
Social Media’s Dial-Up Ancestor: The Bulletin Board System - sohkamyung
http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/networks/social-medias-dialup-ancestor-the-bulletin-board-system
======
beamatronic
I got into BBSes when I was in maybe 8th grade. Because we didn't have call
waiting, and thus it would tie up the phone line, I could only do BBSing at
night. Until I got a long extension cable from Radio Shack, I had to move the
computer ( Commodore 64 ) to the dining room table every night when everyone
had gone to sleep and I could finally BBS!

I wish there was some way to convey the excitement of getting online back
then, and to recapture that magical feeling. Try to imagine sitting at your
dining room table in the dead of night, and it's completely silent, except for
the (muted) sounds of your modem. And then holding your breath in the hopes
that the BBS answers, and you don't get a busy signal. And then finally when
those colorful characters started scrolling across the CRT screen... It was
magical... I don't have any other word for it.

~~~
baldfat
My parents got a second line! I can't tell you how awesome that was to this
generation nor the trouble I caused. I bought my first modem when I was in 8th
Grade.

Oh the things I learned on BBS.

Back then black boxes, free compuserve, phreaking and other nefarious things
got allot of my "social group" in trouble. My favorite thing was to try and
find a server and figure out who owned it. To bad my friends who were brothers
in Virginia. They had all their computer equipment confiscated by the FBI and
were national news. One stupid friend (Capt Kirk) took carbon copies of sales
at work and bought tens of thousands of dollars through Compuserve for over a
year. He got caught at 17 or 18 and was hired for $40,000 to help their
security.

I had learned Assembly for cracking purposes at 14 and I didn't have the heart
to throw away my two black garbage bags full of floopy disks away till 2004.

Watching the movie War Games knowing I already owned all that equipment was
pretty cool when that movie came out.

------
rufb
Growing up in a coffee farm in countryside São Paulo state, I was a late BBSer
(from 1994 to the early 2000s). As other people have it with Usenet and early
web forums, I just loved how tight-knit and contentful the Internet was back
then. I don't subscribe to the Eternal September "newcomers ruined everything"
feeling (in fact I'm quite a big fan of massified Internet culture), but I do
love and cherish those sorts of small, focused online communities, every day
more protective of themselves and thus harder to find.

I still wonder if it's possible to have a large community (beyond, say,
Dunbar's number active member) that is able to sustain the feeling of those
small ones — as far as I'm concerned, it's an open question in modern design.
Points and reputation systems (such as HN, Slashdot and Reddit sport) and
closed doors (secret groups on Facebook and other communities that are hard to
access or join) are fair compromises, but I still feel no-one has quite
squared the market opportunity around those communities yet. But maybe they do
have to stay small. And maybe it's a thing that will elude monetization
forever, who knows. Right now, as far as I'm concerned, no-one's making money
out of those small-and-focused community patterns which are the best and
oldest of the Internet.

~~~
forgottenpass
_as far as I 'm concerned, it's an open question in modern design._

It's not complicated. The rate of assimilation has to be kept higher than the
rate of immigration. That doesn't mean small, but does mean a bit insular
and/or "LURK MOAR."

 _no-one has quite squared the market opportunity around those communities
yet._

I think they have. Forums, slack, blogs, their own websites, email lists,
subreddits, twitter, facebook, g+, etc...

The problem with the types of community you describe, is not that they're
small, but that they're actually communities. Not userbases branded as a
community. They can flit on and off services as they come and go because the
community has multiple ways to talk among itself.

You can sell them a tool or host a place to talk to a group of friends. But
they're in too strong of a negotiating position with you for you to start a
social network and scale it to the moon. They're already on the social
networks anyway.

If you're targeting a community, your competition isn't facebook. Your
competition is a guy with a dreamhost account and a copy of phpbb.

If you really want a killer app for communities, I think it was called
Trillian. But that was back when the popular communication platforms were less
rigorous at keeping everyone in the branded client.

------
LarryMade2
Back in the day there were BBSs running on just about any type of
microcomputer, CP/M, Apple II/Mac, Atari 8bit/ST, Commodore VIC/64/128/Amiga,
TRS-80, etc. Most overviews focus just on the IBM-PC stuff (or what the author
used back in the day - like Jason Scott an Apple II user). The smaller micro
BBS were their own vibrant little universes.

The Commodore 64 boards had a quite a few BBS systems from pretty spartan
6485-BBS, Compute's Gazzette BBS (yeah they even had a magazine type-in BBS:
Dec'84 & Jan'85), up to more advanced ones like Color64/128, C-Net 64/128, and
Image BBSs - the high end ones used either a bunch of 800k 3.5" drives or hard
drive (comparatively expensive but was worth it for speed and storage), or RAM
drives.

Near the peak of Commodore BBSs some publishers and SysOp worked up their own
Commodore BBS networking schemes where BBSs could exchange emails and forum
postings (like FIDONet, but specific to Commodore), there was even a couple
multi-line Commodore BBSs, and a few got the different makes of BBSs cross
communicating as well. Such things were a labor of love, as us SysOps footed
the long distance bills to exchange messages on top of the cost of an extra
line, hardware, etc. (the automated exchanges happened during lower cost
calling hours, like 2am.)

Now a days there are still a few that either held on or have started new
Commodore BBSs - with most BBSs now being accessible via telnet (though I hear
there are a couple dial up ones out there).

Of course there was a bits of rivalry between computer models as well as BBS
brands...

Any former SysOps/Callers out there?

Me: Joe Commodore SysOp of Silicon Realms BBS 1987-2004

~~~
kingrolo
Systop of Overdose BBS, sometime around 1993/94\. I was 13 or 14 years old.

From a look at a list of software on Wikipedia I think we were running Remote
Access
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RemoteAccess](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RemoteAccess)).
I remember hooking up a Fido mail feed which fetched email at 5am every day
towards the end of things, and playing a Mud (Mud 2) and Lord.

Crazy to think how far things have moved on in 20 years.

------
13of40
Here's my funny BBS story: I was a heavy user in the early 90s, but in 1994 I
got recruited into the military and was sent to a remote corner of the world
where we had one official-business-only phone line for about 250 people, so no
BBS scene. I came back in 1997, met up with an old friend, and inquired about
where to get a current BBS list for the town. And of course he laughed and
said there was no such thing anymore. So basically, from my perspective, the
online experience went from BBS's, telnet, and FTP to full-blown web pages
overnight.

~~~
phil21
It... pretty much did. 1994 through 1995 I recall as being the big turning
point from where usage went primary on BBS' to primarily on the Internet by
around 1996.

At least in terms of people who I wanted to talk to were doing. By mid 1995 I
was pretty much Internet only other than to dial-in a few times a week to
check a few local boards I participated in.

~~~
ghaff
It took a bit longer for some of us to get broadband at home. I don't think I
got it until about 1998 or so. A number of the (relatively) big commercial
BBSs transitioned to becoming dial-us ISPs for a time. I used Channel One in
Cambridge and they were my first ISP at home until I eventually got broadband
through, I think, AT&T Roadrunner.

------
a1studmuffin
Here's the BBS documentary miniseries - worth a watch either for nostalgia or
learning about how electronic communication worked pre-internet:
[https://archive.org/details/BBS.The.Documentary](https://archive.org/details/BBS.The.Documentary)

~~~
ghaff
To be completely accurate, it's not pre-internet so much as parallel to the
Internet pre-Eternal September. There was a whole culture of PCs (of various
architectures) BBSs, freeware, shareware, etc. that was pretty much
independent of--and was largely unaware of--the fairly insular proto-Internet.

------
rhapsodic
I can still recall the little rush I'd get when that 14.4KBS modem would get a
handshake and the lines of green characters would start scrolling down the old
CRT screen...

Good times.

~~~
optionalparens
14.4? Slow down there, friend, we lucky people were using Hayes 300 baud
modems. I still remember my glorious upgrade path:

300->2400 (now we're cooking)->4800->9600->14.4->19.2->28.8->56k

USR, Courrier, and Hayes were usually the best ones for me. I skipped 33.6
among other upgrades. The Courrier also had that extra punch if you were lucky
enough to get one on the other end.

The Unix stuff was pretty pedestrian as far as programs, but on Dos, Windows,
Amiga, Atari ST, C64, and some others, some cool programs for connecting. I
think on Dos I remember using Terminix and Telix quite a bit, but the names
mostly escape me by now.

Anyway, I guess now it's better I don't have to dial with options like *70 or
use the various AT codes to get online, handshake, and stay there.

~~~
axonic
acoustic coupled modems anyone?

~~~
DanBC
It's a bit grimy, but:
[http://m.imgur.com/JTwCqyy](http://m.imgur.com/JTwCqyy)

That's an A4 piece of paper for scale.

~~~
axonic
Awesome!

------
flyinghamster
I also miss the BBS scene. Though I grew up in the Chicago area, I first got
online in Champaign-Urbana, since my folks categorically refused to buy a
modem for the home Apple II. I'm not sure if that was because they thought I
might go full WarGames, or if it was just that they didn't want to risk a
massive phone bill.

C-U had a hopping BBS scene at the time, but the real standout for me was
Tranquillity II, which was conversation only with no downloads. At first it
ran on, of all things, a TI 99/4 with the expansion box. Later it was moved to
an Amiga. There were several Fido systems, and I ran a point (a subnode of an
existing Fido node) for a while. Since I was out of school by then, echomail
was the closest thing I could get to Usenet newsgroups.

When I got back to the Chicago area, I continued with Fidonet until the local
ISPs started popping up. It still surprises me just how quickly the Internet
bulldozed the BBS scene, and I think we've lost something because of that,
even though we've gained a lot as well. Sure, there are still BBSes here and
there (and Fidonet still exists even today), but telnetting into one halfway
around the world just isn't the same as dialing into one that's a couple of
miles away.

------
glazer
I used to visit a BBS semi-regularly during middle school, I had always
enjoyed the simplicity of the basic text interface. Not that there was much
going on, this was around 2008, so everything was long-dead by then. Reddit
(and HN) has its voting system and 4chan has the bump system, but there's
something about newsgroups with the long-lived threads with email-length
replies that really appeals to me. Will there ever be something as popular and
"open" as newsgroups, where each user judges a post on its own merits instead
of by what the rest of the community thinks? Or am I merely pining for a past
that never really existed?

~~~
optionalparens
Newsgroups were a bit different I always thought than BBSs, but were still
much closer in feel to various message bases. The problem even from pretty
early on was spam and moderation. When you did have any ad-hoc or defacto
moderation, it was usually divisive and heavy handed in a way that didn't have
the same vibe as a BBS.

On a BBS, a sysop would disconnect you mid session if you were being an idiot.
You'd be warned, banned for some amount of time or forever. On newsgroups, it
just got much more out of control with bad actors because the scale was so
much larger and the authority was so much less in terms of credibility, fear,
and activity.

In defense of Reddit and HN, it's just hard to scale things up with more
people and deal with the related concerns of post visibility, spam,
moderation, and more. I know you're not saying this, but sometimes people
point that 4chan is more like BBS messages, but it's not true because most
BBSs were heavily moderated, complete with co-sysop users who would log on
just to do this or moderator users with escalated privileges. If anything,
BBSs were the most moderated of all, it's just that some people didn't mind if
you talked about certain things or used certain language because it's their
BBS and they just did what they wanted.

Regarding email-length replies, I obviously love them. I generally don't agree
with short = powerful in most cases except in code sometimes. Of course short
replies can be focused and have a lot of value and I certainly appreciate the
people that do that well. Unfortunately, short for many people means <drop 1
sentence random mental garbage> thought and leave or <me too thought>.

Finally, regarding text, I couldn't agree more. I sometimes wish all websites
just gave me a command line as a second interface. I know I can use curl and
APIs for a lot of similar stuff, but yeah, no, that is not the same as hitting
"f" for files or even just simpler unix commands. Lobste.rs kind of did this
as a joke if you want to check it out, but it's not quite right IMO but good
for fun.

~~~
VLM
"On a BBS, a sysop would disconnect you mid session if you were being an
idiot. You'd be warned, banned for some amount of time or forever."

Yes, a funny anecdote, obviously there was no central registry of names so
sometimes there would be multiple BBS of the same cool name in the same LATA,
so when I was about 12, operating on a tip from a schoolmate at 1200 baud I
log into one of the several pirates cove bbs, or whatever the name was, and
try to send the sysop a mail asking for private access to the files because I
know XYZ from school and sysops cousin is XYZ (XYZ and I are still IT-type
people 30 years later) and the sysop breaks into the session (which they could
do in those days) and reads me the riot act about how he has no warez and he
works real hard and spends a lot of money to make a BBS and what would decades
later boil down to darn kids get off my lawn type lecture and never set foot
here again and I'm deleting your brand new account and at 1200 baud it took
awhile. And being a little kid I'm like "ok sorry about that" because what
else am I supposed to say to mr angry wall of text? Then I go to school the
next day and talk to my friend and "you idiot, call the pirates cove in suburb
ABC not the one in suburb XYZ" or whatever. So that's what passed for a good
time in the 80s. Sysops would sit there and spy on you, while you tried to
work the social game to get access to the good stuff.

Several of the boards I was on with access to the special stuff were basically
BBS embedded secretly inside a normal looking BBS so that made it fun. One of
the special boards as a requirement to make it look good, required us to
participate in the political debate forum if we wanted to keep access. Oh that
board, thats just teens trying to debate federal tax policy. When actually it
was full of software trading, hiding under dumb debates. On the modern
internet of course instead of trading software we just skip right to the dumb
debates, LOL.

Another "only 12 year old boy in the 80s could believe it" is back then we
were pretty paranoid with people getting busted left and right and stories on
TV so before XYZ gives me his tip he asks me between classes if I'm a fed and
I told him no and I asked him if he was a fed and he said no, and that was it,
we believed each other as if that proved anything (and neither of us were a
fed, but I've known this kid since we went to kindergarten together and we're
asking each other if we're a fed... well its just what you did in those
paranoid days). I do not think modern stuff like GPG key signatures are quite
as paranoid on a personal level as we used to be back in the old days.

~~~
optionalparens
Thanks for the story, lots of good memories like that too. I used to always
try to call boards named things like Thieves Guild, Pirates Cove, or some sort
of 31337 sounding name in the hopes of discovering some new scene or
underground board. The best boards were dedicated 100% and didn't even try to
fake it, but did a lot of the stuff I listed below.

Regarding boards with fake or legit parts, I used to routinely page sysops on
boards I thought were underground or had hidden parts. The classic ones later
on were almost always based on PCBoard and later Ami/X, but highly customized.
The early ones generally just ran on whatever the best software was at the
time and boasted about the hardware. They'd have all sorts of legit content
typically and even legit users, but so much of it was a joke. I used to call
one board that was big with HAM radio people and early Internet adopters. The
most nerdy discussions you can imagine. What they didn't know is that there
was a second part of the board that had a huge ROM dump, Amiga, C64, and PC
warez scene.

As far as sysops go, I will also admit to spying on my users as sysop and as a
co-sysop on various boards. I sometimes would break people into chat and kick
them off. There were also many plug-ins that initiated fake chats and logged
the results. A particular one that I'll never forget on one board I was co-
sysop on featured an ANSImation (animated Ansi) by JED of ACID with some troll
I think flipping you the bird as it brought up chat. Sometimes we'd post the
fake chats for other users for comedy purposes.

I was nice and would help people find files, talk about fun stuff, meet in
person, but I was also a dictator and would boot anyone on short notice. There
were often periods of paranoia from alleged "busts," most of which probably
never happened though I know for sure some did. Lots of calling people NARCs
and so on.

One of the funniest things I used to see people do was upload fake files.
Early on it was random binary or generated text files. Later it was things
like blank audio or the same pictures renamed and zip'd. They were just so
desperate for upload credit and time that they'd do this insane stuff.
Checking files was really a pain. Thankfully on my boards, we were snobs about
content, like on the warez boards we'd think we were so cool having 0-30 day,
then it was something like 0-14, then 0 day stuff. So stupid banning and
deleting people for uploading something 2 months old. Same thing happened on
various FTP dumps that started to displace BBSs for file purposes later on.

Anyway, BBSs and the relationship to various underground scenes was a funny
thing. On the one hand, a lot of the communities could be very exclusive and
created all sorts of protections, barriers, precautions, and more. On the
other hand, they'd then make it super obvious what they were up to in so many
ways. Classic examples include:

\- Advertising your BBS on other not-so-secret boards

\- Commissioning ANSI art from a group like ACID, ICE, etc. with the name in
the ANSI and often the area code too. Not uncommon to see things like
+1-212-YOU-WISH Sysop: Mr Man. Awesome, now I know the name and what area code
to look for the number at least, if not people who run it.

\- Logon screen with ANSI depicting group affiliations. THG Eastern HQ =
Genesis Distro = Legion of Doom HQ. It was hilarious because even if you
didn't have access, you instantly knew you called a pirate board, cracking
board, art board, whatever.

\- New User Application filled with terminology from whatever scene. Again,
same as the previous item.

\- New User Password. As if most BBSs without anything illegal would have
this.

\- Users with huge ratios listed. Hmm, not many files on this BBS and yet this
guy uploaded 500 megs!

\- Certain BBS Software. You could be pretty sure that someone running things
like Ami/X were into warez, Oblivion, Iniquity, Eternity, etc. - art, and so
on. The more customized with nice ANSI too, usually the more likely it was
underground. Huge tip-off the board was legit if it ran something like WWIV,
Wildcat!, Celerity, and a few others we all considered hugely lame. Renegade
and other Telegard or Forum hacks always made you wonder on the other hand.
The old stuff on Atari ST, C64 etc was harder since there was a huge deluge of
stuff and not as many ones that were 100% preferred yet.

We thought we were pretty cool in those times, but wow I look back at some of
it and cringe. Good times and I was lucky enough to be involved in most
underground scenes, while still getting time to interact in the legit scenes
too.

------
60654
Oh that takes me back. There were so many BBSes in the 312 in the mid 90s.
Just reading the list [1] is like a trip down the memory lane.

The end of that article makes a great point. There was a huge diversity of
communities back then, and each of them was small enough that they didn't
devolve into spam and mindless trolling. It's something I really miss, and
something that can't be replicated by uber-sites like reddit or facebook...

[1] [http://bbslist.textfiles.com/312/](http://bbslist.textfiles.com/312/)

~~~
anexprogrammer
The sense of community was very real with BBS's. Real friendships developed
with people you would likely never meet. SYSOPs cared about the people who
dialled in to their little hobby project. Many organised meet-ups and BBQs.
Memories for some of the phone bills are less warm though!

It all disappeared incredibly fast in the mid 90s as ISPs and the net grew.

Social is, ironically, far less personal with none of that sense of community.

~~~
ghaff
>Social is, ironically, far less personal with none of that sense of
community.

I think that's overstating things. I can certainly think of a fair number of
exceptions in my case. One thing that could be different in the BBS world,
however, was that there often _were_ organized meetups and BBQs because the
BBS users tended to be clustered locally because of phone costs.

~~~
anexprogrammer
Where I've encountered community since it's been for the activity (eg regional
scuba forum - natural to organise meets, etc). I've never encountered any
arising from the medium since.

OK I'm from a smaller country (UK), many BBS's were national, but still
organised BBQs. The differentiation was usually for the platform rather than
geography.

------
dwyer
It's worth noting that there's a Taiwanese BBS established in 1995 that's
still extremely popular, with "over 150,000 users online during peak hours"
according to Wikipedia.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PTT_Bulletin_Board_System](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PTT_Bulletin_Board_System)

Interestingly, none of my friends that use it know what Telnet is. It's almost
exclusively accessed through unofficial dedicated smartphone apps.

~~~
contingencies
Interesting, I'd never heard of that. Apparently runs on FreeBSD. Will be
checking it out when less active. Right now too many _guest_ users online so
can't log in...

------
bhaumik
I was too young to use BBS when it started but the topic fascinates me,
especially after having read Hackers and The Innovators.

Not to hijack the topic, but has anyone watched the show Halt and Catch Fire
(available on Netflix)? I'm curious how accurately that show captures the
culture of that era.

Would love any additional reading recommendations around BBS' emergence as
well. Already bookmarked the documentary series:
[https://archive.org/details/BBS.The.Documentary](https://archive.org/details/BBS.The.Documentary)

~~~
evanelias
re: Halt and Catch Fire -- it's an enjoyable show, but the accuracy seems to
get worse with each season. The latest season in particular had a lot of
things that made me cringe.

I wish AMC had put the same effort into it as Mad Men, in terms of attempting
to be an extremely accurate period piece. I suppose the viewership for HaCF
didn't get large enough to warrant it, and/or the showrunners just aren't up
to it?

~~~
dragonwriter
Or, most likely, the concept of the show was different on that point, as on
many others.

~~~
evanelias
That's fair, but when it first launched the network was putting a lot of
marketing effort into portraying it that way. And I think in the first season
that wasn't too far from the mark. So I'd argue more that the concept _became_
different on that point over time, for better or worse.

------
EvanAnderson
I definitely miss the local and human aspects of BBSing. I grew up in rural
Ohio, and we had just a few (3 - 4 at any time) BBS that were local calls in
the late 80's and early 90's. Knowing the local "cast of characters" was a lot
of fun, and it was always exciting when somebody new popped-up on the scene.
We had some get IRL get- togethers and a lot of behind-the-scenes drama.

I wrote some software for a friend's board that used an NTSC frame grabber and
Soundblaster card he had attached. You could upload a sound file (WAV or VOC)
and it would play over the PA downstairs in the gym he ran. After your sound
played the machine recorded 5 seconds of audio from a mic in the gym and
pulled a single black and white frame from the gym's surveillance camera.
You'd get back a ZIP file with a single GIF and a VOC file in it. That was a
ton of fun.

I really miss the old "hacker" boards, too, but that's arguably nostalgia for
my youth more than anything. I'd still love to talk to somebody who frequented
the old Bit Truth BBS (203). I very occasionally talk to friends who were on
the old Unphamiliar Territory (602). The Internet helped change that "scene",
but the it was already a pretty established tradition that most people would
either go to college or get a "real job" and move on. Ahh... growing up...

------
diggum
My experience with BBSes started around 4th grade, in 1983 or early 1984. 1200
baud US Robotics external modem, a Heathkit CPM machine my dad built, and
typing AT commands by hand. My favorite at the time was Bongoland, a pacific
northwest bbs which was designed more like an adventure game with message
boards tucked away in various places, and I'm sure a larger, secret segment I
never gained access to. I later discovered some amazing communities (Thrasher
Skateboard magazine had a great system) and some horrifying ones (some people
loved their pets in ways different than I was accustomed to.)

Within a few years, we got a second phone line and I started up my own.
Through a lot of incarnations, but it was most popular as the Chelsea Hotel
and was a hangout for miscreants, hackers, and skaters. Through it, I got to
meet some people who are very influential today, as well as plenty of
anonymous friends.

The experience certainly piqued my interest in other areas of tech, and I can
easily trace my path from there to where I am today. I miss the limited access
and smaller communities of BBSes, the excitement of hearing the connection
tones after having auto-redialed for 30 minutes of busy signals, and of
course, Trade Wars.

------
caffodian
Man those were the days. I was just barely old enough to be able to get into
them before they died. Anyone remember the door games?

I remember it being pretty crazy that I could play BRE or LORD with people,
even across BBSes in some cases.

And each BBS had a different setup for LORD. There were some that seemingly
just tried to install every possible in game module, and it was the most
broken thing ever...

~~~
13of40
I remember one place that had a "wall" plugin at login where you could leave
public messages, and the BBS software also included some special escape
sequences that would resolve to the current user's name, phone number, etc.
Not a real security hole since you could only show someone their own
information, but it was bags of laughs to post something like "Hey
<firstname>, I've been trying to get hold of you all week! Isn't your home #
<phonenumber>?"

------
orionblastar
A BBS as the original social media site. Most people were from the same area
code and had BBS Meetings to see the faces behind the handles.

~~~
tyfon
Oh yeah.

I still remember my fathers face when he saw the 5000 NOK phone bill from me
dialing a non local bbs a few too many times in the early 90s :) Here in
Norway we had charges by the minute for all calls, but long distance (outside
your area code) was a lot more expensive.

In the end i had a separate phone line installed on my room and ran my own bbs
using [https://no.wikipedia.org/wiki/MBBS](https://no.wikipedia.org/wiki/MBBS)
(I can't find any non Norwegian sources, use translate).

------
krinchan
I missed the BBS phase. I vaguely remember sitting on the floor in my parents
room playing with some sort of IBM-Compatible computer, but my real days were
the DOS and Windows 3.1 days.

I'm fairly certain I didn't hit the Internet at large until the Windows 95
days. However, I have very fond memories of Usenet and IRC. I am glad IRC is
still around, but I still miss Usenet. Even after Eternal September, Usenet
was just amazing.

Anytime I'm forced to use literally any website forum, I'm reminded just how
far back we've fallen. Usenet clients were amazing. I could quickly and easily
catch up on posts in groups I was paying attention to. I could quickly and
easily find new groups for literally any interest. Access to a fast server was
included in almost any ISP subscription.

Web forums are just so painful to use these days. Especially since there are
400 forums for a particular topic that are all very disjointed.

------
wyldfire
Fidonet always sounded interesting but I never knew anyone who used it. Only a
few of the local boards participated and none of my (local) friends used it.
Downside of Metcalfe's law, I guess. If you could play Global War over
Fidonet, though, I'd have loved that!

~~~
13of40
Fidonet was neat. I think I sent a message to a Fidonet forum in Thailand or
Cambodia (from Oregon) once, and someone answered, but it was about a two week
round trip. For anyone not familiar, a participating BBS would dial up its
upstream hub in the wee hours of the morning and exchange messages, and the
hubs used dial up as well, so sending messages between major cities took days,
depending on how many hops they took. Toward the end there were even some
email gateways, so you could send reeeeaaally slow email as well.

------
jefurii
SDF ([http://sdf.org/](http://sdf.org/)) started out as a BBS but by the early
90s had turned itself into a public access UNIX system with a community feel.
One of the original admins is now on staff at the Living Computer Museum in
Seattle.

Tilde Club ([http://tilde.club/](http://tilde.club/)) was(is?) an attempt to
revisit 1990s-era UNIX community tools from a 2010-era perspective.

------
Dowwie
When I was 11 years old, I intermittently ran a Telegard 2.7 BBS using a
2400bps external hayes modem that I plugged into the electrical outlet.
Eventually, I upgraded to a 14.4k internal modem and have bad memories of
fighting IRQ jumpers every now and then. I played a lot of doors and
eventually was consumed by tele-arena. I enjoyed collecting ANSI art and mod
music. Those scenes had some really talented people. The local bbs's were on
FIDO net. I vaguely remember posting. I remember going to a couple of BBS
picnics and was always the youngest among the crowd, but the people were
usually nice. I had friends in real life but had developed an online life with
a very different group of people. BBS's gave me access to smart people and
more substantial conversation, but also a lot of trolling.

Back then, turbo pascal was a popular language. I knew nothing about
programming and found it beyond me to learn it on my own. I tried to find help
but failed. I wonder how my life would have changed had I taken up programming
at age 12.

Has anyone seen the BBS Documentary?
[http://www.bbsdocumentary.com/](http://www.bbsdocumentary.com/)

------
optionalparens
I often remark that people love reimplementing BBSs badly, and a fraction of
the functionality. Of course it's not an entirely fair comparison because of
the scope, different UI/nature of the web, audience size, and speed of
communication to name a few issues.

It's important to note that your average decent BBS had most if not all of the
following:

* Files - Often meticulously organized, with sometimes user voting or strict moderation. Unlike a lot of file sharing today, most boards also had things that would extract descriptions from archives or otherwise let you write them manually, along with providing other file metadata.

* User Management/Registration - Complete with idiot filters for the more underground boards (apps, voting on users, new user passwords)

* Mail - Even later, various versions of distributed mail including early email access for many people as well as things like FIDOnet

* Instant Messaging/Chat - There were entire huge multi-node boards entirely devoted to this, and even a single node board at least had sysop chat usually

* Games - Door games, mail/message games, offline sync'd games

* Timelines/Walls - Lots of plug-ins for this type stuff to leave short messages, shouts, etc.

* Time Management - Not necessarily a good thing, but on some boards you could bank time. Moreover, the fact there was time involved with your login on some boards created a sense of purpose and urgency.

* Keyboard Shortcuts - Godsend compared to your average web app, but also a drawback for some.

* Customizable UI - Most boards at least let you change menus, if not install plug-ins and other add-ons

* Distributed Content - Various boards would call each other or a sync service or otherwise download sync files to sync data such as games, not just mail.

* Groups/Subcultures

* No Frills - Despite being over modems primarily and thus slow, BBSs were pretty fast. In fact, I still feel like I got to more relevant information faster. It's not just a keyboard and mouse thing, it's about flow and the fact that the goal of the BBS was to deliver you some content quickly and efficiently. Navigation in web pages just sucks sometimes in so many ways - multi-page ads, long click funnels, huge percentages of random things I don't need on the screen like sidebars, etc.

I think for me the #1 thing about BBSs is at least for the better, BBSs, they
tended to be more restrictive and served as great content filters. If you were
an idiot, you simply could not join or got banned. There was a sense of
excitement to get on a new BBS and see what it had, and with many, a status
attached, especially in various undergrounds. There were always troublemakers,
but they were limited and it was part of the fun usually to fight and have
factions.

The small scale really made you feel like you knew everyone, even on large
BBSs with tons of users. Sometimes this also meant that we all met up in real
life and that changed how you interacted with people. It also sometimes
deflated your view of certain people.

On the flip side, there were many things that were pains not limited to busy
signals, slow speed, lots of bad BBS software that was popular, file transfers
in the earlier days, limited to calling or receiving per number of phone lines
unless you had expensive hardware/telco, and so on. I've often thought of
writing some sort of newer, hybrid Internet modern BBS software. I am keenly
aware of the many efforts to do things over SSH, telnet, web sockets, but they
are mostly just unfinished rehashes of a lot of the less impressive parts of
the old stuff. I have a list of many somewhere if anyone cares.

There are just so many things I could write about what we could learn from
BBSs. Sadly, I still think the filtering aspect was really what tied it all
together. Regardless, I would like to see someone build something new starting
at the protocol level that isn't just sitting on top of what exists or at
least is not just copying the old stuff. Some things like Hotline and other
file sharing were close in a way, but lacked the same feel. I really wish at
least the idea of getting to information fast and without bs would come back
more. Gopher in the early days sometimes felt like this, and many web pages
were like this to some degree.

Anyway, I am sure there are a lot of people who disagree and I believe there
is a lot more good and bad things to say. I feel like BBSs are really ignored
by a lot of people, and misunderstood by another large amount of people
including former users. There are still some BBSs out there and the good news
is most don't require a modem (just SSH or telnet), but it's just not the
same.

~~~
sseagull
There are two "features" that are hard to re-create with modern BBSes. These,
in my opinion, partly lead to the good user experience.

1\. Because you tied up a phone line (on both ends), your time was limited.
This results in not only not wasting time while on there, but also an increase
in anticipation for when you can next get on. It prevents people from getting
to far ahead in games.

2\. Banning could actually mean something. You were not really anonymous (at
least on the local ones) since you can be identified by your phone number and
maybe banned that way. How do you effectively ban a person nowadays? Can't do
it by IP or email, which leaves... ? That results in large amounts of spam,
trolling, sockpuppets, etc.

~~~
type0
> Banning could actually mean something. You were not really anonymous (at
> least on the local ones) since you can be identified by your phone number
> and maybe banned that way

Hypothetical question: if we would see a new emergence of mobile based BBS's,
using some novel protocol without identifiable phone numbers but with ability
to assign unique IDs to users and solve those problems, could it take off
today?

~~~
optionalparens
I am afraid I don't have any great answers other than taking some of the ideas
that made BBSs great as a whole and combining them into something entirely
new. There I have a few thoughts, but then we're not really talking about
BBSs.

The fact things were on a phone line helped in some ways (exclusivity, time,
identifiability), but doing it all through a mobile phone or other telephony
does not really capture that. For one, there would only be single node BBSs
unless you got creative, so I think the mobile phone part is too literal on
the concept of phones.

Secondly, while this is less popular, a lot of us including myself were not
actually identifiable unless we wanted to be. This happened because you could
call a BBS through an intermediary such as a PBX, and it was common to war
dial to find and hack these (or use open hardware) to dial out long distance.
Another way was carding (stealing credit cards) to pay for calls, which would
also often answer caller ID requests with another number than your own
depending on what you bought.

The anonymity was more complicated as you can see, but yes, it did help quite
a bit to have some sort of reputation attached to your name. A BBS handle
could carry weight across many systems, and word did spread. Some Sysops were
pretty nasty to people and went out of their way with that, but I think most
people accepted it and didn't do things like try to take them to court like we
have today. Somehow, whether they knew who you were or not, it just was not
worth it and getting other users to accept you in one form or another was
important. This happened via message bases, uploads (try to be top, avoid
being banned for bad uploads), new user signup, games, and more. So souring
your reputation had a cost if you were an avid BBSer, and even more so if you
had met people in real life.

I think anything remotely similar to BBSs in terms of success needs to do at
least some of these things:

\- No frills access

\- Tie things together as a cohesive hole

\- "Character" per system. Logging on to X should not be the same as logging
on to Y, but familiar enough to still be usable.

\- Distributed (run by a person/people)

\- No advertising. Advertising is at the root of ruining a lot

\- Cross-over between the real-world and the virtual-world. Ex: In person
meetings.

\- Sense of urgency

\- Connections to several rabid groups of sub-culture that will drive future
updates, modding, usage, etc. In the old days, this was HAM Radio operators,
ANSI artists, Anarchists, Punks, Crackers, Warez kids, Phreakers, D&D players,
and many other groups.

\- Decent give and take type systems. Ratios, time, and chat often worked this
way and sometimes were all interconnected. The more you upload, the more time
you get, and the more you can chat for example.

Many more things, but I'll stop there.

~~~
VLM
"No advertising. Advertising is at the root of ruining a lot"

I remember enormous controversy at the time about modem manufacturers who
would sell you a high speed (for the time) modem for free or a substantial
discount if you put a little advertisement for their modem on your board and
it was NOT well received. I think this was around the era of dueling and
completely incompatible 9600 baud modems. I skipped that horrible era and went
right from 2400 to 14400 then rapidly to 28800.

Class based access levels were a thing in the BBS era. It seems hard to
believe in 2016 web page world where there's maybe "have an account vs no
account" or at most "guest/free/paid" but some BBSes had a zillion levels of
participation and allowed time and ratio requirements. Some got a little eye
roll-y over specific.

Active discouragement of lurking, is how I'd phrase it.

~~~
optionalparens
Agreed. A lot of BBSs both thrived and ruined themselves over having pay
tiers. Sometimes it was pay for "premium" content which was usually warez,
porn, etc. Then there was a period of charging for access to parts of the
Internet (gateways), like email or usenet messages through your BBS.Other BBSs
simply asked for donations and got quite a bit because people were passionate.

Ugh, modem incompatibility was an awful thing. The modem manufacturers often
got greedy or out right lied about supporting standards correctly. It really
was a case of needing to pay for quality. The worst period I remember was
toward the end of the era with "Win modems" tied to windows. They'd pop these
pieces of junk inside Dell, Packard Bell, eMachines, Compaq, and other
consumer junk.

You're absolutely right about tiered access. I will say that torrent sites,
especially private ones do have some levels of tiered access. As do some web
forums in terms of moderation privileges. That's about the closest you get,
but it's no where near as nuanced, draconian, or as powerful. The class-based
access did have positive effects like you hint it such as discouraging
lurking, creating exclusivity, encouraging uploads, discouraging bad actors. I
kind of laughed at the web when years back they tried to do some version of
that via game-ification and in most cases it ended badly excluding the obvious
notables.

------
brightball
Oh man, I still remember having friends over to my house when I was a kid and
waiting til midnight so we could dial up to the local list of BBSs to take our
turns on the text games they had.

I think Red Dragon and Usurper were the big ones that we played. It's funny
that I was actually thinking about Usurper the other day because the best
thing to be in that game was an Alchemist which struck me as funny because now
that I'm into Elixir that's what the devs like to call themselves. :-)

~~~
Dowwie
what about Global Wars? :)

~~~
VLM
[http://www.tradewars.com/default.html](http://www.tradewars.com/default.html)

In the late 80s I used to have whiteboards all over my bedroom with various
graphical trade routes in my local tradewars game. From memory the solar
systems were all numbers so you'd go 3-6-99-8 or whatever.

Around the same time a local set up a machine with UUCP email and usenet. The
same people are on rec.pyrotechnics today as were on in 1989, probably because
they're FBI honeypots not people.

Around the early 90s I would download Phrack magazine from its internet site
when it was released using an email to FTP server where pre-mime days you'd
run uudecode on the email it sent back to get your short file. You'd email it
batch style a list of FTP commands and it would email you back whatever you
wanted to download. Then I'd upload the new Phrack zine to all my local BBSes
to get a better upload/download ratio. I distinctly remember
ftpmail@sunsite.unc.edu. I'm not sure the concept of a zine or Phrack (or
2600) would make any sense to anyone under 40.

~~~
Dowwie
you were so l33t with your hpacv.. what happened to you?

------
bungie4
I set up my first BBS in the late 80's. Prediction: You will start seeing more
and more locally oriented internet sites as the need hasn't disappeared. It
was only bulldozed out of the way to make way for the global village.

(God, did I just say global village, what's next, "Information Highway?"

~~~
rasz_pl
Isnt FB doing local groups/circles now or something?

------
squozzer
Don't remember much except Trade Wars. And some cracked C64 games.

------
mobiuscog
So many good memories, mostly on the Raytech BBS in Scotland, which was a
central point for PoV and other raytracing chat.

------
newswriter9
God I miss Totse.

