I have been a bulletin board user since the time when computers ran the CP/M operating system and 1200 baud modems were hot stuff. Back then, bulletin boards were mostly local affairs, as the internet was the domain of universities and the World Wide Web hadn’t been invented yet. Nonetheless, bulletin boards have survived to this day, and perhaps the most famous general-interest bulletin board on the internet today is Quora. It will come as no surprise that I am a Quora user.
The other day, the Quora post, “How do transistors work?” caught my eye. There are 25 answers to this question, but the one that caught my eye was this one:
Gan Uesli Starling says
I do like Quora, and have answered a number of posts as simply and directly as I possibly can. I find myself having to wonder at any number of queries (this because of how they are phrased) if my providing an answer would be, in effect, doing some student’s homework assignment on their behalf.
PS – Quora does indeed remind me of the old days on Compuserve with a numeric address via the Kermit protocol. I vaguely recall my peers lamenting about CP/M. But by the time that I myself could afford a computer, 2400 Baud modems were out and so too was the Amiga 2000, in glorious 4096 colors while DOS was still only just DOS.
Dan KB6NU says
I just blow off the questions that sound like someone asking you to do their homework for them.
Sean W6VRF says
It gets worse in computer science and programming sites. I can tell pretty quickly when some student in India just wants his project completed.
Few people in the real world will just ask “how would you implement tic-tac-toe using binary arithmetic?”
Dave New says
An ASR-35 Teletype with 110-baud acoustic-coupled modem, dialing into a GE-255 timesharing system at the local university from the high school, running Dartmouth timesharing BASIC. That would be in 1971, I think.
Then CP/M on a Z/80 Digital Group computer with a 300 baud acoustic-coupled modem (“Pennywhistle”), dialing in to the university mainframe. 1972-75
Then in the early 80’s came Compuserve, Prodigy (which came with a 1200-baud modem that I lost in a lightning storm), and local BBS’es, especially on the Altos 68000 that Mike Myers ran in his bedroom in Ann Arbor. The conversation system, Picospan, (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PicoSpan) was written by Marcus Watts, and influenced the design of the Well, the famous system that operated out of California in those days.
I had an MSEN email/dail-in account starting in the early 90’s and ran a Linux system (kernel 0,99pl14) running the Yggdrasil distro.