Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by zozbot234 2250 days ago
> I loved taking my laptop out on the train or to a coffee shop, and replying to threads and publishing a post to SSB while offline. Something about reading other peoples ideas while disconnected, and then writing my thoughts, and having them automatically sync to the network when I got back on my WiFi at home, gave me a different perspective on ways to use technology.

You can do this with Usenet and most BBS's. Most native IM apps will also do this for you, plus of course there's email.
1 comments
capableweb 2249 days ago
One cool feature of Scuttlebot is that if you and your friend are already following each other, you only need a connection to each other P2P to be able to send messages to each other. So if you're on a train with ad-hoc WiFi connected to each other, you can still proceed as usual and sync stuff.

I don't think this feature exists in Usenet and BBS's where there is a central server who masterminds the sync that everyone is doing. Same with email, requires a server (local or remote) to send/receive stuff while in SSB both local and remote are usually the same machine.

link
tlavoie 2246 days ago
For BBSs, you're correct. Usenet (and email) used UUCP, which is actually much closer in concept I think here.

UUCP is a store-and-forward mechanism, not dependent on a real-time connection to a particular server. I used to run a node, connected to a guy I'd met who worked for an ISP. He had, gasp, a full-time network connection via ISDN; pretty magical in these days of dial up.

So, Usenet feeds were configured on my own little system, essentially subscribing to the newsgroups I wanted. Periodically, it would dial out to the other gent, upload any new posts from me, and download anything new on those newsgroups. My email came and went the same way. Naturally, what I got was a subset of what he had accessible.

While I never used this functionality, I could have had others call up to me, and I would just be an intermediate link in the chain. RFC 976 (https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc976) describes how this works for email, including SMTP over UUCP.

link
capableweb 2245 days ago
Interesting, I didn't know that (BBS and Usenet was before my time), so thank you for sharing.

That does sound a lot like how Scuttlebot treats feeds as well.

link