Back in 2001 when I blogged about my first Usenet posting it had been 16 years since the great event. Now it’s 21. Oh, and I found and even earlier posting, reproduced below for posterity:

I have all but given up attempts to compose a BASIC terminal program for my SANYO computer (IBM-compatible) in GW-BASIC. Here is a brief version of the root of the program:

10 OPEN "COM1:300" AS #1
20 COM(1) ON
30 ON COM(1) GOSUB 1000
40 A$ = INKEY$
50 IF A$ <> "" THEN PRINT#1, A$;
60 GOTO 40
70 :
1000 IF EOF(1) THEN RETURN
1010 B$ = INPUT$(1,1)
1020 PRINT B$;
1030 GOTO 1000

Strangely, the program seems to be able to handle DATAPAC (the Canadian data communications network) quite fine, but gives repeated DEVICE I/O errors when used with anything else ? I can find no good reference to the possible cause of DEVICE I/O error in communications so I really can’t identify what needs to be changed. I am, of course, assuming the SANYO communications are handled, through BASIC, identically to IBM BASICA.

That was back in the days when we wrote our own terminal programs. Oh, DATAPAC, you were a teenage hacker’s playground of wonders.