
Social Media’s Dial-Up Ancestor: The Bulletin Board System (2016) - okket
https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-history/cyberspace/social-medias-dialup-ancestor-the-bulletin-board-system
======
spdustin
I used to run a BBS in Florida (904 area code) on an Atari 800XL with two
acoustically coupled 300 baud modems. I eventually found a pair of 1200 baud
USRobotics modems at a garage sale (!) for $50 (!!), and started curating ANSI
graphics and RIP menus and Atari demoscene (such as it was), along with all
the code and scans I could find for Atari projects (like a WeFax decoder, my
favorite).

Man, I was so addicted to Door programs like TradeWars.

I ended up going to a few (I guess you'd call them) meetups of other SysOps
and learning all I could about FidoNet and NNTP gateways and so many things I
think I'm starting to ramble out of pure nostalgia.

Those were the days; watching a roughly pixelated scan of a swimsuit model
slowly paint on the screen while downloading at 300bps via ZMODEM.

Yep. Those were the days.

Especially when your BBS was running on your home phone lines, and your older
brother needed to call his $%{*3H# NO CARRIER

~~~
sokoloff
My first paid programming gig was $20 for a piece of relcoatable machine code
to calculate the XModem checksum in a USR$ call instead of in BASIC for the
BBS operator who had just upgraded to a 1200 baud modem and found the
transfers were only barely faster.

------
donbright
one interesting thing is that the BBS would have been impossible if the
government hadn't forced AT&T to allow people to hook their own chosen devices
into the telephone network.

In other words, in the old days, phones did not have a jack in the wall - AT&T
came to your house and wired their network directly into your telephone. They
did not want the RJ-45 jack which made consumer Modems possible. The
government forced them to open up their network to other device makers, to
competitors.

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

I really wonder if the modern techno giants would be able to be regulated by
the government if they became stagnant monopolies.

~~~
pasbesoin
I remember using a 300 baud modem with an acoustic coupler (rubber-cupped
cradle). After a while, that got swapped out for a electrically-
connected/jacked 1200 baud modem.

That also made "war dialing" practical. Not something I engaged in (kind of
wish now that I'd been more "interesting"), but the business I was connecting
to had to block an ex-employee a couple of times, who kept finding their dial-
in number.

Today's systems may be way faster and more "entertaining", in a mass sense.
But I miss the old culture.

Including the openness and exchange. If you were interested, and you weren't a
jerk, people would bend over backwards to help you. And they enjoyed doing so
-- well, most of them. Which is how I ended up on those first systems, anyway.

I think a lot of people miss that culture. But, it just doesn't scale to the
general population.

~~~
isostatic
Surely people today have watched Wargames - Broderick used an acoustic coupler
in his nefarious attempts to get into his classmate's pants

~~~
LeoPanthera
Which, perhaps ironically, is a small plot hole in the movie. "Wardialing" is
not possible with a coupler - since the computer has no ability to hang up, or
dial. When using a coupler, you have to dial manually.

~~~
kimdotcom
Could you not run a relay from thr parallel port and pulse dial?

~~~
LeoPanthera
Yeah, you could. But there’s no pulse dialing depicted in the movie.

------
exogeny
Count me as yet another person who would likely not be here, commenting on HN,
without discovering BBSes and falling in love with the merging of hacking,
designing, and community.

I ran a heavily, heavily modded Renegade board in 412/724 (Pittsburgh) with
some good distros into the art and demoscenes in Europe. Nearly every free
minute of my life back then was related: drawing ANSI, tracking MODs, trying
to figure out how to get Lightboxes to work with Renegade, playing LORD and
hanging out with other users from around the Pittsburgh area.

I consider myself incredibly lucky to have been a curious teenager in a time
when BBSes were a thing, and the web as we currently know it was born.

------
unrealchild
I love the “ancient tech” topics :) as time marches on I tend to think
“...wow...I used that!” BBS, Gopher, and other tools which are still (maybe
not commonly) used like Pine and Lynx are a few items that come up in
conversation that prompt a sense of wonder in me. Things have come a long way
since I first started to dabble...and I’m not even “that old”!

~~~
tyfon
Then you realise that this happened 30 year ago and then you feel old. At
least I do.

I used to use a bbs offline "mail" client called blue wave, and it would
import .qwk files from the bbs, then you spent your time replying offline and
in the end would upload a .rep package containing said replies.

In some ways I miss it but in other ways I have a 500/500 internet fiber
connection now and do not miss the days when donloading a 10 mb file took the
rest of the day.

~~~
robin_reala
Yep, same on CiX in the UK. We had to pay for phone access by the minute, so
an offline reader was absolutely necessary.

~~~
tyfon
Same here in Norway. I remember being jealous of people in the US with a flat
local rate. We paid by the minute for everything, even more for "long"
distance. My father got rather upset when we got a phone bill of 5000 NOK back
in the day because I had downloaded something from a BBS in Bergen from Oslo.

Funny how things have reversed, now we are the ones with unmetered fast
internet and the US has datacaps and whatnot.

------
wolco
The big difference is everyone on bbses had a handle for some reason everyone
uses there real name / posts where they work.

Social media wouldn't be such a problem if people stopped using their real
name

~~~
allannienhuis
Anonymous handles have a different set of problems which I think is why we've
landed on real names for much of social media. Personally I prefer real names
in most contexts, but I get why some people don't.

~~~
wyck
Anonymity is very comforting, you brought your discussion to the table without
stereotype or preconception getting in the way, much like this very site and
the reason why reddit is so popular. It is the basis for free discussion, a
foundation pillar of the internet.

It's truly amazing that the early internet was a social experaince that went
though a weird product/service commercial driven phase, and now we find
ourselves trying to balance both of those out.

~~~
allannienhuis
right, but I don't think we can ignore the problem of cesspools of really
toxic behaviour that is at times enabled with anonymous handles. Moderation is
much more important in those contexts. HN works because it's pretty heavily
moderated (both by users via downvotes + comments and admins).

But a heavily moderated forum is not a completely free discussion environment.
And the forums full of toxic comments aren't really that free either, because
a huge portion of potential participants choose not to participate because of
the nasty environment.

Clearly in some (many?) contexts there's a need for anonymity, and in some
cases (HN) it seems to work out ok. I'm just not sure if anonymous is the
right default for a lot of social media contexts. Both Slashdot and Reddit
have become unusable for me because of the signal to noise ratio is so low
(reddit may have some subreddits with better behaviour, but not any of the
ones I found personally interesting).

------
evadne
Probably of interest:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PTT_Bulletin_Board_System](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PTT_Bulletin_Board_System)
which is the largest of its kind in Taiwan

------
anfractuosity
I keep meaning to get the documentary they mention -
[http://www.bbsdocumentary.com/](http://www.bbsdocumentary.com/)

Be curious about reviews of it.

~~~
guiambros
It's a great documentary; worth watching.

I have a friend and former co-worker who had relevant role in the movie (and,
funny enough, I only discovered years later, when I re-watched it).

------
TangoTrotFox
It's fun to compare and contrast the games of the BBS era to mobile games
today. In the BBS era there were countless time-regulated games such as LORD,
Trade Wars, Usurper, and many more. By 'time regulated' I mean that you were
given a certain amount of turns/energy/etc per 24 hours, and then had to wait
to do more. It's literally the exact same model the seemingly vast majority of
'free' mobile games today use, except they did not try to coerce users into
paying for more energy/turns/moves/...

~~~
Canada
Didn't sysops usually give donators extra time? Not sure if that mattered, I
didn't spend much time playing those games.

~~~
TangoTrotFox
That's on the BBS itself. E.g. a regular account might get an hour per day
whereas an 'elite' might get 4 hours per day. BBS' were of course run through
phone lines and while many operators set up multiple concurrent lines, access
was still relatively limited so time limits on the site were necessary.
Donors, by contrast, enabled operators to expand their service and buy even
more lines and so on.

The games themselves are a different story. It's of course impossible to prove
a negative, but I certainly never experienced any paid cheating or favoritism
in Trade Wars - which I played on dozens of different sites and later on on
the large telnet sites once the internet became a thing.

------
kstenerud
It was a blast installing, running, and later modifying BBS software. Usually
the source was available somewhere, even for shareware stuff or via a warez
site. Or you'd just hack it directly with a hex editor.

You'd have your usual haunts where you'd dial in to check messages (before
fidonet). The haves were on HST dual standard, the have-nots on v32bis. Having
a sysop break in for a chat was a fairly common occurrence.

Fun times...

------
classichasclass
I frequented Image BBSes with my best friend of the same name; we dialed in
from our respective Commodore 128s. Our favourite story was when one of our
local boards was doing a promotion on download points over New Year's Eve. I
was the last visitor on 19xx and he was the first visitor on 19xx+1, and we
never had to upload a file ever again to that board. :)

------
Cursuviam
Recommendation for checking out Digital: A Love Story, a free PC game set
mainly on BBSs in 1988.

[http://scoutshonour.com/digital/](http://scoutshonour.com/digital/)

------
Dowwie
The New Jersey BBS communities from the early 90s were great. I assume that
many of the members are doing well today, considering their interests were
well aligned with the economy. I hope all are well.

------
gaius
_many of the ... cultural practices that we now recognize as social media were
first developed_

I caught the tail end of BBS culture and modern internet culture is nothing
like it. See
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17534985](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17534985)
and
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17535165](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17535165)
for an example

~~~
mmt
Agreed. It may be safe to compare BBS culture with Usenet culture, not least
of which because Fidonet enabled so much overlap toward that tail end you
mention, but the sheer ubiquity alone makes today's Internet a different
situation entirely.

------
qrbLPHiKpiux
I have a lot to thank BBSs for in cultivating my life.

Textfiles.com for nostalgia.

------
Dowwie
Come on, no mention of Global Wars? :)

