The history of the manufacturer of premium wheels BBS. History of the manufacturer of premium rims BBS Immeasurable bbs mpl

1970

Heinrich Baumgatner and Klaus Brand run a small factory for the production of plastic chassis parts in the town of Schiltach. The initials of the founders and the name of their hometown gave the company the name BBS.

1972

BBS has started producing three-piece racing wheels. Within a few years, the BBS wheel technology became a quality guarantee for auto racing. Started as family business, the company quickly became a market leader.

1976

The first BBS plant opened in France.

1979

Martin Braungard joined the company.

1983

Serial production of discs based on BBS technologies, proven in motorsport, has begun. Thus the BBS RS was born. This wheel rim became an absolute hit. In the same year, BBS America and BBS Japan appeared.

1987

The company entered the market and its shares began to be traded on the Frankfurt and Stuttgart stock exchanges. Heinrich Baumgartner became chairman of the board of directors, Klaus Brand took a seat on the supervisory board, and Martin Braungard became technical director. Klaus Buckenberger became the third member of the board of directors and was responsible for sales and development.

1990

In its twentieth year of existence, BBS has become a key supplier of wheel rims for brands such as BMW, Audi, VW, as well as for the best racing teams in the world, exceeding a turnover of DM 200 million.

1994

This year was the most successful in BBS racing history. Formula 1, IndyCar, DTM and ADAC championships have been won on BBS wheels.

1995

The company celebrated its 25th anniversary with the introduction of new standards for the production of alloy wheels and the introduction of the new BBS RS II model. In the same year, Michael Schumacher won the Formula 1 championship on BBS wheels.

1997

BBS once again became the largest supplier of wheels for the IndyCar series and for the first time - for Formula 1, equipping 5 teams and 10 cars.

1998

Already 6 teams and 12 cars were equipped with BBS wheels in the Formula 1 championship.

1999

The company began supplying wheels for Daimler-Chrysler, Porsche, Ferrari and Jaguar. A second plant for the production of wheel disks was opened.

2000

Michael Schumacher on Ferrari in Formula 1 and Kenny Roberts on Suzuki in the GP500 class join the list of championships won on BBS wheels.

2001

Michael Schumacher once again won the Formula 1 championship, Manuel Poggiali won the GP 125 championship in a Gilera. Both were on BBS wheels.

2002

The new BBS paint shop has been recognized as the most environmentally friendly in Germany. The Ferrari F1 and Maserati GT racing teams have confirmed highest quality BBS disks.

2003

New integrated production process: Dry process for the production of aluminum wheels. A world first, this process underscored BBS's status as a leader in motorsport wheel production and an environmental advocate.

2004

This year a new revolutionary technology was introduced - Air Inside Technology. It allowed not only to significantly reduce the weight of the wheels, but also to increase strength.

2006

Michael Schumacher won the Formula 1 championship for the 7th time and for the seventh time on BBS discs. Worldwide, 26 racing championships have been won on BBS wheels, and the BBS brand has received 6 quality awards.

2007

BBS has received every possible award from the German automotive press. The company continued production of light alloy wheels highest quality, which was confirmed by the Made in Germany stamps.

2008

For the third year in a row, BBS received the Best Wheel award from the readers of Auto Motor und Sport magazine.

2010

As part of its annual awards ceremony for the top 10 partners, Porsche awarded BBS the "Best Supplier" award.

I have already sat down to write this story several times, but each time I have not been able to finish it. What prompted me to do this was the discovery of our company’s blog, although the story has nothing to do with NetCat. This story is about a legendary, unique and, dare I say it, cult phenomenon: White Bear BBS. Location: Moscow, time: early 1996.

Introduction

When I was writing this article, I caught myself thinking that it would be difficult for me to convey to readers the atmosphere of that time, primarily because it seemed to me and myself something distant and unreal. Now, when there are several tens of millions of Internet users in the country, there are broadband networks, laptops with Wi-FI, millions of Russian-language sites - what can I say, and almost every first person has a mobile phone - it is difficult to imagine that 15 years ago there was nothing like this simply there wasn't. So let's try to imagine 1996 based on dry facts.

There are 4 large Internet providers in Russia: GlasNet, Relcom, Demos and Russia-On-Line. The number of Russian-language sites with a domain in the ru zone is a couple of hundred (the domain itself is less than two years old). There are about hundreds of thousands of Russian Internet users (mostly those whose work is in one way or another connected with the Network). There are about the same number of mobile phone users, because the pleasure is not cheap. Yes, and you can’t just buy a mobile phone, you need to get personal permission from the State Communications Committee (yes, until 2000, you could use mobile phone it was impossible).

Artemy Lebedev Studio has been working for six months, ICQ is only in the project, Yandex and Google are not even in the project. The cost of Internet access is about $3 per hour, which was unaffordable for ordinary surfers (if you sit for an hour a day, you pay $150 a month; for example, I then earned an average of $200 a month, which was considered very good for a 17-year-old summer guy).

The current (and the first, approved as the standard of this language, already for six months) version of HTML is 2.0. The first W3C recommendations for CSS1 are almost a year away. PHP1 already exists, but few people know about it. Internet Explorer 2 just started supporting JavaScript, but this did not help it much in the unequal fight with Firefox's grandfather Netscape Navigator, although IE, unlike NN, was a free browser.

Introduced? This is the time we will talk about.

At that time, FIDO was the only computer network available to the lucky owners of computers with modems. I was one of them. My computer with a Pentium 66 megahertz processor was certainly not the most sophisticated, but quite modern.

So, I am a second-year student and a happy, as mentioned above, owner of a USR (US Robotics) Sportster 14400 modem. For those who don’t know, this figure meant the data transfer speed, measured in bits per second (for example: now in our office a channel of 10 megabits, that is, almost 1000 times more). However, it was not always possible to connect to 14400; more often it was 9600 or 4800. When I bought a Courier 33600 modem, the situation changed, but not much.

I won’t talk in detail about Fido and BBS, who doesn’t know what it is -
read for example and . I spent almost every night on BBSes, downloading something, uploading something. And one day I came across White Bear BBS. This encounter literally changed my understanding of the possibilities available to me with my modem.

Meet White Bear

There were many BBSes in Moscow, but Mishka had two key features. Firstly, it was multi-channel. First 4, then 16, then 32, and then 64 modems were connected to the server on which he lived (I could be wrong in the numbers, because this was a long time ago; the same applies to other facts - if you find inaccuracies, not judge strictly). All modems were manufactured by ZyXEL, then the main competitor of US Robotics. This is not surprising, because Mishka was owned by the company Data Express On-Line (abbreviated as DEOL), the official distributor of ZyXEL products (in common parlance “Zukhel”) and one of the first private Internet providers in the country. Initially, Mishka was intended to support Zuhel users: drivers, utilities, manuals, etc. However, DEOL’s management made one serious “mistake” (this was the second key feature): They installed a program on the BBS that allowed legitimate users to communicate with each other online, via chat. Not in DOS text mode, but in a full-fledged Windows client.

Why the error? Because all available modem lines were instantly occupied by lovers of an exotic pleasure: real-time communication via a computer. And thus they deprived the owners of zuhels (usually wealthy people, because ZyXEL modems were much more expensive than others) of the pleasure of downloading new firmware. In addition, Deol's commercial subscribers accessed the Internet using these same phones - our activity also affected them.

Why is "error" in quotes? Because it was she who gave many, including me, a start in life. Or on the Internet.

The program was primitive - from a modern point of view. Any user of ICQ and other QIPs will laugh at the sight of that program. She was an ordinary chat, but then she seemed like manna from heaven and the height of communication capabilities. During the day, it was sometimes possible to call Mishka the first time, but at night it would take more than an hour to get through. Subsequently, the Deol administration introduced a limit on a one-time connection (45 minutes - after this time the subscriber was disconnected and had to be called again), and then on the time spent by the subscriber on the BBS per day, as well as on the number of phrases in the chat. We got out of this situation simply: we registered similar nicknames. An extra underscore and you're a different subscriber. For example, I had the nickname DedVasilych, as well as Vasilych, DedVasilych_, Ded_Vasilych, etc. In total, I had 6-8 subtypes of nickname. 3-4 hours a day was usually enough for me, and if not, I registered a new user.

Contingent

Mishka had hundreds of users, about fifty active ones. Mostly they were teenagers, from 12 to 20 years old, but there were both very young ones, about seven years old, and quite adult guys. The female sex on Mishka was in a severe minority. We talked... about everything. Music, computers, girls, bill-gates-must-day, studies, alcohol, computer games and so on. Material wealth (not so much ours, but our parents’) is average and above average. This is understandable; not every parent has the opportunity or desire to buy such an expensive set of toys for the family: a computer and a modem (on average, one thousand and a half dollars, which was quite a lot for most Muscovites).

Residents of other cities also came to visit us. These, however, usually lived no more than a month, when the parents received a bill for long-distance communication, after which the modem was either strictly controlled by the elders or simply sold (do not forget: there were no broadband connections and home networks even in the project, only a connection via the telephone network ).

Now it’s hard to explain why we spent several hours chatting almost every night (and if we needed sleep, we’d come in for ten minutes to check in). It was unusual and cool. We didn’t feel like we belonged in any way, we didn’t feel drawn by belonging to the avant-garde, because we all knew about the existence of the Internet with much greater opportunities, and some of us had even been on it. We simply enjoyed the fact that we could just sit at home and chat with fifty people, sometimes separated by tens and sometimes hundreds of kilometers.

Well, okay, of course, I'm lying. There was a very real feeling of belonging to something sacred, inaccessible to mere mortals.

Offline meetings

If you live in the same city, communicate constantly and there are very few of you, it would be a sin not to meet in person. We met every week on Thursdays (sometimes on other days). The meetings took place in a public garden at the intersection of Maly Levshinsky Lane and Prechistenka, not far from Arbat. I don’t know why exactly there, it started even before I met Mishka. We called the meeting place a sandbox, because in the center of the square there was a fenced area with sand, where in the indefinite future a monument to Surikov was to be erected, as was clearly evidenced by a stone erected in the center of the sandbox with the corresponding inscription. Or did the stone appear later? I don't remember anymore.

What were we doing there? Yes, all the same things that ordinary young people do: they drank alcoholic beverages, discussed anything, especially if it was related to computers, sang songs, ran away from the police called by local residents, and so on. There were also fights, both with locals and among themselves. Once, an aborigine we awakened even shot at us from the window. Not in combat, of course.

The sandbox ended after the Tamerlan restaurant opened in a nearby house. Our gatherings five meters from the entrance to a very expensive establishment did not arouse enthusiasm among the owners and security guards of the mentioned establishment. And the meetings from the sandbox moved to the “Neolith” club, opened by one of Mishka’s users, one of those who was much “above average”. I've only been there a few times. One time I remember a meeting of eminent fidoshniks, among whom was “Exler himself personally” (that’s how he was introduced to me, only later did I find out who he was, because I wasn’t a fidoshnik).

Either I didn’t like the place, or work and study began to take up more time - I don’t remember - but I didn’t fit in at Neolith. Meetings of Deolovites continued for several years, but most of us, including me, gradually stopped attending them. However, this was after the end of Mishka.

Polar Bear Sunset

White Bear BBS closed in the winter of 1997. Several factors contributed to this event. Firstly, the Internet access service became popular and the Deol administration was forced to release modem lines occupied by freeloaders for commercial users. Secondly, access to the Internet has become more accessible, and the beauty of a regular chat has been eclipsed by the much more serious capabilities of the Internet.

The closure of Mishka caused withdrawal symptoms for many, including me. Most of us who did not yet have access to the Internet found an opportunity to connect to it, legally or not (this is a separate story). The community has partially recovered on the #deol IRC channel on the Undernet. The channel lived for some time with former users of White Bear BBS, but the process of growing up and changing interests cannot be stopped. The community gradually disintegrated, the Deolovites disappeared into new parties or lost interest in the hobbies of their youth. In the process of writing this article, I tortured Yandex and Google in search of traces of past glory. There are few traces left.

Afterword

The White Bear meant a lot to me. In addition to the above-mentioned ticket to the Internet, he gave me a second job (the first was the position of a salesperson for the ConsultantPlus legal reference system). I don’t remember how I contacted the Deol administration, but in 1997 I was hired as a piecework Internet adjuster for users of this provider. At the user's request, I came to his home or work and set up access (despite detailed instructions, it was not like that simple procedure, sometimes I had to dance with a tambourine), for which I received as much as 20 dollars. On one of these visits, I was asked if I could make a website, to which I answered in the affirmative without hesitation, although I had no idea what kind of animal this was. We agreed on $100, on the way home I bought the book “HTML in Action,” and soon the site of four pages in bold and italics on a colorful background was ready. This incident marked the beginning of my passion for website building, from which, by the end of 1999, the first version of NetCat grew.

Wonderful people worked at Deol, for example, Evgeniy Soldatov and Elena Gubareva, but I was not particularly included in the company’s team, because I communicated with them mainly by telephone. In addition, by the time I graduated from university (1999), I was already passionate about my work and gradually moved away from both the Deol community and work in Deol. And over time, both the #deol channel and the provider itself closed.

In the form I described, Mishka lived for only a few months, but what months they were! I don’t know how my fate would have turned out without Mishka, but it definitely would have turned out completely differently.

P.S. Once again, I apologize if I got something wrong in the chronology or facts, so I will be glad to see corrections. Over the years, I have lost contact with almost all of the Deo people. If there are any among the readers of this article, I will be very glad to gather again. It is possible in the sandbox area :)

P.P.S. I would like to express my gratitude to the archive.org project for its invaluable help in correcting the gaps in my memory. If this article is received favorably by the habra community, I will write one or two more stories from the nineties.

FidoNET- Networks, FIDO, BBS and ZX-Spectrum.

ATTENTION! This material is taken from the magazineBlack Crow-2 bears full responsibility on the editor of this magazine.Mikhail Maksimenko (MAX) Networks, FIDO and ZX-Spectrum ───── ──── FIDO is a network of friends. Treat those around you the way you would like to be treated.(C) Jesus If you have any idea what a modem is, computer networks in general and FIDO in particular, you don’t have to read this section. It is intended to give a general idea of these things to beginners. Contents ──────────── 1. Lyrical digression. 2. BBS. 3. FIDO. 4. Network structure. 5. How to become a member of FIDO. 6. Connection diagram for internal HAYS modem.Lyrical digression ──────────────────────── Suppose (for starters, just assume) you have a computer, modem and phone at hand. By combining all this into a single whole, you suddenly find yourself in a completely new, exciting world, the existence of which you may not have even suspected before. You find yourself at the center of events not only in your country, but throughout the whole world. Your social circle expands to such an extent that you are unable to retain the names of all your friends in memory. All news is available to you almost the moment it appears. Cities, countries, borders no longer exist. There is a huge cyberspace without borders, authorities, censorship and other things unnecessary for a normal person. And you get all this without getting up from your comfortable chair. All of these are computer networks. And to access all this, you just need a computer, a modem and a phone. BBS ─────── (Bulletin Board System - Electronic bulletin board). BBS is the simplest solution for a computer network. In this case, there is a server answering phone calls and you calling that server. After connecting your modem to the server modem, the latter runs a special terminal program that can transmit something to the screen of your terminal and read commands from your keyboard through the modem. The main purpose of the BBS, no matter how they try to elevate it, is file exchange. By calling the BBS, you can use the same modem to pick up something that is available to you, or transfer something. And although many sysops (system operators) add a bunch of additional functions to their stations, transmitting and receiving files remains the main purpose of the BBS. There is no need to talk about any acceptable network communication. Most often, all communication comes down to communication with the owner of the BBS, discussing his interests, or, at best, to communication between users of a single station, whose circle is most often limited to one locality. FIDO ──────── Once upon a time there was a man. And all night long this man was calling his friends on the BBC. I rang and rang and got tired. And the man made himself such a gadget that called itself at the appointed time, transmitted letters written in advance by the man to the necessary telephone numbers, and took away the answers, if any. This is how the network appeared FIDO which the mentioned man named after his dog (Fido in English translation means faithful). The year was 1984. Over the years, the network grew and expanded. It included more and more new stations. New, more advanced programs appeared. The technology and network structure have improved. Soon, the network participants found it not enough to communicate with each other in person, and they came up with echo conferences, where it became possible for everyone to communicate together at once. Echo conferences are like magazines or newspapers that are distributed around the world and to which everyone in the network can write. The network crossed the borders of countries, and network members realized that in order to send a letter to a distant friend it is not at all necessary to spend a lot of money on an international call. It is easier to send a letter to a nearby node, which will forward it to the next one, again avoiding large costs. And so the letter, even if it takes some time (currently, for example, a letter from Chelyabinsk to Quebec, Canada, takes about three days), will reach the addressee, a direct call to whom would require a lot of money. The network continued to grow. The volume of transmitted mail is proportional. The nodes worked mainly at night, and then it turned out that sometimes in order to transmit an important personal message to a node you have to work pretty hard, since this node is busy pumping echo mail over the modem all night long. Then the network participants entered fidosh"radio silence hour" - ZMH, zonal postal hour. During this hour, which is set according to the time zone, you are prohibited from transmitting anything other than private personal mail online. Here in general outline basic technical principles of FIDO:network (personal, personal) mail;echo conferences;routing (path personal letter from one node to another through other nodes, when the sender does not even know through which nodes his letter will go, but can be sure that it will arrive).Zonal Mail Hour. Currently, the FIDO network has more than36 thousand nodes worldwide. In addition, each node can have as many points as desired - network nodes of a lower order. Therefore, no one knows the real number of network participants. The official list of official nodes of the FIDO network is published centrally and updated weekly. On any BBS that is part of FIDO, you can find Nodelist - that’s what this list is called. More detailed and more comprehensive information about FIDO can be found in the official documents of the network, which can also be found on almost any BBS that is part of FIDO. This is fidopol - fidonet policy, a document describing the network structure, hierarchy and basic rules of behavior; echopol - echo policy - a description, respectively, of the structure and ethical standards for FIDO echo conferences; FTS*.*, FSC*.* - technical standards and recommendations for Fidonet Technology Networks (FTN).Network structure ──────────────── The functional unit of the FIDO network is a node. A node is, most often, a computer with a modem on which the appropriate software is installed, which communicates with other nodes according to a special schedule. Each node has its own unique address on the network. Theoretically, all network nodes have equal rights. Topologically - no. Typically, nodes are grouped according to territorial characteristics in a network, networks into regions, and regions into zones. All this is reflected in the node address. Those. Knowing the FIDO address, it is most often possible to determine the location of the node with precision down to the locality. Currently, a 4-dimensional address system is used. Those. an address in FIDO consists of 4 numbers separated by special characters. Namely: zone_number: network_number/node_number. point_number For example: 2:5010/14.7 - my point address. Here:└─┼─────┼─┼──── Zone 2 - Europe and Russia └─────┼─┼──── Network 5010 - Chelyabinsk and│ │ area. └─┼──── Node 14 within network 5010 └──── 7th point of the 14th knot. Obviously, the node with the address 2:5010/14.0 is hierarchically higher than 2:5010/14.7. And this is true. Full members of the network are only nodes with a zero point number (hereinafter simply nodes). Most often, in their address the 0 after the dot is not indicated, but simply written 2:5010/14, for example. The node is free to choose with whom it maintains network contact within the network. The point is attached to a node, and all its communications with the outside world are carried out only through this node, the sysop of which is called its “boss”. A node can connect to itself as many points as it likes, and it bears full responsibility for any of their actions. A node that has a constant connection with a certain number of other nodes is called a hub. Most often, there are no BBSs at such nodes due to their high load. In each network, the sysop of the node with node number 0 is the network coordinator, which determines and controls routing (passage and passage of signals inside and outside the network), changes in the operating mode of nodes, and performs other administrative functions. There are also regional, zonal and network coordinators. All these positions are elective, and in no way provide any advantages over other units, except for responsibility for decision-making. Perhaps that's enough. It seems to me that the information provided is enough to get started. You can find everything else in the official FIDO documents, or simply by talking with a familiar sysop - fidoshnik.How to become a member of FIDO ─────────────────────── The first step is to call the BBS. BBS phones are not difficult to find if you have access to a computer. They are often published in newspapers and magazines. Call, don’t be afraid, make mistakes, communicate with sysops. Sysops are usually benevolent people and will be happy to explain to you anything you don’t understand. The only thing I want to say is NEVER HANG UP THE HOOK IF THE OTHER SIDE OF THE LINE ANSWERED BY VOICE. Be sure to pick up the phone, apologize and politely ask about the operating hours of the BBS. Well, after the first step is taken, it’s easy to get your bearings. If the BBS sysop is a FIDO node, you have every right (of course not right away) to ask it to give you a point address. Although, he has every right to refuse you. If the BBS sysop is also a point, you can ask him for advice. In general, I’m tired of describing obvious things here. Find your own way. The main thing is to take your time. And remember - no one owes you anything (just like you owe no one). Each network node works on its own enthusiasm and completely unselfishly, so a lot will depend primarily on your attitude towards others.

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