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It was pretty awesome. The barrier to entry was a little high for a lot of people in the 80's as you required a decent PC, modem and had to pay the phone bill

It was pretty awesome. The barrier to entry was a little high for a lot of people in the 80's as you required a decent PC, modem and had to pay the phone bill for long distance calls. Something people don't remember is that long distance calling was not free, you couldn't call other area codes or states in the US without paying a per minute fee. It was more on-par to international calling today then with mobile phone calls. Oh, and busy lines were not uncommon, you'd spend hours trying to dial into a system to get a file or post on a forum etc. I would say it is less like social media today and more like forums. So less Facebook/Twitter and more reddit style. Though BBS' were also less filtered and far less big brother IMO. Of course some site admins would be militant about their feelings and only allow certain view points but that was fine because there were tons of other BBS' to play on. The industry was fairly big and growing fast, one of the larger us BBS systems was execpc, you can find stuff on them still. They started as a small BBS that turned into a fairly large internet provider eventually. But there were tons of players, and there were systems like Tag BBS etc. I both hosted a BBS for a number of years and was a user of tons of them. Another key thing people don't think about today, disk space was at a premium (especially for personal computers). We used floppy disks for moving files a lot and hard drives were expensive so getting 10Mb or 40Mb drives was awesome. Putting in 3-4 hard drives to get yourself over 100Mb was crazy. Drive technology was still evolving so lots of different types with pros/cons and most were loud, pretty large and obnoxious. A lot of the search & compression technology we created during the BBS days is still in use, though in different ways now. Compression being pretty critical since for most long distance sites you paid per minute and downloading a 1Mb file over 9600baud was slow. Man I remember going from 1200-2400-9600-19200 then 38400 and 115200. You felt like a damn rock star when your file downloads didn't take 6-8 hours and could be done in like an hour or so. It was definitely a lot of community and sharing. There were trolls then just like now, but generally I feel like back then they were less damaging or hurtful and more entertaining. Of course, there were scams on most forums just like now, but good BBS sites did their best to keep them at bay.

StanislavPetrov 5y ago
>Something people don't remember is that long distance calling was not free, you couldn't call other area codes or states in the US without paying a per minute fee. Here in New York, you couldn't even call within the same area code without paying a per minute fee and a connection charge. On Long Island the plans included unlimited calling to several close, adjacent towns, but calling towns even 10 miles away in the same area code incurred a substantial per minute surcharge.
ryandrake 5y ago
> A lot of the search & compression technology we created during the BBS days is still in use, though in different ways now. Compression being pretty critical since for most long distance sites you paid per minute and downloading a 1Mb file over 9600baud was slow. Man I remember going from 1200-2400-9600-19200 then 38400 and 115200. You felt like a damn rock star when your file downloads didn't take 6-8 hours and could be done in like an hour or so. I started BBSing in the late 80s, so saw the very tail end of 2400, but the first modem I bought was 9600, so I missed the big 2400-9600 change mostly. Road the wave all the way up to 56K. I had planned to finally start my own BBS when I moved off to University in 1994, since my parents wouldn't let me buy dedicated phone lines. Saved all my cash from working McDonalds and was all ready to pull the trigger on multiple V.34 56K USRobotics Courier modems and had the BBS (based on WWIV) all ready to turn on. Confirmed that the University would allow multiple phone lines per dorm. Got to University, and lo and behold! The summer before, they outfitted all dormitories with two 10-base-T ethernet connections to the Internet backbone. Mind blown. Ditched the BBS idea instantly and that was it, I never dialed into another BBS or ran my own. A lot of my BBS friends also instantly lost interest the moment they entered University and had a proper high-speed Internet connection.
- davismwfl 5y ago
  Totally agree, I had early access to the internet through one of the BBS's I subscribed to, textual only of course cause the www didn't exist at first and then even in the early 90's it was still very new. But in the early to mid 90's we had a dedicated T1 trunk (at work) to connect us to UUNET. All fun times. Even then, I still used a few BBS' at home (including for home internet access) until say like 1995/96 when I moved solely over to Mindspring. Might be a little off on the year I switched but not by much, that is a long time ago.
- timbit42 5y ago
  My first modem was a used VIC-MODEM for the Commodore VIC-20. I used it to access a "free" data service not realizing the phone calls weren't free. Ended up with an $80 phone bill. That's $220 in today's dollars.
ecpottinger 5y ago
One thing to remember of message hopping. I ran a BBS in Oshawa, if you posted a public message to it, it was copied to the Whitby BBS, who in turn copied it to the BBS in Pickering, who in turn copied to a Toronto BBS where it was copied to multiple systems. In affect the public section was one big BBS it was just that messages would take days to relay around. I remember some silly reporter did not understand and he called BBSes all around North America posting the same message, and for the next week or so you would see repeats of his message all the way from California and Florida.
VLM 5y ago
> one of the larger us BBS systems was execpc Around 1990 they started a parallel "less serious" service called execpc chat, or something like that (had a few names) and I played online trivia on exec chat for MANY hours. For some strange reason I seem to remember Thursday nights. For a long time if you had a subscription to the "serious" execpc they gave away a subscription to the "fun" exec chat service. Eventually around '92 I got on the internet and IRC (later MUDs) then dozens of people because normal. Exec-PC the main service had an interesting file search system that used an enormous number of PCs in parallel and they called it hyper-search or something like that and it was ridiculously fast, like Google search speed. You could tell if someone was serious about BBS stuff because they had multiple PCs on their desk. The fancier PC for gaming or programming or using in general, and the lame PC that barely booted but could be dedicated to downloading files for an hour or whatever who cares. Magnetic interference between adjacent CRT monitors was a problem, or some company named "Black Box" sold monitor switchboxes so you could have as many as four analog VGA PCs plugged into one monitor, only one visible at a time of course, or a similar switch could connect one keyboard to multiple computers. I remember seeing an ad for my first KVM switch, well, KV, anyway, and that was pretty mindblowing that you only need one box instead of two. I had multiple PCs on my desk from the late 80s until about 2018, habit I guess. Many people also had a TV on their desk; start a download, watch TV, who cares how long the download takes.
ok123456 5y ago
>Something people don't remember is that long distance calling was not free, "Local" calls weren't always free either. Each locality had their own set of exchanges that were considered "local" and beyond that it was "local-long distance." It was completely arbitrary. The "local-long distance" rates were often higher than the actual long distance since there was still something of a monopoly. Then in some areas they didn't have flat rate lines, where local calls calls were "free". There were message rate lines where calling different places within your locality cost a different number of message units per call, and only a fixed number of them were included with your service. It's very similar to cloud pricing now.

StanislavPetrov 5y ago

>Something people don't remember is that long distance calling was not free, you couldn't call other area codes or states in the US without paying a per minute fee. Here in New York, you couldn't even call within the same area code without paying a per minute fee and a connection charge. On Long Island the plans included unlimited calling to several close, adjacent towns, but calling towns even 10 miles away in the same area code incurred a substantial per minute surcharge.

ryandrake 5y ago

> A lot of the search & compression technology we created during the BBS days is still in use, though in different ways now. Compression being pretty critical since for most long distance sites you paid per minute and downloading a 1Mb file over 9600baud was slow. Man I remember going from 1200-2400-9600-19200 then 38400 and 115200. You felt like a damn rock star when your file downloads didn't take 6-8 hours and could be done in like an hour or so. I started BBSing in the late 80s, so saw the very tail end of 2400, but the first modem I bought was 9600, so I missed the big 2400-9600 change mostly. Road the wave all the way up to 56K. I had planned to finally start my own BBS when I moved off to University in 1994, since my parents wouldn't let me buy dedicated phone lines. Saved all my cash from working McDonalds and was all ready to pull the trigger on multiple V.34 56K USRobotics Courier modems and had the BBS (based on WWIV) all ready to turn on. Confirmed that the University would allow multiple phone lines per dorm. Got to University, and lo and behold! The summer before, they outfitted all dormitories with two 10-base-T ethernet connections to the Internet backbone. Mind blown. Ditched the BBS idea instantly and that was it, I never dialed into another BBS or ran my own. A lot of my BBS friends also instantly lost interest the moment they entered University and had a proper high-speed Internet connection.

davismwfl 5y ago
Totally agree, I had early access to the internet through one of the BBS's I subscribed to, textual only of course cause the www didn't exist at first and then even in the early 90's it was still very new. But in the early to mid 90's we had a dedicated T1 trunk (at work) to connect us to UUNET. All fun times. Even then, I still used a few BBS' at home (including for home internet access) until say like 1995/96 when I moved solely over to Mindspring. Might be a little off on the year I switched but not by much, that is a long time ago.
timbit42 5y ago
My first modem was a used VIC-MODEM for the Commodore VIC-20. I used it to access a "free" data service not realizing the phone calls weren't free. Ended up with an $80 phone bill. That's $220 in today's dollars.

ecpottinger 5y ago

One thing to remember of message hopping. I ran a BBS in Oshawa, if you posted a public message to it, it was copied to the Whitby BBS, who in turn copied it to the BBS in Pickering, who in turn copied to a Toronto BBS where it was copied to multiple systems. In affect the public section was one big BBS it was just that messages would take days to relay around. I remember some silly reporter did not understand and he called BBSes all around North America posting the same message, and for the next week or so you would see repeats of his message all the way from California and Florida.

VLM 5y ago

> one of the larger us BBS systems was execpc Around 1990 they started a parallel "less serious" service called execpc chat, or something like that (had a few names) and I played online trivia on exec chat for MANY hours. For some strange reason I seem to remember Thursday nights. For a long time if you had a subscription to the "serious" execpc they gave away a subscription to the "fun" exec chat service. Eventually around '92 I got on the internet and IRC (later MUDs) then dozens of people because normal. Exec-PC the main service had an interesting file search system that used an enormous number of PCs in parallel and they called it hyper-search or something like that and it was ridiculously fast, like Google search speed. You could tell if someone was serious about BBS stuff because they had multiple PCs on their desk. The fancier PC for gaming or programming or using in general, and the lame PC that barely booted but could be dedicated to downloading files for an hour or whatever who cares. Magnetic interference between adjacent CRT monitors was a problem, or some company named "Black Box" sold monitor switchboxes so you could have as many as four analog VGA PCs plugged into one monitor, only one visible at a time of course, or a similar switch could connect one keyboard to multiple computers. I remember seeing an ad for my first KVM switch, well, KV, anyway, and that was pretty mindblowing that you only need one box instead of two. I had multiple PCs on my desk from the late 80s until about 2018, habit I guess. Many people also had a TV on their desk; start a download, watch TV, who cares how long the download takes.

ok123456 5y ago

>Something people don't remember is that long distance calling was not free, "Local" calls weren't always free either. Each locality had their own set of exchanges that were considered "local" and beyond that it was "local-long distance." It was completely arbitrary. The "local-long distance" rates were often higher than the actual long distance since there was still something of a monopoly. Then in some areas they didn't have flat rate lines, where local calls calls were "free". There were message rate lines where calling different places within your locality cost a different number of message units per call, and only a fixed number of them were included with your service. It's very similar to cloud pricing now.