myself248 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Thank you!

In the alcove on the right, I think I'm seeing 66-blocks, breaking out the phone lines that must be routed to each machine. Two blocks stacked, each with a fanout of wire on the right side.

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cheschire 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Oh that's a breaker box (or a box of wiring of some sort), not a mirror!

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ssl-3 6 hours ago | parent [-]

A mirror? I first saw it as a common (US-centric) exterior metal door, with a window -- and with a shelf blocking the opening.

The blur does interesting things.

	▲	cheschire 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		yeah the shine in the top left of the rectangle was what led me to think it was a mirror, which from my experience would have been really strange for the types of nerds that would work in windowless rooms back in those days. The black cable underneath looked like the shadow of an oval frame

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ryanjshaw 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

That telephone cord is impressive.

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syncsynchalt 6 hours ago | parent [-]

Pretty standard option for any home with a teenager, to be honest. Long enough to drag the handset into the nearest coat closet when needed.

	▲	netule 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Mom’s listening along on the other phone with her hand covering the receiver.

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somat 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Hmm, that is interesting, why was that version originaly hosted on 3drealms site? Probably nothing, somebody there just wanted to share a cool picture. But what if that were an early apogee shareware distribution bbs?

	▲	rasz 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		it was 3D Realms official BBS https://nitter.privacyredirect.com/ScottApogee/status/159372... Scott Miller - Apogee/3D Realms Founder : >BBS's (bulletin board systems) were the backbone of the online world before the Internet came along in 1995. Apogee teamed up with Dan Linton's BBS, called Software Creations, and we poured $200k+ into it to grow it to nearly 140 call-in nodes with a T3 (high bandwidth) line.

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themafia 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Apparently "Software Creations" BBS, which ran PCBoard BBS software and was operated in cooperation with Apogee games.

https://x.com/ScottApogee/status/1593729387106512896

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whatthe12899 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

wait, are you OP? or did you happen to find a high res version of the same paper-copy picture that OP supposedly was given 30 years ago and then scanned and then threw out. or did OP make it up? or is OP just a bot?

maybe i'm a bot.

anyway i used to call into BBSs back in the early 90s and the thing I'm remembering is that they survived mostly on donations, and now that I am seeing the infrastructure that supported those systems and recalling the price of hardware back then I'm starting to second guess everything I thought I knew.

	▲	layer8 6 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Click on the HN “past” link for this submission near the top of this page, then you’ll get to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30096565 (see the top comment there) from when the original image link was still working.
	▲	hamdingers 6 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		Many sites including Google offer reverse image search. You give it an image and it gives you a list of places it appears, sometimes in higher resolution or with more context (or different context, which can be interesting).
	▲	DetroitThrow 6 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Rachel says she had the photo as a postcard. It's likely that more postcards were printed, and that other people had owned those copies, rather than people being bots.

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jprd 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Glorious. This must be what is like when old people long for the hot car they lusted for in their youth.

	▲	SpaceNoodled 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I recall old people being glad that air conditioning was invented.

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louwrentius 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

In this picture it seems that all machines have a 3.5" floppy disk inserted. Maybe they had no hard drive and only booted from floppy and then ran software over the network?

	▲	EvanAnderson 7 hours ago \| parent [-]
		A lot of network interface cards had a socket for an option ROM that would allow network boot, but you could definitely fit a client on a floppy and boot that way, too. Novell Netware server would be the mostly likely server for that vintage of rig and a Netware client fit easily on a floppy.

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486sx33 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

[dead]