13 ms·

41 Years Ago, There Were BBS Instead of the Internet

114 points by laphony 8y ago

bemmu 8y ago
I used to be a sysop and made some of my deepest friendships that way. One-to-one chatting via fullscreen realtime updated text with no other distraction has some magical quality to it that makes you talk about all manner of things in depth with another person.
- bonniemuffin 8y ago
  I used to play a ton of MajorMud, half to chat with other people while we played, and half to script it so our characters could keep playing while we were all at school. I met my husband on a BBS, and here we are all these years later. Plain text chat with local strangers in your area code is truly magical.
- noufalibrahim 8y ago
  I got onto the net in the late 90s and discovered IRC soon after. I developed several nice friendships over freenode other IRC servers. Like you said, typing on a terminal without any distractions had a uniquely magical quality. I've put it down to nostalgia but things like slack and other popular modern tools just don't have the pull which IRC had for me.
- discobean 8y ago
  I started coding by doing C for ProBoard BBS plugins! I wrote SMURf CHaT back in 97! http://archives.thebbs.org/ra119a.htm http://archives.thebbs.org/ra119a.htm I remember when I encountered my first smilie on chat :) Those were the days :D
LinuxBender 8y ago
LOIS BBS stuck around for a while after the internet was created. For a while you could telnet to it. It was really popular on the central coast of California and as folks got jobs, moved around, that was a way for people to keep in touch. I remember seeing multiple split-66 blocks in the sysops room the BBS was running from, with a couple dozen phone lines. It's sysop (Pete a.k.a. Communicator) passed away and the BBS was run by another member for a while and then it eventually faded away. There were a lot of great memories created from that group of people. Given the localization aspect of BBS's in the day, it was common for a lot of people to meet up on a regular basis.
- wax66 8y ago
  TREX is still up.
hoodwink 8y ago
Ah what I would do to play a good ol’ game of TradeWars 2002 the ol’ fashioned way
- teilo 8y ago
  Recently, as I was doing some deep cleaning in my study, I found a warpgate map in my files that I made in the late 80s. I had forgotten all about Tradewars, so that brought back some memories. I lived in a small town, but there was a service available at the time, a sort of modem gateway network with nodes in a lot of smaller towns. It was a subscription service. Connect to it via a local call, and from there you could dial out to most major cities without paying long distance, and the local node proxied connections over some independent network. It was limited to 1200 baud. I can't remember what it was called. When I went off to school, I ran a local fidonet point, which basically was a sub-node that could connect to a full fidonet node and collect mail and group messages, and hang up. I could then read and respond at my leisure. Compuserve eventually replaced Fidonet for me, well before they offered Internet access. I had one of the old numerical IDs.
  - bbhart 8y ago
    PC Pursuit from Telenet. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telenet https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telenet I woke up super early many days so I could explore far-flung BBS’s before school. And I was 1:377/7 on Fidonet. Good times.
    - teilo 8y ago
      Yep, that was it!
  - LeoPanthera 8y ago
    Sounds like something similar to the IPSS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Packet_Switched_Service https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Packet_Switched_...
- taborj 8y ago
  Good news, there's nothing stopping you: https://www.telnetbbsguide.com/ https://www.telnetbbsguide.com/
Jemm 8y ago
BBSs are still alive; mostly accessed over amateur radio.
- gglitch 8y ago
  I’m brand new to amateur radio, but loved my BBS back in the day. Can you tell me more about this?
  - JohnL4 8y ago
    Packet radio, I'm guessing.
- lholden 8y ago
  And... over the internet. Quite a few internet connected BBSs around still, many of which are even part of FidoNet. Speaking of which... FidoNet is still alive too, along with several other similar BBS mail networks. :)
- csixty4 8y ago
  There's a decent community of BBSs connected over telnet as well. The ESP2866 makes it easy to "dial in" from an 8-bit machine.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - dcbadacd 8y ago
    What is there to do in the BBSs currently connected to the internet?
    - ksherlock 8y ago
      message boards, email, games, usenet, files
- codazoda 8y ago
  I ran a Utah BBS in the late 80's on a phone line I "found" in my childhood bedroom. I've thought, a bit, about setting up a "BBS" hosted on any computer connected to any WiFi access point. Here are my initial ramblings about the idea. https://blog.joeldare.com/wireless-bbs/ https://blog.joeldare.com/wireless-bbs/
porpoisely 8y ago
The internet predates BBS. And I'd credit HTTP, Netscape or AOL for killing off BBS rather than TCP/IP.
- icedchai 8y ago
  The everyday consumer did not have access to the Internet until the 90's when it was commercialized. True, it "existed" before that, it was primarily education / academia and defense-related orgs that had access. BBSes were primarily text based... early Internet providers opened up access to Usenet newsgroups, email, IRC, etc. which made traditional BBSes look like a toy in comparison. The web put the nail in the coffin, but they were already on their way out before then.
  - simonblack 8y ago
    > The everyday consumer did not have access to the Internet until the 90's I remember a day in the very early 90s when another node in our UUCP email system told the rest of us that he'd heard that there were now a million computers on the Net. We were gobsmacked. A whole million! Now an extra million or two computers is mere noise-levels.
    - pmoriarty 8y ago
      My biggest surprise was how quickly everything happened. One day you were considered a massive nerd for having your own computer, spending a lot of time on it, playing games on it, and socializing with others on it. Seemingly the next day everyone was online and had their own email addresses. I remember being amazed the first time I saw website advertised on the side of a bus. It seemed like the world had massively changed overnight. Now so many people have lived their entire lives with the net all around them and only hearsay about what it was like before.
      - krapp 8y ago
        >Now so many people have lived their entire lives with the net all around them and only hearsay about what it was like before. It's become so ubiquitous that the nerds have started complaining about how the tourists have ruined it. Which is understandable on the one hand, and regrettable on the other, because unlike physical real estate, the internet can be a potentially boundless space and there's room in it for everyone.
em-bee 8y ago
a host is a host from coast to coast, and no-one will talk to a host that's close, unless the host that isn't close is busy, hung or dead. (sing to the melody of the talking horse mr. ed) i don't know how old this is, and it still fits to the internet, but it's definitely from a time when BBS were still around.
- Stratoscope 8y ago
  Go right to the host and read the post, You'll get the answer you love the most, But all the way you'll never boast, Talk to BBS! People yakkity-yak a streak, And waste your time of day, But BBS will never speak, Unless there's something to say! https://genius.com/Jay-livingston-mr-ed-theme-lyrics https://genius.com/Jay-livingston-mr-ed-theme-lyrics
l8mr4 8y ago
QSD represent
dccoolgai 8y ago
There was a time you could (and would) go to a _picnic_ in real life with the other people on the internet. Can you imagine that? Tradewars, chat, warez, Club Caribe, music mods... it was pure magic. I would trade a year on this internet to have that one back for a couple hours.
- romwell 8y ago
  Hah, those times didn't quite pass. I went to a subreddit meetup around.. 2009, I think; it was the same spirit. (And we accidentally ran into David Blaine, but that's another story). But, more commonly, meeting up with strangers you met online is pretty much the default way of meeting people (ever heard of Tinder?). So it seems like you are complaining about the Eternal September more than anything else :)
RawInfoSec 8y ago
It was a hard decision sometimes, (as most boards gave only an hour so other people get a turn). Do I play Tradewars? LORD? What about downloading another half of disk 2 of UFO:Enemy Unknown? Maybe I should just stuff it all and go chat with the dude on line 2. 519 was an amazing and active BBS community. I still have friends that I see regularly. Some boards we used to chat all night or on occasion we'd insta-rush a bar, karaoke, or bownling alley at 3am just because we could. Some great memories, people etc. So far on the Interwebs I've found only dragons and monsters! lol
mymythisisthis 8y ago
A great, and free, doc about that time. https://archive.org/details/bbs_documentary https://archive.org/details/bbs_documentary
- lsh 8y ago
  That seems be to a collection of clips and things. The 'BBS: The Documentary' was released as ~8 episdoes. You can find them collected here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nO5vjmDFZaI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nO5vjmDFZaI
fred_is_fred 8y ago
Ah my first ops job. Running a BBS with a friend. I see Tradewars mentioned below, but I really liked Lands of Devastation.
pmoriarty 8y ago
The movie War Games inspired me to get a 300 baud modem, and one of my first memories of using one was to play Adventure (one of the first text adventure games) on a BBS. I war dialed like there was no tomorrow, and racked up huge phone bills downloading wares from across the country. 300 baud modems were super slow. You could literally watch a line of text be typed across the screen in front of you, one letter at a time. I upgraded to 2400 baud after that, and 9600 after that. Even at 9600 baud, I seem to recall that downloading one single mp3 (once those fancy high tech music files were invented) would take something like half an hour. 56k modems came after that, and finally ISDN and cable modems. In the late 80's I discovered the Internet and UNIX at the local university's computer lab, and there was no going back to BBS's after that. I remember trying to convince a Fidonet sysop to try the Internet, and he adamantly refused, saying that Fidonet is all he'd ever need. I wonder if he's still on Fidonet now, keeping to his vow never to set foot on the Internet.
- User23 8y ago
  I played MUDs on a 1200 baud modem, and I was at a distinct disadvantage. Going to 9600 was incredible.
  - pmoriarty 8y ago
    MUDs are actually still around, and the more popular ones are still going strong. I went on a MUD binge recently, and got a good dose of nostalgia. Check out The MUD Connector, if you're interested. https://www.mudconnect.com/ https://www.mudconnect.com/
    - jacobush 8y ago
      I think basically all art forms will for now on live on forever. Someone will always be programming an Atari 2600, play a MUD, or paint in oil on a canvas.
  - aedron 8y ago
    I lived out several years of my youth at 1200 baud. The word "U.S. Robotics" was like porn to me.
rboyd 8y ago
when the sysop breaks in when you’re desperately trying to brute force a NUP
sfopdxnonstop 8y ago
Barren Realms Elite on Hermes what it was 1991.
- efdee 8y ago
  Two words. Gooey Kablooie.
hendry 8y ago
Had to share my story how it was like in South Africa: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q0Dl-HJx7kY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q0Dl-HJx7kY
lbj 8y ago
Was really hoping for some nostalgic screenshots in this piece
insulanus 8y ago
Even 25 years ago, BBSes were still important, though it was clear they were in decline then. Students in the U.S. were going from poorly connected schools, to well connected Universities, and when they went back home for the break, they needed their fix!
coldtea 8y ago
In 41 years we moved on from BBS to BS
- rqs 8y ago
  If BS is short for Business Strategy then yes. Though BBS, some people found the potential of the Internet and starting to utilize it using varies business strategies. Dismantle those decentralized BBS is one of those methods.
- fb03 8y ago
  Can agree. Now we need 10 megs of javascript to even show some simple content on the web and whatnot. In that regard, this website is keeping the hope real, being really lightweight and snappy.
Endy 8y ago
Like so many of us, I miss the days of the BBS. But I think I know precisely why I do. BBS systems and Usenet were plain-text communications which were fast and open. There wasn't much space for user tracking, analytics, etc. There just wasn't much corporate space. Yes, there were corporate BBSes and public FTPs; but by and large they couldn't pull your call log and see what you'd been up to. There was a sense of privacy - even if there was less anonymity. There was also a sense of control. This massive TCP/IP, ECMAScript/PHP, CSS+HTML Web leaves a user with no feeling of control over how they browse, what they browse, etc. It's even worse when you know even a little about Web marketing and SEO. The manipulations employed which influence not just computers, but also users, have gotten wildly out of control. Back then, you the user had to make a deliberate choice to call into one BBS or another. You chose to interact with that specific group. Now it's all algorithmic.
- eeZah7Ux 8y ago
  Indeed plain-text BBS (over a slow modem) were faster than loading 10 MB of javascript over an ADSL. Also the information density and signal-to-noise ratio was higher. Even if you use ad-blockers.
  - nkozyra 8y ago
    I have a lot of nostalgia for my bbs days, but one thing I distinctly recall was the slowness of it all. The palpable improvement when you went from 300 baud to 600 or from 14k to 28k to 56k. I think we romanticize this stuff too much. Even showing a splash screen of ASCII text was stuttered. Chat operations were slow over the wire, you just never knew because ... maybe they just hadn't typed anything?
    - pjc50 8y ago
      Yeah, I don't think interactive use was actually faster. Noninteractive use however - FidoNet (an early messageboard system with similar properties to UseNet) supported downloading a chunk of posts which you could then read through offline in a native, responsive program.
    - 8y ago
01100011 8y ago
Nostalgia time... I remember when my grandparents tried to help their misbehaving grandson by buying him a C=128-D at Toys "R" Us along with a 1200 baud modem. I quickly grew bored with Q-Link and found about the network of BBSes which existed in the late 80's. It wasn't long before I had ran up an $800 phone bill, and for the next 20 years my grandpa wouldn't talk to me. I found friendship and mischief, a world of wonder for a 12 year old in the late 80s. "Free" games, porn(4-bit color, but still), and instructions for how to make bombs and hacking devices. After a couple years, I graduated to an Amiga 500 and a 2400 baud modem. Wardialing. Voice mail box hacking. 2600 magazine. Phrack. cDc. Credit-card and calling-card fraud. Tymnet and Telenet. Getting on the internet via a hacked login at UC Davis. Hacking the local phone companies billing system. Playing around with an open flood monitoring system running QNX. Every night was an adventure. I still remember having my mind blown after accessing a German chat server over one of the PSNs(Lutz?). My late friend Patrick started up a scam where we'd call people and tell them we were with the phone company. Someone had run up thousands on their calling card, but we could remove the charges if they'd verify the last 4 digits. Well, the first ten were the phone number we just dialed. One day a stranger called me(I still don't remember how he got my number or who he was) and we exchanged some notes... interesting finds from wardialing mostly. He called me back in a couple days and let me know one of the numbers was now giving a dialtone. That meant it was probably a PBX and we could use it to divert calls. I gave the number to Pat and after a few minutes he calls me back screaming "The password is 1-2-3-4!" over and over. Sure as shit, the fools didn't bother changing the password to something difficult. My innate paranoia kicked in and I suggested we should use the calling cards through the PBX so the owner didn't notice a surge in billing. That turned out to be a colossal mistake. A few months later, a confused and surprised GMAC, the PBX's owner, received a call from AT&T security. Someone was using stolen calling cards at their organization. We first got wind of it when we saw a highlighted section on the front page of the local newspaper warning people to be wary of giving out calling card information over the phone. I got paranoid and loaded my modem and a can of black powder I kept under my bed in my backpack and started biking to my friend's house. I don't know why, but I changed my mind and turned around half way. As I crested the small hill near my house, I saw the cop car and white evidence van parked out front. My parents had just been served a warrant and the police were seizing my computers(my old Amiga 500 was packed up to be sold, as I just bought a 386SX off my dad. They took both and everything around it... a printer... even a calculator). I don't remember much after that. The cops tried to befriend me with some bullshit stories of how they worked on the first networked computer. In the end I pled guilty and had to give up computers for 3 years, go to some scared straight program, and do a bunch of community service. I was charged with 2 felonies and a misdemeanor, but one of the felonies was dropped. I was a 15 year old felon, which I guess I'm strangely proud of. I managed to go about 18 months before I scrounged up an old green-screen TTY and a 300 baud modem. I was back online, but somewhat scared straight. I stuck to the mainstream BBSes, especially the multiline monsters that began popping up in the early 90s. It wasn't long before I found new friends though. I met the Mike's online and was in awe when I heard how they'd used stolen credit cards to fly to Portland and buy a couple of HAM radios. They figured out how to mod them and showed me how to take over the drive-thrus at local fast food restaurants. Another friend got involved and decided to go big with the credit card fraud. It wasn't long before we were driving through neighborhoods late at night, the backseat covered in a mountain of stolen mail. We'd sort through the pile looking for credit cards or gas cards, tossing the rest off a cliff or into the trash. We'd hit the malls and radio shack, buying radios, cassette tapes, laptops, computer equipment. Before long my friend started taking it to the extreme. He bought a new muffler and a set of tires for his car, leaving a clear paper trail right back to him. The group got concerned and somehow decided the best approach would be to cut ties and turn him in. I got picked to make the call. The next thing I know I'm talking to a postal inspector and the secret service. We thought we could contain the damage but the next thing we knew most of the group was getting charged. The whole thing blew up in our faces and ended our fun. We were adults now, in a world that suddenly took our games seriously. There's not much to say beyond that. The group recovered individually and all got day jobs. It sucked at the time but the story might just have made it all worth it. Sorry if you ever got a strange call in the middle of the night, or had your mail go missing. After all that I managed to get an old 8088 with a 20GB(edit: oops MB) HDD from Boeing surplus and started my first BBS. I don't even remember the name now. I ran Gremcit and had a small collection of users. It was tough to compete with the multiline systems at that point. I ended up taking my 56k modem back to Newegg and used the money to buy my first car. After that I found myself at college with a real connection to the internet. I've searched around since but I've never found anything that compares to the world I knew over a modem. I know the internet has an underbelly and a similar world still exists, so I guess I'm the one that changed. Maybe one day I'll fire up a port scanner and see what's out there, but after having been through the legal system I'm too scared to do anything that seems remotely illegal online. Here's to all the kids who are too young to fear, poking at the soft side of the world wide web.
voltagex_ 8y ago
https://ssh.sdf.org/ https://ssh.sdf.org/ - there's some still around, they've just evolved.
leemailll 8y ago
Bbs is still a thing in Chinese circle. In Taiwan is Ptt, in mainland there are still a few such as newsmth.
- stargazer-3 8y ago
  Can confirm - as recently as 2014 a substantial fraction of my college friends in Taiwan spent hours a day on BBS boards, gossiping about uni life and what not.
DEADBEEFC0FFEE 8y ago
How we used to marvel at bidirectional transfers. x-modem, y-modem, x-modem, q-modem. I can hear the handshaking as shrilly as they ever were. Good time.
- fb03 8y ago
  And then came z-modem and we could squeeze an additional bytes/s out of the connection, depending on the content. I remember seeing a steady 4.0kB/s on a 33600 baud USRobotics modem and going "wow we are at peak performance, let's just hope noise line or something doesn't degrade it" heheh good times indeed.
  - bluedino 8y ago
    At my first computer related job, they had a T1 line. My jaw hit the floor when I downlaoded a driver at 150kB/s 'that was faster than copying a floppy disk'
malbs 8y ago
Fidonet as the original electronic mail package, Door Games (BRE, cross-bbs wars, wow), ANSI Art, damn, it was really fun. I loved my time dialing into the local BBS's. It was interesting watching some of the larger ones in my area turn into the most successful ISPs at the time (and get consumed later by the much larger national ones). It inspired me to run my own, and while I only had the one line, and a very simple set of RemoteAccess screens, the experience taught me a hell of a lot about computers in general.
trollied 8y ago
There was a brilliant set of local BBSes where I grew up in Nottingham. The local cable company, Diamond Cable (since taken over by NTL/Virgin Media), offered free local calls to other cable customers. This obviously provided the perfect ecosystem for BBSes to pop up and thrive. I fondly remember old door games such as LORD [0], and downloading the Quake 1 demo using a 14.4k modem - That took some time! BBSes themselves used some technology that wasn't mainstream, DESQview being a good example - a nice text UI for multitasking DOS. [0]: https://www.pcmag.com/feature/340587/the-forgotten-world-of-bbs-door-games/6 https://www.pcmag.com/feature/340587/the-forgotten-world-of-... [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DESQview https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DESQview
qrbLPHiKpiux 8y ago
textfiles.com
bluedino 8y ago
If you added ANSI graphics and some door games, surfing HN with Lynx almost feels like a BBS
martin1b 8y ago
BBSes had soul. Everyone was excited to be there. Most everyone was an enthusiast. We had chat, forums, filez, online games before everyone else. Nobody outside of that world had any idea what we all were doing.
- O1111OOO 8y ago
  > Nobody outside of that world had any idea what we all were doing. Ha! So true. There was a technical debt that had to be paid for entry. Really kept things from de-evolving. The best we have today seems to be invite-only sites but with limited features in comparison.
xukuwarrior 8y ago
As a teenager I used to run the Middlesbrough Emerald City BBS. It was great fun. It was on my parents telephone line, so was only online after 10pm. Still got loads of calls. Most people just wanted to chat.
NuSkooler 8y ago
It's been pointed out already, but a little more info: There is a fairly large (and growing, actually) community of BBSers in the modern area. Telnet is even slowing being pushed out in favor of SSH and/or secure WebSockets (BBS from your browser!) in addition to other crypto and related tech where it can apply. There are boards running on retro hardware, under emulators, and even quite a few modern BBS software being written (disclaimer: I'm the author of one in Node.js). There is a lot of nostalgia, but also a lot of people enjoy time away from the modern corporate controlled web. A text-mode interface, community, etc. is quite nice at times.
jefurii 8y ago
Are any BBS nostalgiaists interested in the Tilde Club idea? You can set up an community insurance de a VPS box for peanuts these days.

114 points by laphony 8y ago

I used to be a sysop and made some of my deepest friendships that way. One-to-one chatting via fullscreen realtime updated text with no other distraction has some magical quality to it that makes you talk about all manner of things in depth with another person.

bonniemuffin 8y ago
I used to play a ton of MajorMud, half to chat with other people while we played, and half to script it so our characters could keep playing while we were all at school. I met my husband on a BBS, and here we are all these years later. Plain text chat with local strangers in your area code is truly magical.
noufalibrahim 8y ago
I got onto the net in the late 90s and discovered IRC soon after. I developed several nice friendships over freenode other IRC servers. Like you said, typing on a terminal without any distractions had a uniquely magical quality. I've put it down to nostalgia but things like slack and other popular modern tools just don't have the pull which IRC had for me.
discobean 8y ago
I started coding by doing C for ProBoard BBS plugins! I wrote SMURf CHaT back in 97! http://archives.thebbs.org/ra119a.htm http://archives.thebbs.org/ra119a.htm I remember when I encountered my first smilie on chat :) Those were the days :D

LinuxBender 8y ago

LOIS BBS stuck around for a while after the internet was created. For a while you could telnet to it. It was really popular on the central coast of California and as folks got jobs, moved around, that was a way for people to keep in touch. I remember seeing multiple split-66 blocks in the sysops room the BBS was running from, with a couple dozen phone lines. It's sysop (Pete a.k.a. Communicator) passed away and the BBS was run by another member for a while and then it eventually faded away. There were a lot of great memories created from that group of people. Given the localization aspect of BBS's in the day, it was common for a lot of people to meet up on a regular basis.

wax66 8y ago
TREX is still up.

hoodwink 8y ago

Ah what I would do to play a good ol’ game of TradeWars 2002 the ol’ fashioned way

teilo 8y ago
Recently, as I was doing some deep cleaning in my study, I found a warpgate map in my files that I made in the late 80s. I had forgotten all about Tradewars, so that brought back some memories. I lived in a small town, but there was a service available at the time, a sort of modem gateway network with nodes in a lot of smaller towns. It was a subscription service. Connect to it via a local call, and from there you could dial out to most major cities without paying long distance, and the local node proxied connections over some independent network. It was limited to 1200 baud. I can't remember what it was called. When I went off to school, I ran a local fidonet point, which basically was a sub-node that could connect to a full fidonet node and collect mail and group messages, and hang up. I could then read and respond at my leisure. Compuserve eventually replaced Fidonet for me, well before they offered Internet access. I had one of the old numerical IDs.
- bbhart 8y ago
  PC Pursuit from Telenet. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telenet https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telenet I woke up super early many days so I could explore far-flung BBS’s before school. And I was 1:377/7 on Fidonet. Good times.
  - teilo 8y ago
    Yep, that was it!
- LeoPanthera 8y ago
  Sounds like something similar to the IPSS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Packet_Switched_Service https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Packet_Switched_...
taborj 8y ago
Good news, there's nothing stopping you: https://www.telnetbbsguide.com/ https://www.telnetbbsguide.com/

Jemm 8y ago

BBSs are still alive; mostly accessed over amateur radio.

gglitch 8y ago
I’m brand new to amateur radio, but loved my BBS back in the day. Can you tell me more about this?
- JohnL4 8y ago
  Packet radio, I'm guessing.
lholden 8y ago
And... over the internet. Quite a few internet connected BBSs around still, many of which are even part of FidoNet. Speaking of which... FidoNet is still alive too, along with several other similar BBS mail networks. :)
csixty4 8y ago
There's a decent community of BBSs connected over telnet as well. The ESP2866 makes it easy to "dial in" from an 8-bit machine.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- dcbadacd 8y ago
  What is there to do in the BBSs currently connected to the internet?
  - ksherlock 8y ago
    message boards, email, games, usenet, files
codazoda 8y ago
I ran a Utah BBS in the late 80's on a phone line I "found" in my childhood bedroom. I've thought, a bit, about setting up a "BBS" hosted on any computer connected to any WiFi access point. Here are my initial ramblings about the idea. https://blog.joeldare.com/wireless-bbs/ https://blog.joeldare.com/wireless-bbs/

porpoisely 8y ago

The internet predates BBS. And I'd credit HTTP, Netscape or AOL for killing off BBS rather than TCP/IP.

icedchai 8y ago
The everyday consumer did not have access to the Internet until the 90's when it was commercialized. True, it "existed" before that, it was primarily education / academia and defense-related orgs that had access. BBSes were primarily text based... early Internet providers opened up access to Usenet newsgroups, email, IRC, etc. which made traditional BBSes look like a toy in comparison. The web put the nail in the coffin, but they were already on their way out before then.
- simonblack 8y ago
  > The everyday consumer did not have access to the Internet until the 90's I remember a day in the very early 90s when another node in our UUCP email system told the rest of us that he'd heard that there were now a million computers on the Net. We were gobsmacked. A whole million! Now an extra million or two computers is mere noise-levels.
  - pmoriarty 8y ago
    My biggest surprise was how quickly everything happened. One day you were considered a massive nerd for having your own computer, spending a lot of time on it, playing games on it, and socializing with others on it. Seemingly the next day everyone was online and had their own email addresses. I remember being amazed the first time I saw website advertised on the side of a bus. It seemed like the world had massively changed overnight. Now so many people have lived their entire lives with the net all around them and only hearsay about what it was like before.
    - krapp 8y ago
      >Now so many people have lived their entire lives with the net all around them and only hearsay about what it was like before. It's become so ubiquitous that the nerds have started complaining about how the tourists have ruined it. Which is understandable on the one hand, and regrettable on the other, because unlike physical real estate, the internet can be a potentially boundless space and there's room in it for everyone.

em-bee 8y ago

a host is a host from coast to coast, and no-one will talk to a host that's close, unless the host that isn't close is busy, hung or dead. (sing to the melody of the talking horse mr. ed) i don't know how old this is, and it still fits to the internet, but it's definitely from a time when BBS were still around.

Stratoscope 8y ago
Go right to the host and read the post, You'll get the answer you love the most, But all the way you'll never boast, Talk to BBS! People yakkity-yak a streak, And waste your time of day, But BBS will never speak, Unless there's something to say! https://genius.com/Jay-livingston-mr-ed-theme-lyrics https://genius.com/Jay-livingston-mr-ed-theme-lyrics

l8mr4 8y ago

QSD represent

dccoolgai 8y ago

There was a time you could (and would) go to a _picnic_ in real life with the other people on the internet. Can you imagine that? Tradewars, chat, warez, Club Caribe, music mods... it was pure magic. I would trade a year on this internet to have that one back for a couple hours.

romwell 8y ago
Hah, those times didn't quite pass. I went to a subreddit meetup around.. 2009, I think; it was the same spirit. (And we accidentally ran into David Blaine, but that's another story). But, more commonly, meeting up with strangers you met online is pretty much the default way of meeting people (ever heard of Tinder?). So it seems like you are complaining about the Eternal September more than anything else :)

RawInfoSec 8y ago

It was a hard decision sometimes, (as most boards gave only an hour so other people get a turn). Do I play Tradewars? LORD? What about downloading another half of disk 2 of UFO:Enemy Unknown? Maybe I should just stuff it all and go chat with the dude on line 2. 519 was an amazing and active BBS community. I still have friends that I see regularly. Some boards we used to chat all night or on occasion we'd insta-rush a bar, karaoke, or bownling alley at 3am just because we could. Some great memories, people etc. So far on the Interwebs I've found only dragons and monsters! lol

mymythisisthis 8y ago

A great, and free, doc about that time. https://archive.org/details/bbs_documentary https://archive.org/details/bbs_documentary

lsh 8y ago
That seems be to a collection of clips and things. The 'BBS: The Documentary' was released as ~8 episdoes. You can find them collected here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nO5vjmDFZaI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nO5vjmDFZaI

fred_is_fred 8y ago

Ah my first ops job. Running a BBS with a friend. I see Tradewars mentioned below, but I really liked Lands of Devastation.

pmoriarty 8y ago

The movie War Games inspired me to get a 300 baud modem, and one of my first memories of using one was to play Adventure (one of the first text adventure games) on a BBS. I war dialed like there was no tomorrow, and racked up huge phone bills downloading wares from across the country. 300 baud modems were super slow. You could literally watch a line of text be typed across the screen in front of you, one letter at a time. I upgraded to 2400 baud after that, and 9600 after that. Even at 9600 baud, I seem to recall that downloading one single mp3 (once those fancy high tech music files were invented) would take something like half an hour. 56k modems came after that, and finally ISDN and cable modems. In the late 80's I discovered the Internet and UNIX at the local university's computer lab, and there was no going back to BBS's after that. I remember trying to convince a Fidonet sysop to try the Internet, and he adamantly refused, saying that Fidonet is all he'd ever need. I wonder if he's still on Fidonet now, keeping to his vow never to set foot on the Internet.

User23 8y ago
I played MUDs on a 1200 baud modem, and I was at a distinct disadvantage. Going to 9600 was incredible.
- pmoriarty 8y ago
  MUDs are actually still around, and the more popular ones are still going strong. I went on a MUD binge recently, and got a good dose of nostalgia. Check out The MUD Connector, if you're interested. https://www.mudconnect.com/ https://www.mudconnect.com/
  - jacobush 8y ago
    I think basically all art forms will for now on live on forever. Someone will always be programming an Atari 2600, play a MUD, or paint in oil on a canvas.
- aedron 8y ago
  I lived out several years of my youth at 1200 baud. The word "U.S. Robotics" was like porn to me.

rboyd 8y ago

when the sysop breaks in when you’re desperately trying to brute force a NUP

sfopdxnonstop 8y ago

Barren Realms Elite on Hermes what it was 1991.

efdee 8y ago
Two words. Gooey Kablooie.

hendry 8y ago

Had to share my story how it was like in South Africa: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q0Dl-HJx7kY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q0Dl-HJx7kY

lbj 8y ago

Was really hoping for some nostalgic screenshots in this piece

insulanus 8y ago

Even 25 years ago, BBSes were still important, though it was clear they were in decline then. Students in the U.S. were going from poorly connected schools, to well connected Universities, and when they went back home for the break, they needed their fix!

coldtea 8y ago

In 41 years we moved on from BBS to BS

rqs 8y ago
If BS is short for Business Strategy then yes. Though BBS, some people found the potential of the Internet and starting to utilize it using varies business strategies. Dismantle those decentralized BBS is one of those methods.
fb03 8y ago
Can agree. Now we need 10 megs of javascript to even show some simple content on the web and whatnot. In that regard, this website is keeping the hope real, being really lightweight and snappy.

Endy 8y ago

Like so many of us, I miss the days of the BBS. But I think I know precisely why I do. BBS systems and Usenet were plain-text communications which were fast and open. There wasn't much space for user tracking, analytics, etc. There just wasn't much corporate space. Yes, there were corporate BBSes and public FTPs; but by and large they couldn't pull your call log and see what you'd been up to. There was a sense of privacy - even if there was less anonymity. There was also a sense of control. This massive TCP/IP, ECMAScript/PHP, CSS+HTML Web leaves a user with no feeling of control over how they browse, what they browse, etc. It's even worse when you know even a little about Web marketing and SEO. The manipulations employed which influence not just computers, but also users, have gotten wildly out of control. Back then, you the user had to make a deliberate choice to call into one BBS or another. You chose to interact with that specific group. Now it's all algorithmic.

eeZah7Ux 8y ago
Indeed plain-text BBS (over a slow modem) were faster than loading 10 MB of javascript over an ADSL. Also the information density and signal-to-noise ratio was higher. Even if you use ad-blockers.
- nkozyra 8y ago
  I have a lot of nostalgia for my bbs days, but one thing I distinctly recall was the slowness of it all. The palpable improvement when you went from 300 baud to 600 or from 14k to 28k to 56k. I think we romanticize this stuff too much. Even showing a splash screen of ASCII text was stuttered. Chat operations were slow over the wire, you just never knew because ... maybe they just hadn't typed anything?
  - pjc50 8y ago
    Yeah, I don't think interactive use was actually faster. Noninteractive use however - FidoNet (an early messageboard system with similar properties to UseNet) supported downloading a chunk of posts which you could then read through offline in a native, responsive program.
  - 8y ago

01100011 8y ago

Nostalgia time... I remember when my grandparents tried to help their misbehaving grandson by buying him a C=128-D at Toys "R" Us along with a 1200 baud modem. I quickly grew bored with Q-Link and found about the network of BBSes which existed in the late 80's. It wasn't long before I had ran up an $800 phone bill, and for the next 20 years my grandpa wouldn't talk to me. I found friendship and mischief, a world of wonder for a 12 year old in the late 80s. "Free" games, porn(4-bit color, but still), and instructions for how to make bombs and hacking devices. After a couple years, I graduated to an Amiga 500 and a 2400 baud modem. Wardialing. Voice mail box hacking. 2600 magazine. Phrack. cDc. Credit-card and calling-card fraud. Tymnet and Telenet. Getting on the internet via a hacked login at UC Davis. Hacking the local phone companies billing system. Playing around with an open flood monitoring system running QNX. Every night was an adventure. I still remember having my mind blown after accessing a German chat server over one of the PSNs(Lutz?). My late friend Patrick started up a scam where we'd call people and tell them we were with the phone company. Someone had run up thousands on their calling card, but we could remove the charges if they'd verify the last 4 digits. Well, the first ten were the phone number we just dialed. One day a stranger called me(I still don't remember how he got my number or who he was) and we exchanged some notes... interesting finds from wardialing mostly. He called me back in a couple days and let me know one of the numbers was now giving a dialtone. That meant it was probably a PBX and we could use it to divert calls. I gave the number to Pat and after a few minutes he calls me back screaming "The password is 1-2-3-4!" over and over. Sure as shit, the fools didn't bother changing the password to something difficult. My innate paranoia kicked in and I suggested we should use the calling cards through the PBX so the owner didn't notice a surge in billing. That turned out to be a colossal mistake. A few months later, a confused and surprised GMAC, the PBX's owner, received a call from AT&T security. Someone was using stolen calling cards at their organization. We first got wind of it when we saw a highlighted section on the front page of the local newspaper warning people to be wary of giving out calling card information over the phone. I got paranoid and loaded my modem and a can of black powder I kept under my bed in my backpack and started biking to my friend's house. I don't know why, but I changed my mind and turned around half way. As I crested the small hill near my house, I saw the cop car and white evidence van parked out front. My parents had just been served a warrant and the police were seizing my computers(my old Amiga 500 was packed up to be sold, as I just bought a 386SX off my dad. They took both and everything around it... a printer... even a calculator). I don't remember much after that. The cops tried to befriend me with some bullshit stories of how they worked on the first networked computer. In the end I pled guilty and had to give up computers for 3 years, go to some scared straight program, and do a bunch of community service. I was charged with 2 felonies and a misdemeanor, but one of the felonies was dropped. I was a 15 year old felon, which I guess I'm strangely proud of. I managed to go about 18 months before I scrounged up an old green-screen TTY and a 300 baud modem. I was back online, but somewhat scared straight. I stuck to the mainstream BBSes, especially the multiline monsters that began popping up in the early 90s. It wasn't long before I found new friends though. I met the Mike's online and was in awe when I heard how they'd used stolen credit cards to fly to Portland and buy a couple of HAM radios. They figured out how to mod them and showed me how to take over the drive-thrus at local fast food restaurants. Another friend got involved and decided to go big with the credit card fraud. It wasn't long before we were driving through neighborhoods late at night, the backseat covered in a mountain of stolen mail. We'd sort through the pile looking for credit cards or gas cards, tossing the rest off a cliff or into the trash. We'd hit the malls and radio shack, buying radios, cassette tapes, laptops, computer equipment. Before long my friend started taking it to the extreme. He bought a new muffler and a set of tires for his car, leaving a clear paper trail right back to him. The group got concerned and somehow decided the best approach would be to cut ties and turn him in. I got picked to make the call. The next thing I know I'm talking to a postal inspector and the secret service. We thought we could contain the damage but the next thing we knew most of the group was getting charged. The whole thing blew up in our faces and ended our fun. We were adults now, in a world that suddenly took our games seriously. There's not much to say beyond that. The group recovered individually and all got day jobs. It sucked at the time but the story might just have made it all worth it. Sorry if you ever got a strange call in the middle of the night, or had your mail go missing. After all that I managed to get an old 8088 with a 20GB(edit: oops MB) HDD from Boeing surplus and started my first BBS. I don't even remember the name now. I ran Gremcit and had a small collection of users. It was tough to compete with the multiline systems at that point. I ended up taking my 56k modem back to Newegg and used the money to buy my first car. After that I found myself at college with a real connection to the internet. I've searched around since but I've never found anything that compares to the world I knew over a modem. I know the internet has an underbelly and a similar world still exists, so I guess I'm the one that changed. Maybe one day I'll fire up a port scanner and see what's out there, but after having been through the legal system I'm too scared to do anything that seems remotely illegal online. Here's to all the kids who are too young to fear, poking at the soft side of the world wide web.

voltagex_ 8y ago

https://ssh.sdf.org/ https://ssh.sdf.org/ - there's some still around, they've just evolved.

leemailll 8y ago

Bbs is still a thing in Chinese circle. In Taiwan is Ptt, in mainland there are still a few such as newsmth.

stargazer-3 8y ago
Can confirm - as recently as 2014 a substantial fraction of my college friends in Taiwan spent hours a day on BBS boards, gossiping about uni life and what not.

DEADBEEFC0FFEE 8y ago

How we used to marvel at bidirectional transfers. x-modem, y-modem, x-modem, q-modem. I can hear the handshaking as shrilly as they ever were. Good time.

fb03 8y ago
And then came z-modem and we could squeeze an additional bytes/s out of the connection, depending on the content. I remember seeing a steady 4.0kB/s on a 33600 baud USRobotics modem and going "wow we are at peak performance, let's just hope noise line or something doesn't degrade it" heheh good times indeed.
- bluedino 8y ago
  At my first computer related job, they had a T1 line. My jaw hit the floor when I downlaoded a driver at 150kB/s 'that was faster than copying a floppy disk'

malbs 8y ago

Fidonet as the original electronic mail package, Door Games (BRE, cross-bbs wars, wow), ANSI Art, damn, it was really fun. I loved my time dialing into the local BBS's. It was interesting watching some of the larger ones in my area turn into the most successful ISPs at the time (and get consumed later by the much larger national ones). It inspired me to run my own, and while I only had the one line, and a very simple set of RemoteAccess screens, the experience taught me a hell of a lot about computers in general.

trollied 8y ago

There was a brilliant set of local BBSes where I grew up in Nottingham. The local cable company, Diamond Cable (since taken over by NTL/Virgin Media), offered free local calls to other cable customers. This obviously provided the perfect ecosystem for BBSes to pop up and thrive. I fondly remember old door games such as LORD [0], and downloading the Quake 1 demo using a 14.4k modem - That took some time! BBSes themselves used some technology that wasn't mainstream, DESQview being a good example - a nice text UI for multitasking DOS. [0]: https://www.pcmag.com/feature/340587/the-forgotten-world-of-bbs-door-games/6 https://www.pcmag.com/feature/340587/the-forgotten-world-of-... [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DESQview https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DESQview

qrbLPHiKpiux 8y ago

textfiles.com

bluedino 8y ago

If you added ANSI graphics and some door games, surfing HN with Lynx almost feels like a BBS

martin1b 8y ago

BBSes had soul. Everyone was excited to be there. Most everyone was an enthusiast. We had chat, forums, filez, online games before everyone else. Nobody outside of that world had any idea what we all were doing.

O1111OOO 8y ago
> Nobody outside of that world had any idea what we all were doing. Ha! So true. There was a technical debt that had to be paid for entry. Really kept things from de-evolving. The best we have today seems to be invite-only sites but with limited features in comparison.

xukuwarrior 8y ago

As a teenager I used to run the Middlesbrough Emerald City BBS. It was great fun. It was on my parents telephone line, so was only online after 10pm. Still got loads of calls. Most people just wanted to chat.

NuSkooler 8y ago

It's been pointed out already, but a little more info: There is a fairly large (and growing, actually) community of BBSers in the modern area. Telnet is even slowing being pushed out in favor of SSH and/or secure WebSockets (BBS from your browser!) in addition to other crypto and related tech where it can apply. There are boards running on retro hardware, under emulators, and even quite a few modern BBS software being written (disclaimer: I'm the author of one in Node.js). There is a lot of nostalgia, but also a lot of people enjoy time away from the modern corporate controlled web. A text-mode interface, community, etc. is quite nice at times.

jefurii 8y ago

Are any BBS nostalgiaists interested in the Tilde Club idea? You can set up an community insurance de a VPS box for peanuts these days.