4 ms·
One thing that always fascinated me is that although BBSs connected people, they were necessarily constrained by distance given the difficult (and price) of lon
by whatever_dude 9y ago
One thing that always fascinated me is that although BBSs connected people, they were necessarily constrained by distance given the difficult (and price) of long-distance calls. That reflected on the shape of the community around it. There were some things that would be common between them but overall different area codes had very different scenes. This is somewhat diluted today, since you can connect with whatever community you want. It creates a different sort of bubble.
Anyway, that constraint was also somehow reflected on the choice of tools, maybe in this case especially in the software used by the BBS itself. The US had plenty of different BBS software being used. I know Wildcat was popular in Europe. In my native Brazil it was dominated by PCBoard (major) and Remote Access (minor), and the underground scene was heavily invested in the "cool" Oblivion. I actually thought PCBoard was a major player until I realized very few boards in the USA used it.
- rottyguy 9y agoalso, it was constrained by a queue. Usually 1 phone line therefore only one person could be on at a time (cooperative multitasking if you will). busy signals (when was the last time you got a busy signal anywhere?) and auto-redials. good times!
- zorked 9y agoBBS software was very regionalized. Being from a different part of Brazil Remote Access reigned supreme, while PC Board is something I saw once that one day when I dared dial long distance to some BBS in a different state. The same goes for all the other software. In some areas LORD was _the_ BBS game, in others it was unknown. In my region BlueWave was the standard offline mail reader, in others only QWK or even weirder formats were the standard.
- bananaboy 9y agoIn Melbourne, Australia, Remote Access and ProBoard were fairly popular amongst regular BBSes. At the time I always had the impression that PC Board was more popular amongst the warez BBSes.
- Muuuchem 9y agoI visited the sonic the hedgehog video game BBS nearly daily when I first got a computer and dialup at my home in the late 90/early 2000s. I don't remember any distance constraints, but I was between 9 and 11 years old during this time period.
- tracker1 9y agoI bet your parents noticed.. ;-)