/retro/ - Y2K

Japanese software still uses SJIS nowadays like it did in the 90s.
Look it up if you don't know what it is.
Also the current imageboard interface we use in the west derives from Japanese BBSs.
The west was more focused on Usenet and forums rather than BBSs.

>>234 
>Japanese software still uses SJIS nowadays like it did in the 90s. 
>Look it up if you don't know what it is. 
I know, I mean about how I imagine the lines of text early Japanese computers could display for kanji were probably not a lot and made things difficult.
>Also the current imageboard interface we use in the west derives from Japanese BBSs. 
You mean textboards, I'm talking about traditional BBSs.
>The west was more focused on Usenet and forums rather than BBSs. 
Asking about the 80s and early 90s though.

Japanese computers were specifically made to handle kanji and had higher resolutions than contemporary western computers, so there wasn't really any issue with kanji support. The higher resolution and larger color counts led to something known as CG (computer graphics) back then (now just called イラスト / illustrations since CG now usually refers to 3D graphics). It ranged from 8 color CG in the late 80s, to 16 and 256 color CG in the 90s and near the turn of the century 16 million colors were introduced.
 
Sharing CG on BBSs was really popular during the 90s and a lot of prominent BBSs even had their own custom advertisement CG. 16 color art dominated since the PC-98 was the most popular system in Japan during that era and it lend itself well to the anime art style. They also shared FM and midi music on BBSs, but CG was more popular. Other than that they used BBSs similarly to the west and shared files and talked about various things.
 
With the advent of the Internet, many CG artists created their own websites for their CG and a forum called NiftyServe gained a lot of popularity and BBSs started to lose their significance. A lot of CG artists had a really hard time to transition from 16 colors to 16 million colors and quit, but some artists like Wakachan and Goto-P are still active to this day.
 
As for what software they used, I can't give much information as it doesn't interest me much, but they did use their own software specific to Japanese computers. Some of it might be available in the vector.co.jp software library. The source of my information is visiting some BBS archives, a lot of CG artist and FM/midi music creator sites, plus other old Japanese sites and reading the tidbits of information they shared.
 
PS: Japanese BBSs had their version of newfags that wanted to get spoonfed called CG beggars.

>>238 
Thank you for the info.
 
Now, for anyone else who might know, what about ZX Spectrum clones in the USSR?

>>238
Correction - NiftyServe was a popular commercial BBS service, but there was also a web based forum version. Both were closed down in the mid 2000s though.

I know that most popular BBSes were run by telephone companies,  and were analogous to modern "chinese superapps" or do-all social networking sites like Facebook or VK, in a sense, not only you could use the bullet-in board forums or send email to other phone company subscribers, but also access banking services, post dating/sale ads, look at address catalogs. Prestel in Britain, Minitel in France, CompuServe in USA, some analogs in Canada and Sweden, canadian one had special markup that allowed vector graphics, it was also used in some information terminals like ATMs. Minitel had some sort of BBS-hosting where businesses could have a dedicated phone number with their BBS hosted at phone company locations.
Local hobbyist-run BBSes were made possible due to free calling for certain city areas, AFAIK, in United States, or because every user knew phreaking and could get free calls from anywhere. Fido nodes exchanged inter-city echomail over nights when calling fees were much lower than during day. Later Fido client software also allowed downloading mail for offline reading, and terminating the connection to save money and free the phone line. Something most modern forum systems severely lack, due to them being webshit, asides from email of course.
CompuServe had world's first live chatroom on their BBS in 1980, which predates IRC by 8 years. Not counting UNIX "social" system commands that predate even this one.
IIRC, Eastern Europe didn't get into this computer business until 90's because not everyone even had telephone at home, but they've had floppinets and zine exchanges among demo scene and hackers.

Missing post | No.564 | 03/15/2020 11:37:24