It was the year 1994, when to investigate, only motivated by curiosity, we decided to take a significant sum from the family budget and thus buy our first 2400 baud modem. Of course, it is difficult to understand what a baud is because that word has not been used for a long time, but in modems of those speeds it could well be said that 2400 baud is the equivalent of 2400 bits per second (bps), this translated into a maximum transfer rate of 300 characters per second, that is, just a little faster than a good secretary typing on a keyboard. Just to exemplify a broadband connection in the year 2021 of 100 Mbps, it is 44,000 times faster than that cutting-edge technology that had us a couple of months saving to buy it. In addition, this modem was connected to the telephone line, so to connect with another modem you had to make or receive a call.
So it was, that in a rented apartment in the neighborhood of Belgrano, a totally amateur enterprise called RBBS - (Roberts Bulletin Board System) was put online. Like almost all of us who were born in the interior have the roots for our people, so it took the name of ROBERTS. The system was a PC 286 with the old FrontDoor software that was responsible for answering incoming digital calls and allowed the user to browse different sections and download files, have a messaging system (the FIDO Net network was well known, and we were also members of the EcoNet network, both were similar systems to what could be a discussion forum today. Everything was done in pure text mode, there were no graphics, hopefully the 16 colors of the ANSI coding allowed to give a little more attractiveness to the screens that slowly appeared hand in hand with the slowness of the modem (the fastest of that time occasionally came to connect at 14,400 baud). And as we said, the connection was point to point, that is, users to connect had to make the modem dial the line number of our house.
Over time RBBS was evolving, at first it worked from 0 to 8 (with the same telephone line we used for voice chats) and then we put a dedicated line 24 hours a day. Thus technology was also advancing by leaps and bounds, until the 28.8, 33.6 and 56Kbits modems appeared and with them Internet connectivity so in 1997 with the rise of the Internet and the first broadband connections, it no longer made sense to continue with the BBS so it was decommissioned.
Years later, moved to our first department in the neighborhood of Flores, by August 2001, RCNetwork (Roberts Connect Networks) was set up that aimed to connect through direct cabling (LAN) to a group of friends from the same building and thus in a very supportive way to be able to share an internet broadband connection using an old 386 as a server of shared resources, web server, mail server and router via proxy to the internet. So we were making the first portals, without their own domain and in mid-2002 the domain rcnetwork.com.ar was registered.
Then life took us to Villa Ballester, where we maintained the portal and the mail server until today that we are updating the entire system to Linux to be able to take better advantage of the processing resources. And so we continue to walk, only for experimental and self-learning purposes.
So it was, that in a rented apartment in the neighborhood of Belgrano, a totally amateur enterprise called RBBS - (Roberts Bulletin Board System) was put online. Like almost all of us who were born in the interior have the roots for our people, so it took the name of ROBERTS. The system was a PC 286 with the old FrontDoor software that was responsible for answering incoming digital calls and allowed the user to browse different sections and download files, have a messaging system (the FIDO Net network was well known, and we were also members of the EcoNet network, both were similar systems to what could be a discussion forum today. Everything was done in pure text mode, there were no graphics, hopefully the 16 colors of the ANSI coding allowed to give a little more attractiveness to the screens that slowly appeared hand in hand with the slowness of the modem (the fastest of that time occasionally came to connect at 14,400 baud). And as we said, the connection was point to point, that is, users to connect had to make the modem dial the line number of our house.
Over time RBBS was evolving, at first it worked from 0 to 8 (with the same telephone line we used for voice chats) and then we put a dedicated line 24 hours a day. Thus technology was also advancing by leaps and bounds, until the 28.8, 33.6 and 56Kbits modems appeared and with them Internet connectivity so in 1997 with the rise of the Internet and the first broadband connections, it no longer made sense to continue with the BBS so it was decommissioned.
Years later, moved to our first department in the neighborhood of Flores, by August 2001, RCNetwork (Roberts Connect Networks) was set up that aimed to connect through direct cabling (LAN) to a group of friends from the same building and thus in a very supportive way to be able to share an internet broadband connection using an old 386 as a server of shared resources, web server, mail server and router via proxy to the internet. So we were making the first portals, without their own domain and in mid-2002 the domain rcnetwork.com.ar was registered.
Then life took us to Villa Ballester, where we maintained the portal and the mail server until today that we are updating the entire system to Linux to be able to take better advantage of the processing resources. And so we continue to walk, only for experimental and self-learning purposes.
