110

BBS
Posted on January 11, 2011 by David M Willis

110 thoughts on “BBS”

  1. DaniellePhantom

    computer dork love <3

  2. Undrave

    Aww… its the begining of a beautiful friendship!

  3. David Herbert

    Oh God, just like when I started. I swear, I didn’t learn anything for the first six months because it was just an introduction to MS Office.

    1. BlueNight

      I tested out of Intro To Computers for my 2-year. It was 1/4 each of bits & disks, Word, Excel, and Access databases. Studying Access for two days and never having used databases ever before, I found it was surprisingly easy to match the terminology of the test with the tooltips. I thought I was going to fail it, however, because stupid Word 2007 and beyond has those stupid button bars instead of text menus, and it took me five minutes to turn the text the right shade of green and not bold, so I ran out of time.

      1. Trixter

        I learned early on in the Intro Office class they made me take not to make eye contact with any other students lest I end up spending the whole night doing their homework for them.

  4. arjay2813

    well at least its not ASCII of something worse

    1. Bubba

      (_o_)

      1. arjay2813

        oddly enough, that’s close to what i was imagining. creepy bubba, creepy

      2. milk experiment

        GOATSCII? Now I’ve seen everything.

        1. Bill M.

          That’s not GOATSCII, there’s no hands.

          E(_O_)3

          Now THAT’S Goatscii.

        2. Quantum Polagnus

          ε(_☼_)3

        3. thomas0comer

          WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TO ME!?

  5. General Tekno

    Is that Shaggy from Scooby-Doo in the background?

    1. Merrick

      This again?

      1. Monty Prime

        Green shirt, unkempt hair, little chin beard thing.

        Looks like Shaggy to me.

        1. Malph

          No, that’s me before I grew my hair out.

    2. KCO

      I’ve been thinking the exact same thing. XD

      1. Osaru Sensei

        ‘Like, Totally, Scoob’

        We’ve been over this 😛

    3. cappadocius

      No, that’s Dumbingverse Hooper X.

  6. MM

    This strip rings painfully true. And I only took Intro to Computer Science because I needed some non-humanities credits.

    1. Malph

      If there were any Intro to Computer Science classes were actually open when I finally get around to registering (a week before the deadline) I’d take one. I need a computer class for my degree and the fact that I just typed and posted this proves I know enough about computers to get an A. It’ll be the 2nd easiest 3 credits I’ll ever get.

  7. Jen Aside

    BBS LURVE

    What doorsTELL ME PIMP WARS PLEASE

    1. Trae Dorn

      Nope, Just LORD, Usurper and Trade Wars 2002.

  8. Nearphotison

    Is that Shaggy from Scooby-Doo sitting behind them?

  9. AsinineAxioms

    Back in the days when dial-up was the norm, I used to have a script that would send a thousand emails to a specified address every time somebody accessed the page the script was embedded on. I had some good times with that.

  10. Mobius Strip

    Huh, the “intro” computer science classes I took taught Scheme and C++. I didn’t even know there were actually college level courses that gave you credit for knowing basic computer literacy.

    1. MissAzrael

      I had to take Computers in Education. We spent the first week (yes, the first week) going over the finer points of how to send an email. And this was in 2001, mind you.

    2. milk experiment

      I took one like that, but it got the silly fluff out of the way in 2 or 3 weeks. Also, it was my school’s version of a general studies elective about the Internet and not part of the “real” computer science curriculum. Also also, it was 1995 — back before every 18 year-old knew more about computers than many of the professors. Good lord, I feel old all of a sudden. D:

      Anyway, Danny was just complaining about not being at a school with a good comp sci program. I figure this pitiful introductory material is a sign of how bad it is.

      1. Bickendan

        I had several ‘Computer Science’ classes teaching this… in 2000. I surfed the web and discovered Sluggy Freelance during the lectures.

        1. Rusty

          First month at least of the Intro to Computers (Specifically designed to give you an introduction to C++ and general programming) I took 2 years ago was just basic how to use a computer stuff.

          But, thankfully that one was an online class, so I skipped most of the first month and just read over a summary of what the class was about. Still found it annoying though that the teacher insisted on repeating those “helpful hints” that she taught in the first month all throughout the rest of the year.

          Most of the stuff was pretty non-basic stuff, but if you’re going into actual programming chances are you’ve got HTML figured out already >.>

    3. Chad from Canada

      Uh… Those were high school classes for me… C++ Basic was eleventh grade… Then in 12th we moved into C++ Visual… But I dropped that because after looking at the 5000 lines of code it takes to make the drop-down File menu… I realized I really had no interest in programing… Mind-numbing…

  11. turkishproverb

    That brings back memories. My adviser wouldn’t let me test out of anything either.

  12. wynne

    So Danny is officially the Lois lane to Amber’s Supes now?

    1. TemplarKnight

      Danny has always been the Lois Lane to the various butt kicking women he’s dated. He rarely realizes it.

      1. Ancestral Hamster

        Does this mean at some point he’ll be tied up with his clothes in tatters for Amazi-Girl to rescue? (Hey, they did it to Teri Hatcher when she was Lois Lane!)

  13. Sharktibolt

    Having just taken a Computer Science Basics class, I can say I’m not exactly sure if any of what I learned had any use whatsoever.

    We spent an entire class talking about how to sort playing cards. All I remember from that is about 15 minutes was spent on 52 pickup.

    1. Daelin

      If you sorted them using a variety of algorithms, I’d say that was pretty useful, especially if it successfully demonstrated the strengths and weaknesses of each type of sort.

  14. Dierna

    I know how that is. I generally got bored, finished my work super fast and would end up helping the teacher by helping students who didn’t understand *lol*

  15. Shift

    Aww… they’re computer geek bonding.

    1. Rognik

      Hurray for bonding! Which, I should note, is completely separate from bondage. (Never gonna make that mistake again…)

  16. Lara

    I’m taking Computer Science this semester. ‘Good to know it’ll be an even easier A than I thought.

  17. Chris Ashtear

    Oh I miss BBSs. And door games. Especially L.O.R.D. You have been hit with an ugly stick! Lose 10 charisma!

  18. drpepperfan

    What’a a BBS?

    1. Zap

      Your FAAAAACE.

      1. MJ

        There’s a store called “Your FACE” in Finland, caps letters and all. Seriously.

        http://www.yourface.fi/eng/store_locator.php

        See.
        +5 awesome to Finland

    2. Cholma

      In the days before the World Wide Web (and graphics!), when us old folks were using HP Teletypes with 300 Baud modems, BBS were how we talked with other people not in the same room, and played Zork-like* text games. (or games using ASCII graphics like NetTrek)

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulletin_board_system

      * (please don’t ask me what Zork is. My heart couldn’t take the pain.) 😉

      1. drpepperfan

        Woah, it’s like reading about morse-code in an history book, I can’t imagine a world without graphics 0_0
        I’ve played Zork, it’s a classic! 😀 “You may be eaten by a grue”

        1. Nichan

          You can’t imagine a world without graphics……
          But you’ve played Zork…
          But you can’t imagine a world without graphics…
          But you’ve played Zork…
          But… But…
          **Nichan’s head has exploded, taking out the above light fixture with it. It is dark. You may be eaten by a grue.**

        2. Bickendan

          *Is eaten by a Grue.*

          You are standing in a clearing. In front of you is a white house.

        3. milk experiment

          There is a small mailbox here.

          ] open mailbox

          Opening the mailbox reveals a leaflet.

          ] read leaflet

          (taken)
          “WELCOME TO ZORK!

          ZORK is a game of adventure, danger, and low cunning. In it you will explore some of the most amazing territory ever seen by mortals. No computer should be without one!”

          You can play it online here. Type “help” and hit Enter to learn how to login and save your progress.

        4. Rusty

          http://www.legendsofzork.com/ I’m sorry to have to show this to you, but yeah, someone thought to themselves “Hey, let’s add graphics to Zork!”

        5. Strephon

          The first graphical Zork adventure came out in 1993, so Legends of Zork is just following suit. (And these versions of Danny and Amber are too young to remember a world without graphical Zork. I feel very, very old now.)

        6. Strephon

          The first fully graphical adventure, I should say–Zork Zero, which had some graphics, came out in ’88.

      2. Ancestral Hamster

        Remember when a fast modem was 1200 baud, but most BBSs couldn’t handle that speed, so you had to log in at 600 baud or less?

    3. agentksilver

      Oh goodness I am so glad I’m not the only one who doesn’t know what a BBS is.

  19. Bell_

    I like this Amber, but BBS would have started to disappear in favor of local ISPs even when she was young. (Oh, I’m sure some are still around, but they used to flood local computer newspapers like personal ads)

    TW2002 was pretty amazing.

    1. David

      Amber wasn’t around for BBSes, but that doesn’t mean she doesn’t nerd out about them. If you’re obsessively interested in a subject, you probe its history.

      1. Trae Dorn

        There are still some BBSes around — and a few are running Telnet clients too, so people can still play classic Door games.

        You just have to hunt them down is all.

        1. Ian

          But, aren’t they an endangered species?

        2. Kelly

          Yep, and there are still some gopher sites as well.

          Unfortunately, browser makers are starting to drop support, someday soon you may need a dedicated client for it.

          gopher://gopher.quux.org/1/

        3. Ristar

          more than a few Linux browsers support them.
          >you find an apple on the ground
          >Eat apple.
          >core dump

        4. Chad from Canada

          Lol @ Core-dump… That just made my whole day Ristar.

  20. AsinineAxioms

    Concerning the new poll: I wonder how many people are going to read LORD as a divine entity, rather than L.O.R.D. the door game.

  21. Eri

    You know, a few days ago I was just kidding about the ship thing, but now I kind of appreciate them in a bromance kind of way (can a guy and a girl have a bromance?)

    1. wnderjif

      brotherly love?

      1. Pagannerd

        http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheStraightWillAndGrace

        1. Ancestral Hamster

          *The Hamster looks at the domain name before clicking, and quickly backs away from the link.*

  22. Black Bumblebee

    I remember my intro to computer class from college in ’93: the computers didn’t even HAVE a mouse, and we had to learn “F keys” and silly control + whatever shortcuts. I offered to bring my mouse from home, but was told not to bother, as they were a “fad.”

    1. Rusty

      Of course they’re just a fad. Everyone knows that the Power Glove is gonna become the norm man.

      1. Pagannerd

        You mean it isn’t already? My Mother lied to me!

        1. Rusty

          I love the Power Glove. It’s so bad!

        2. Bill M.

          Yeah, well, uh, just keep your Power Gloves off her, pal, huh?

    2. airfox

      Weird.

      We had mice on our computer courses back in 1991 … in a third world country … and weren’t considered a fad.

      -airfox

  23. milk experiment

    (1) Uh oh. I think I might have just become an Amber/Danny shipper. Amby? Danber? The Amazi-Ship? …I’ll stop now.

    (2) So that’s the achievement she was unlocking.

    1. agentksilver

      I kind of like Danber.

      1. Kernanator

        Danber sounds like some species of animal.

  24. Doom Shepherd

    You know what’s extra funny about this for me? When I started college, I signed up for an “Introduction to Computing” course that I THOUGHT was about Office and Word and such… but it turned out to be all programming. I actually needed the class Amber doesn’t.

  25. Booger.

    they’re in a classroom? it looks like they are riding a crowded bus!

  26. Paul_Bags

    I’ve heard the term BBS before, but until this comic I thought it some strange analog for ‘forum’.

  27. MrGBH

    BBS? I have no idea what that is. I also have no intention of ever finding out. As long as the magic word box keeps talking to me, I’m happy.

  28. Pingback: Tweets that mention Dumbing of Age - Bbs -- Topsy.com

  29. Daibhid C

    I don’t remember the computing course I took at college, which probably speaks volumes about it. I do remember taking the European Computer Driving Licence course because I was told it would help me get admin work. Luckily, it was designed for us to work at our own pace, which meant I got through the whole thing in about three weeks. (It would have been two weeks, but it was the year before we got the internet at home, so I intentionally milked that section in order to surf Wikipedia. If TVTropes had existed I’d have taken a couple of months.)

    And how useful did this prove in my job hunt? Every admin interview I go for, the first thing they ask is “What’s an ECDL?”

  30. Robert in San Diego

    1. The counselor, at least theorically, should be old enough to know what a BBS is. Aren’t Amber and Danny a little young for direct knowledge of the wonderful BBS direct dialing experience?
    2. There IS a place for some basic applications training in 4 year institutions. Finding out how “Headers” work makes organizing papers in word processing a bit easier — since most off the high function ones now have an “outline view.” Using header types is way better than trying to remember what font/size/effects you’d been using for chapter or section titles.
    3. Also presenters have to be told what not to do with their presentation managers. My class best was setting backgrounds inside charts — I was telling the person in the lab beside me “I hope I’d be fired for this in the real world” right before the instructor said “You’d be fired for that in the real world,” BUT I know some maniac out there is going to want fabric-textured columns superimposed on a puppy picture one of these days.

    1. Cha

      If you don’t know how to, it’s easy to find out. Just google a question and bam, answer.

  31. LurkerAbove

    ANSI penises would be more apt, though unrecognisable 😛

  32. Ristar

    I was a computer science major and approve this message. Are both Danny and Amber CS majors? If so I hope to revist the good ol’ days of 2 years ago before I graduated. ah staying up all night writing a C++ program, 2 300 level math classes a year, losing hair early, drinking every night to forget how hard your classes are.. oh wait nevermind, I like my job now. keep the nostalgia, I’ll keep the paycheck.

  33. Zem

    I’m leaning towards thinking that Danny will become her sidekick after they have bonded. (Seriously, why aren’t there more female heroes with male sidekicks? Oh right…)

    Can anyone suggest a good name?

    1. Cha

      Awesome Boy?

      1. gangler

        Incredi-boy?

  34. nitpicker

    If this is anything like my university, Amber will change majors after she gets tired of being the only girl in every one of her CS classes. Being fawned over by a horde of socially inept nerds gets old.

  35. agentksilver

    I took a basic computer course at the liberal arts school I attended for a year. I thought it would be simple, as I have a pretty good grasp of html and troubleshooting, and I was genuinely interested in learning what the course was teaching. She dropped us right into C++ as a basic language course. I couldn’t follow computer logic at all, begged the entire computer staff for help just to do my homework, and played off my stomach ache as an excuse to not attend class again, and got about 3 points in that class overall (okay, 4, because I had done some homework). Two years later, I took a course in basic problem-solving. If I had taken that course before “basic” computer programming I wouldn’t have failed that course so badly.

    The point is, I have no sympathy for Danny and Amber right here. I do, however, find their geeky interchange adorable.

    1. agentksilver

      (to be fair, the stomachache was completely serious — turned out my entire digestive system had shut itself down for a few weeks)

    2. gangler

      No sympathy at all? Fair enough. You’re free to your stance on that. Certainly though courses like this seem to me like the equivalent of an college English course that starts you off by explaining phonetics. You’re teaching people in their twenties. If highschool didn’t take care of this they can look up the basics before they come.

      Then again, my general stance is that they should assume their students already know what’s on the wikipidia article before they walk in the door.

  36. Glooble

    I think I remember my parents being on a Star Trek BBS when I was little. I’m pretty sure that’s what it was, anyway – this would have been the early nineties.

  37. Gianni

    Heheh, I really like Danny and Amber together. Looking forward to seeing where this goes.

  38. Reepicheep-chan

    My councelor did not even make me test out of Intro to Computers. I was asked if I could use a computer, I said yes, and he put me in the combined accelerated class (which was still pretty easy, but did not involve teaching me what a mouse was) (and yes, the intro class did teach students what a mouse was).

    It was an art school so computer literacy among the student body ran the gamut between Apparel students and Visual Game Programming students.

  39. Roborat

    Awww, how cute, nerds bonding. So when does the rest of the gang show up, and how will they sneak Scooby in?

    So, the question is, where does this go? Do they go the love interest route, or just stay friends? Or, my preference, mainly for the torture and humour potential, they could vacillate between the two.

  40. Pagannerd

    Eesh. My boyfriend’s a first year BioMed student, and one of his core modules is something to do with statistics. He kept fuming because the first six weeks taught nothing but, and I shit you not, “How to find the mean”. A: Who the fuck doesn’t learn that in PRIMARY SCHOOL and B: How can anyone possibly justify taking longer than, say, seven damn minutes to teach how to find the bloody mean?

  41. Strephon

    My time in library school was during an interesting transition in computer technology; my first year I took the (fairly useless to me) required course in computers, where among other things we had the assignment of dialing into a BBS at home. (The professor tried to convince me that the Commodore PET didn’t exist and I was somehow confusing it with the VIC-20). A couple of years later I was taking a course in HTML and website design.

  42. Kater

    I feel that the poll should have a fourth option, “Yes, because I looked it up immediately after reading this comic.”

  43. KarlBob

    I remember the bad old days of the 1980s when my 7th grade Intro to Computers class started with talking about Ada Lovelace and Babbage’s Analytical Engine, then worked its way around to writing a BASIC program to draw a picture on a TRS-80’s monochrome display.

  44. Arkzist

    oh god i have the same issue…. tell me about it

  45. Plasma Mongoose

    Do modern computer courses still assume that people who come to their classes have never used a computer before?

  46. Lord_Beavis

    Good Lord you are making me feel old… I had to kludge my own RS-232 interface together to get my VIC-20 to talk to the SmartTeam 1200 modem I had so that I could get on the BBS in my hometown…

  47. Maycroft

    yeah, ASCII penises, classy.

  48. Hinoron

    First two weeks??
    More like the entire first semester.
    I was in a 3-year Computer Programmer/Analyst program myself. You’ve got 18 year olds who have taken computer sciences classes all through high school, mixed with 40-somethings coming back to school asking “which key’s the any key?” The first semester was all about getting everyone up to the same page.

  49. Ember Quil

    I remember Intro to Computers. It was an entire semester about MS Office.

    To be fair, I knew absolutely nothing about Access beforehand, so I actually did learn some things in that class, but still, I was bored to tears. The textbook was basically a series of tutorials about how to do our assignments, broken up by occasional projects. As it was basically a list of every assignment and project we’d do over the course of the semester, I was completely finished with all of my classwork within the first two weeks…

    Also, lol, archive binging because I’ve been gone for a LONG time.

    So long that I even forgot about FAAAAAAAAAAACE.

  50. khambatta

    Some people really need those classes.
    Me: ” Remember, your password is case sensitive.”
    User: *c-a-s-e-s-e-n-s-i-t-i-v-e*… “Hey, this password’s wrong!”

  51. TParadox

    I took an ICS course for non-majors in my senior year because I wanted to understand how a lump of metal and plastic can do math. That’s the level at which I stopped understanding computers. We had one chapter on that, two weeks before the final.

    We started out doing labs learning HTML. I taught myself HTML when I was about 11. Eventually I realized that we were learning HTML so we knew how to write a container for Javascript, and with Javascript we got to get hands-on with logic programming. I didn’t know Javascript before that class.

  52. Aisling

    Intro to Computers most mind-numblingly boring A I ever got…

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