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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Cheeky Kid who wrote (15318)	1/14/1998 8:50:00 PM
From: Lady Lurksalot	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 108807

Cheeky Kid, Actually, we agree. For what you describe all you would really need is a webpage--if that--and use an existing ISP for actually connecting, with the software configured to to go directly to the webpage of choice. Throw in some custom bookmarks, and you're in business. Individual ISP hookups at $19.95 per, as opposed to large corporate hookups and other dedicated connections, are surely loss-leaders for existing ISPs--even the big guys. I can't see operating an independent or proprietary ISP as profitable. You just plain couldn't compete with what's already there and remain viable, IMHO. Besides, we're on the theshhold of cable modems and other wondrous gadgets. I think CompuServe did allow some access to Internet data bases and Usenet, but I'm not completely sure of this. Back in those days, CompuServe and the others had astronomically high hourly fees which were based on the speed of your modem. To have a 2400 baud modem was to be the envy of the nerds. There are still a few very good BBSs around, but not nearly as many as there were even a couple of years ago; I can think of several reasons for this, perhaps the biggie being the popularity of the WWW on the Internet. There is also the theory that in a very short period of time all the xxteen-year-olds and their siblings got computers and went merrily wherever a modem was to be found to connect to, and drove the old-time BBS sysops nuts. I know that several of my favorite BBSs are long gone, and thus I learned not to dial in the middle of the night those BBSs that I hadn't called in a while. For largely sentimental reasons, I guess, I can't quite bring myself to delete my dialing directories in ProComm Plus and PC Anywhere (for DOS, of course). Holly