.

        Incidentally, this also sidesteps another problem that many people face on their home connections: "no servers". You're serving inward, not outward, so that never becomes a problem.

        I ran a BBS from 1990 to 1999 and shut it down due to a lack of interest. The fundamental concept of a bulletin board where people post about stuff is still needed - stare at your monitor for awhile if you don't believe it. Bring it back at a neighborhood level and you'll find the community that's been waiting all this time.

      • Re:my heroes (Score:2, Interesting)

        by Army Eye ( 651245 )
        I know, it makes no sense. The Internet can do everything a BBS can do, and better. But BBSes were still cooler.

        • Re:my heroes (Score:2, Informative)

          by haroldK ( 96625 )
          Why do I keep seeing stuff like this here? If you like BBSs, join one. I'm a member of one and I run one. Mine [princessharold.net] doesn't have that many users, and is only up for testing purposes, but the other one I'm on [bebs.net] has 17 users and 27 rooms as well as a LORD clone (Scary Caverns). There are many others out there with many more users.

          Seriously, if they're cool, use them.

        • Re:my heroes (Score:3, Informative)

          by gmack ( 197796 )
          ARE still cooler. Some still exist. Some friends have one running at telnet://bbs.mysticone.com [mysticone.com]
          We even have registered Tradewars and LORD.

          It's like... the BBS days minus the long distance charges(and multi node is suddenly much cheaper).

          • And by doing everything over a telnet session you get the nostalgic feeling of using a 9600 baud modem while on your broadband connection :)
      • Telegard was the BOMB! And long distance charges? Obviously you never heard of Code Thief? I really, really miss those days of the BBSes. A real sense of community.
        • Oh yeah, almost forgot, the guys who started this board used to log into my BBS. Nostalgia will kill you, it really will... I remember when the only reliable board was running Wildcat over at the now named Careerline Tech center.
    • I'm trying to get Ward back into assembler programming. Tales of 61k operating systems might help. ;-)

      --Mike--

  • Snow day... (Score:5, Funny)

    by vspazv ( 578657 ) on Saturday February 22, 2003 @03:30AM (#5359279)
    I wonder if the internet would even exist if those guys had had girlfriends during that week snowed in.
    • I wonder if the internet would even exist if those guys had had girlfriends during that week snowed in.

      Considering that they had nothing at all to do with the Internet, I'd say yeah it probably would...

      • They may have not had anything to do with the internet we know today, but they are indeed the fathers of the BBS, which evolved into the internet, after a fashion.

        • Re:Snow day... (Score:3, Insightful)

          by rusty0101 ( 565565 )
          Actually what became the Internet already existed. ARPAnet existed, and I seem to recall it celebrating it's 30th birthday in the last couple of years.

          What the BBS provided, respective to the Internet, was a bunch of people who had some experience administering equipment that connected computers over the telco PSTN. Many of these people started their own ISPs or went to work for new ISPs when it became obvious that the internet was the way of the future.

          Running a BBS gave you experience with user accounts, privledges, various chat and application options, modems, and in some cases even billing. In many cases it also provided you with a crash course in customer relations or even what has become known as Customer Relationship Management, as you usually were the tech support for your BBS.

          If you did not back end your BBS with a network of some sort, other than fidoNet or RHYME, you probably did not have experience with routers, or file servers. The vast majority of BBSs were single systems with 1-4 modems attached. If you wanted more than four modems you would have to buy special cards that would allow 8, 16 or even 32 serial ports per card. These cards may have been expensive, but in most cases they were less expensive than the added computer, network equipment, etc to add more phone lines.

          If you participated in one of the back end file and message passing services, and there was not a local hookup with another BBS, you almost always ended up paying monthly $100+ phone bills.

          -Rusty

        • Re:Snow day... (Score:3, Informative)

          by Forgotten ( 225254 )
          No, it really didn't. It seems that way to many people because they started on BBSes, then moved to dialup shell account access and eventually SLIP and PPP access. But on the actual network side of things, there's little connection between BBSes and the Internet. Some big multiline boards became small ISPs, but that's really more like repurposing old equipment. The only real connection I can think of is between Waffle boards and other UUCP systems, and those notably weren't really ever part of the BBS scene - precisely because they were leaf nodes to the Internet instead. There were FIDONet gateways and such in the early nineties, but rather than evolving they mostly just did out as cheap, real net access came along and the sysops lost interest.

          The relationship of the BBS scene to the ARPAnet/Internet is really one of parallel evolution or microcomputer imitation of what the real iron had already been doing for a decade. It didn't evolve into anything - it died out, as many parallel evolution strains do. I'm not dissing it exactly (you can probably tell I was right into BBSes) but it was the toy version, and the people involved basically outgrew it and left it behind.

  • Damn Blizzard!! (Score:4, Funny)

    by Nyktos ( 198946 ) on Saturday February 22, 2003 @03:33AM (#5359286)
    First BBS's, and then Warcraft!!! What next?? Some sort of fancy persistant universe?? CRAZY!!

  • Slow News Day? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Quaoar ( 614366 ) on Saturday February 22, 2003 @03:34AM (#5359288)
    Two stories from three decades ago...I guess Linux can only have so many kernel updates to report about...
    • Two stories from three decades ago...I guess Linux can only have so many kernel updates to report about...

      Just wait til 2.6 is released (or did I hear they're gonna call in 3.0?); they'll release an update every couple of weeks.
    • "Two stories from three decades ago...I guess Linux can only have so many kernel updates to report about..."

      Not to worry, Mozilla will have a minor version update soon. Soon there'll be much rejoicing!

  • Ahh Those were the days (Score:5, Funny)

    by Saoi ( 535612 ) on Saturday February 22, 2003 @03:38AM (#5359298)
    single character commands, harsh bootings, sounds like my kinda system, pity I wasn't born yet :(

    • Re:Ahh Those were the days (Score:5, Funny)

      by antiprime ( 121253 ) on Saturday February 22, 2003 @03:49AM (#5359335) Journal
      Get drunk to simulate the slow response time, then try to navigate through your favorite modern windowing shell without using a mouse, tie the power cord to your ankle to simulate random rebooting that you somehow blame yourself for: exactly the same effect. For advanced nostalgia, futz with your monitor and display settings so everything's a shade of green and black.
      • Get drunk to simulate the slow response time

        I'll drink to that!
        : )
        Cheers!
      • If you wanted a color monitor, you could buy one of those plastic covers that made the white text look amber.

      • ..tie the power cord to your ankle to simulate random rebooting that you somehow blame yourself for..

        So you're saying that you had a Spectrum or Timex/Sinclair? <rimshot>

        My Commodore had color graphics, rarely crashed, and had no mouse. It needed no mouse. CBM BBSs' were neat, because they could do color PETSCII graphics and even animated screens made from the graphics characters. It was similar (and possibly superior) to ANSI graphics, but this was at a time when the IBM PC had a green screen and a beeping speaker.

  • 5 million solders? I dont think so. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by DaPhoenix ( 318174 ) <raybNO@SPAMkod.net> on Saturday February 22, 2003 @03:41AM (#5359302)
    "The answer was two weeks later, when the Computerized Bulletin Board System first spun its disk, picked up the line and took a message."

    "Christensen wrote the BIOS and all the drivers (as well as the small matter of the bulletin board code itself), while Suess took care of five million solder joints and the odd unforeseen problem."

    Okay time for quick math.

    60 secs a min * 60 mins a hour * 24 hours a day * 14 days (a fortnight) = 1209600 seconds.

    5 million solders / 1209600 seconds = ~4.13 solders per second.

    Aint no way in hell he did that by hand.
    • By the way, honestly, what kind of sentence is this!?

      "Christensen wrote the BIOS and all the drivers (as well as the small matter of the bulletin board code itself), while Suess took care of five million solder joints and the odd unforeseen problem."

      What the heck is the odd unforeseen problem! The author might be refering to later in the article where they design a mechanism to detect an incomming call, start the floppy drive, etc, but they dont mention a problem beforehand.

      Seriously I expected 'more better' proofreading out of ZDNet :P

    • Sorry, that was a typo. It was supposed to be, "Suess took care of five million soldiers, joints, and the odd unforeseen problem."

      I'm guessing that Suess was a huge pothead, and traded dope to the soldiers in exchange for the hardware. The "odd unforseen problem" was when he ran out.

      It's all right here in this web site [stonersoldiersbbs.org]. Just don't /. it. Five million soldiers don't take kindly to DoS.

    • Re:5 million solders? I dont think so. (Score:5, Funny)

      by Mike1024 ( 184871 ) on Saturday February 22, 2003 @08:14AM (#5359828)
      Hey,

      Suess took care of five million solder joints and the odd unforeseen problem... 4.13 solders per second.

      Aint no way in hell he did that by hand.

      He did not do it all by hand,
      he did not do it with Ayn Rand,
      he did not do it for a band,
      he did not do it to command.

      He could have used a solder bath [cedmagic.com],
      that could have worked with your math,
      or may have used another path,
      for the figures which cause your wrath.

      Michael
    • No he purchased [chinet.com]his micro-computer as a kit. The only soldering he did was to add an aditional 8k of ram.

  • BBS Games (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Jason1729 ( 561790 ) on Saturday February 22, 2003 @03:46AM (#5359319)
    What I really miss about BBS's were the game doors, Especially Tradewars and GTWar. I know people run Tradewares via telnet not, but it's just not the same thing. I got to know the other players and it was more fun because it was personal.

    I still hold a grudge against Telus because they bought the company that bought the ISP that bought my BBS to shut it down and harvest their customers. I even cancelled my ClearNet cell phone when Telus bought them.

    Jason
    ProfQuotes [profquotes.com]
    • Don't forget The Pit!
  • The phone manufacturers could add some software and modems and then why not have a convergence of technologies like France had with minitel but with cellphones and all other types of phones. Have you ever called a local store to find a certain product but too late and they they had closed ? If you could just call their personal BBS/OS then you could see if they stocked what you were looking for and store hour times.

    There you have it. If these idiot electronic companies could get together with a plan to install this stuff then i think life would be easier for everybody. I don't think it could be done without government prodding though.

    • We have this technology, it's called the internet. It's not worth the trouble for most stores to setup an entire interface for customers to see their stock while they aren't open. That's why it won't happen. Government prodding? Are you suggesting to make laws against not having a publically available electronic inventory? And if the store is closed, what good is knowing they have it in stock when you have to wait till their open to buy it!

  • Bulletin: (Score:3, Funny)

    by $$$$$exyGal ( 638164 ) on Saturday February 22, 2003 @03:47AM (#5359324) Homepage Journal
    Bulletin:
    Bill brainstorms bulletin board before bedtime. Blizzard buoyed brainchild.

    --bare babes [slashdot.org]

  • Flashbacks???? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by sickboy_macosX ( 592550 ) <sickboy.inconnu@isu@edu> on Saturday February 22, 2003 @03:47AM (#5359327) Homepage Journal
    I thought This [slashdot.org] was discussed last week, leave it to slashdot to start beating a dead horse..repeadtedly, until people start complaining.

    Not trying to be a troll, just saying hey, we have already discussed it.

    Memo To Malda: Make sure your not posting the same story a week later...

  • I only sigh.... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by jlleblanc ( 582587 )
    I caught the tail end of the BBS era in the mid 90's just as AOL was beginning to ship out their free trial floppies, which everyone else used to get online. Where I lived, AOL didn't have access numbers, so I explored the local BBS'es and learned about modem commands and such instead. (Much better use of time :) Those days were fun.

  • One slow day in the news world... (Score:4, Funny)

    by pVoid ( 607584 ) on Saturday February 22, 2003 @03:58AM (#5359355)
    Man, this article reminds me of the simpson's episode where bart picks up a magazine of "Find Waldo", and all you see in the picture is this big empty room with waldo in the middle, to which bart says "man he's just not trying anymore"...

    The article is a dupe, and it's not even a karma whore, it's a single line, with a single link.

    I'm not really complaining though, so don't think I'm a troll or something. It's just good to have a sense of humour about ourselves every once in a while.

    • Re:One slow day in the news world... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by jericho4.0 ( 565125 ) on Saturday February 22, 2003 @04:20AM (#5359405)
      I'll back you on this.
      This is a dupe. From what? Three or four days ago. Yesterday we saw a multiple dupe about some interview Bill Gates gave 8 years ago.
      I realize I'm not paying anyone for the right to post this, but someone is paying the editors, no? Christ, start _trying_ to look like pros, at least. Take a fucking journalisim class and discover the concept of journalistic responsibility. I, for one, am tired of seeing dupes that anyone who actually reads the damn site could recognize.

      IMHO, slashdot needs to produce a mission statement that clearly states what slashdot is. Are you news? A gossip site? A bunch of kids playing in Mom's basement?

      I realize that 'go start you're own site if you don't like it' is a valid response to this post, but I simply don't understand the lack of professionalism I see here. We are talking about 20 posts a day kids, get with it.

      • In all fairness I imagine it has to do with co-ordination. I don't think that the /. editors read every article on /. like some of us readers do. In fact, if the editors are like most folks, they probably want to do something completely different from /. on their off-time.

        So, with a bunch of editors, it's only natural for things to get lost. Most of the time, the dupes have titles that could easily be mistaken for different stories.
      • Yesterday we saw a multiple dupe
        Three identical stories == tripe?

        -Mark

  • Never would have known... (Score:5, Funny)

    by cabra771 ( 197990 ) <<cabra771> <at> <yahoo.com>> on Saturday February 22, 2003 @03:58AM (#5359356) Homepage
    that those damn people at Blizzard [blizzard.com] not only killed all my social skills by releasing Diablo and Diablo II, but now I learn that they got me hooked even earlier! Damn all those BBS's I used to visit!!!
  • Am I the only one that saw the title and thought, "Cool! I wonder if they'll provide a door to Warcraft or a Warcraft version TradeWars?"

    Damn I spent too much time BBS'n.
  • ...what great things will the blizzard of 2003 spark into being?

    I'd bet $10 that this time it has something to do with porn, though... Heh.

    • Re:Makes me wonder... (Score:1, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      "This time"? Are you suggesting BBSes didn't have anything to do with porn?
  • When I first read this, I thought it was talking about Blizzard that makes Warcraft LOLOLOLOMGLOL!!!!!!!
  • Am I the only one who hates recollection? Especially recollection about how shitty things used to be?

    I remember hearing people talk about the 'good old days', now all you hear about is "OMG REMEMBER WHEN OUR COMPUTARS HAD 3KB AND YOU HAD TO TRYPE INSTEAD OF SPEAK!?!" -- IT'S FUCKING ANNOYING. STOP IT. I DON'T CARE WHAT YOUR LIFE USED TO BE LIKE, IF IT WAS SHITTY OR GOOD OR ANYTHING. SHUT THE FUCK UP!
    [yes, I meant to do that.]

  • Kids and Doors (True Story!) (Score:5, Funny)

    by romper ( 47937 ) on Saturday February 22, 2003 @05:17AM (#5359517)
    In the late 80's my parents took away the monitor to "ground" me from playing Tradewars 2002 on the local BBS.

    Of course I could blindly launch telemate from DOS and knew how to turn on the printer log and start the dial-up.

    The printer didn't even have ink! We had to read the carbon copy.

    You kids now with your fancy monitors and colors.
  • I didn't know what Chris Blizzard was doing in 1978! Wow!
  • Anyone know the cheat codes to Legend of the Red Dragon? Zandorf14 is killing me while I sleep every night, and that damn bar wench still won't put out..

  • It was GREAT! (Score:5, Funny)

    by xchino ( 591175 ) on Saturday February 22, 2003 @05:30AM (#5359540)
    Oh man, I remember how great those days were. Sitting for hours on end chatting away, playing door games, downloading shareware, adn :)(&(& )_& (*
    *&_(P&*
    (*()*+ *A+S)(*D+)( *

    I(_A)SD*_)Id
    +++
    NO CARRIER

    • Re:It was GREAT! (Score:3, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      True story.. I once got banned from my favorite BBS for swearing in the chat room. the word ass appeared TWICE in a fit of line noise..

  • Not the only thing... (Score:3, Funny)

    by liquidsin ( 398151 ) on Saturday February 22, 2003 @08:09AM (#5359824) Homepage
    ...conceived during that blizzard. I was born in November '78, roughly nine months after the blizzard. From what I know, the snow was so deep you couldn't leave the house for days (weeks?) on end. Thank you blizzard, for leaving my parents with nothing much else to do but have sex.

  • Usenet Born at the Same Time - Synchronicity (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Futurian ( 152084 ) on Saturday February 22, 2003 @09:29AM (#5359956)
    The impetus to electronically intercommunicate was strong. Usenet was born in 1979, one year after the creation of the CBBS. I was an undergraduate at Duke at that time, and recall being shown a prototype of the project by Tom Truscott. The early messages included arcane comments about operating system programming for "Unix wizards". I told Tom it was excellent, but with my limited horizons I internally felt that the early games "adventure" and "Zork" were more exciting. In retrospect, Tom Truscott, Jim Ellis and the other creators captured the zeitgeist and deserve lavish praise. A full Usenet feed topped 500 gigabytes in 2002, a mind-boggling size circa 1979, and the leviathan keeps growing.

    Tom and Jim were great people. They were enthusiastic, friendly, and helpful even to a "lowly" undergraduate. They were always trying to improve Usenet and spoke extensively about how the data structures of the news program had to be redone. Even in 1979 more sophisticated structures were needed to scale up and handle the growing number of news articles. The Duke graduate school did not have a budget item for long distance telephone calls to swap Usenet news items. Luckily, Bell Labs charitably became a hub of the early network and subsidized the long distance calls.

    Jim Ellis enjoyed reading SF and his programming skill helped make one positive SF scenario, inexpensive fast electronic communication, come true. I never had a chance to thank him for all his help and for suggesting I read "Shockwave Rider" and "Forever War". Thanks - via the celestial internet.
  • Some of you will remember that bbs program.. it came out a year or two after I started calling out to the boards. I'd love to see what would have happened with this software if someone had of made it open source. Alas.. everyone liked the idea of OS but nobody wanted to release TG under that license. Telegard embodied everything I loved about bbs software. It had almost everything I needed until I switched from DOS to Linux.

    Time goes on and we keep on reinventing ourselves..

    http://www.clockworkorangebbs.org/bbs
    • remember Renegade? the Telegard hack? well have a look here [sourceforge.net].

      who knows how far the project will actually get, however, as it appears to be lying dead in the water right now. perhaps some exposure on /. will help it get off the ground.

  • Here is some more info (Score:3, Informative)

    by Billly Gates ( 198444 ) on Saturday February 22, 2003 @11:39AM (#5360321) Journal
    He worked as a consultant for IBM. Whenever you bought IBM mainframes and or mini's a consultant usually came with the purchase. My father purchased 1 mainframe and several mini's back in 79 and happened to recieve Christensen as a consultant.

    Anyway the link is here [chinet.com] written by Christensen back in 88. Amazingly his old cbbs program for cp/m ran for 15 years before being retired!

    He tried to get my father to join his bbs but my old man didn't have a pc or I should say Micro-computer back in those days and did not see the fun in it or understand why anyone would need a computer at home. Back in 78 the pc's did not have any off the shelve software like development tools( besides Microsoft Basic), spreadsheets, or games. Christensen's z-80 computer for example only had 16k of ram, an editor and assembler compiler. Thats it. My father only knew cobal and IBM 360 assembler so he couldn't really program it.

    Anyway how it got started was that he loved to share diskettes and tapes with his buddy in Michican. The blizard of 78 was real bad. My parents could not leave the house for close to a week and snow drifts almost reached the roof. It took 2 days for my father to clear out a path to his car. We had close to 5 feet of snow. Anyway as the story goes he couldn't share the diskettes with his buddy so he decided to develop a way to use a phone line and a cbbs was born.

    He also came up with the idea of using phone lines before modems were around. Back in the early or mid 70's he was playing with a spectograph and was analzying analog data over an ethernet line. Out of curiousity he examined a phone line and saw striking similarities when examing the wave forms. He wondered if it were possible to use phone lines as a poor mans wan. He began working on a modem and hayes beat him to it before he was done.

  • When was the blizzard? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by AKAImBatman ( 238306 ) <akaimbatman AT gmail DOT com> on Saturday February 22, 2003 @11:52AM (#5360395) Homepage Journal
    Erm, am I the only one who remembers that the "great Chicago Blizzard" was in '79 not '78? Don't believe my rusty old memory? See for yourself [chipublib.org].

  • online discussion systems on mainframes (Score:3, Interesting)

    by thvv ( 92519 ) on Saturday February 22, 2003 @12:20PM (#5360505) Homepage
    BBS-like functions were provided by
    various mainframe timesharing systems well before
    1978.

    Multics had an online threaded discussion system
    called "continuum" (later renamed "forum") which
    I used while housebound during the Massachusetts
    blizzard of 78. The Multics machine wouldn't
    fit in my apartment though: I had a TermiNet 300
    dialed up to MIT's Honeywell 6180.

    Multics continuum was first written in the mid 70s
    in order to bid on a RFP for the Executive Office
    of the President of the United States
    (we lost the bid, IBM got it).
    At the time we were told that the capability
    desired was similar to a discussion system on
    the Dartmouth timesharing system.

    The PLATO system at University of Illinois
    had a threaded discussion system in the 70s,
    as did a similar system, forget its name, at
    Stanford.
  • Of fer chrissake, now even Slashdot is talking about the frickin' blizzard of '78? Is it some kind of rule that every damn news organization in Massachusetts or that has customers in Massachusetts (such as Slashdot, Newsday, etc) has to run a series of articles on a 25 year old snow storm [google.com]?

    I didn't even live in Massachusetts until a decade later, but I hear about this damn storm so much it's like I'm expected to commiserate with the people that did. On the anniversary of the storm a couple weeks ago, I was at my parent's house with my fiance and some other people, and not one person in the room was around to know what the newscaster was blathering on about, but they blathered on & on anyway.

    The way people go on about this storm every year, you'd think it was like the local Holocaust or some other mutual traumatic event. How could that be so? it was a snow storm, and it was decades ago. Get on with it!

    But no. Now even Slashdot is referring to it casually as if everyone -- even the thousands of Slashdot readers that don't live anywhere near Massachusetts and have never lived in nor maybe even visited Massachusetts -- is supposed to be part of the collective trauma survivors. *sigh*

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