4 ms·
It was sometimes hard to get in (unless the BBS had multiple phone lines, and even then the popular ones were often busy), so there was always a bit of anticipa
by dharma1 5y ago
It was sometimes hard to get in (unless the BBS had multiple phone lines, and even then the popular ones were often busy), so there was always a bit of anticipation waiting for that modem connect tone, and you’d leave it on auto redial for ages sometimes.
Checking out what files other people had uploaded or what comments they had made was fun, and you could sort of have a real-time chat with the sysop when they were online. Downloading stuff took ages, sometimes overnight.
Warez was a big part of it, but so was all sorts of text files for making various stuff, tracker music, demos etc. It was a real DIY culture and a lot of fun.
If someone else in your household picked up the phone to make a call when you were online, the connection dropped (the modem used the main phone line). That was the worst! Luckily you could continue downloading where you left off usually after reconnecting. Many BBSs had leech ratios - you needed to upload stuff as well.
This was late 80s/early 90s… Beyond the PC and modem cost you’d pay for local calls, which was pretty expensive for a bunch of 12 year olds. International calls were out of the question
- sumthinprofound 5y agoI recall "Anarchist's Cookbook" and phone phreaking manuals as ubiquitous text files found on every BBS's file section.
- dharma1 5y agoHaha yes that was a classic! Also bunch of demo coding and electronics stuff as text files.. sound cards were pretty expensive back then, I remember downloading DIY AdLib instructions/schematics and my friends dad built it for a fraction of the cost of a real one
- sumthinprofound 5y agoI'm imagining everything was ASCII character art schematics, given the available toolset back then.
- timbit42 5y agoI told a friend about something I read in it and he went and asked his chemistry teacher about it and got a trip to the principal's office.
- glenneroo 5y agoI remember printing it at school on the single dot matrix printer in the computer lab, which took a couple weeks during lunch breaks and after school IIRC. A lot of students were initially upset that I was always in there taking up printer time... until they saw what I was printing, then suddenly everyone wanted me to print them a copy. I also got some extra credit doing a presentation about it in chemistry class. I'm pretty sure our teacher even took one of the less destructive recipes and made something go boom behind protective glass while everyone cheered. The 90s truly were a different era...
- iszomer 5y agoDon't forget ascii and ansipr0n.
- dole 5y agoBMP and PCXs begat JPGs, GRASP animations begat GIFs. Grayscale, super low res seconds-long loops, but yes, I can fap to this.
- addingnumbers 5y ago> Many BBSs had leech ratios - you needed to upload stuff as well. Ashamed to admit I was unzipping my zips and re-zipping them with `pkzip -e0 ...` to disable the compression before uploading them to another BBS. It inflated my upload ratio several times over and the upload looked unbelievably fast because zmodem transfer protocol would do decent in-line compression on uncompressed files.
- michaelrpeskin 5y agoYes! I did the same thing. So funny to hear that here. There was also a BBS that had a door for queuing downloads that just assumed everyone had a 14.4K modem, and I only had a 2400. When you picked your downloads to queue up, it checked your minutes to check if you had enough time. But since it did the math wrong I was able to queue up more downloads than my minutes allowed. Since it was a door, it didn’t return to the BBS software until my downloads were done. Fun times!
- thedougd 5y agoThank you, Kermit and ZModem. I remember a few legacy BBS didn't support the newer protocols which would let you resume downloads. Even better was when these were combined with an image viewer that would let you view an image as it downloaded. Progressive gif let you see it in full, but blurry and watch as detail filled in.