5 ms·

A bit of a tangent, but the trust factor was pretty high with BBSes compared to the Internet of today. Many, including the Renegade BBS I ran, asked for your re

A bit of a tangent, but the trust factor was pretty high with BBSes compared to the Internet of today. Many, including the Renegade BBS I ran, asked for your real name, phone number, and home address when signing up. I never thought twice about giving out that info and never had anyone complain to me about needing to provide it.

giantrobot 5y ago
Thanks to local toll or long distance fees your local BBS was literally local. Everyone on it lived nearby and if you were an ass you were close enough to get punched in the face. Contrast with Usenet where trolling and flamewars were rampant because instigators could hide behind a veil of anonymity or pseudo-anonymity. The BBS era was also long before public doxxing and spammers scraping any and all personal info. At least before the Internet made such things easily amplified and trivial to do.
- jcims 5y ago
  >Everyone on it lived nearby and if you were an ass you were close enough to get punched in the face. That and getting banned actually hosed you.
- gavinray 5y ago
  > "Thanks to local toll or long distance fees your local BBS was literally local. Everyone on it lived nearby and if you were an ass you were close enough to get punched in the face." What? This is mindblowing to me, being born in 1997. I can't imagine an online experience like this, it sounds pretty neat.
  - junon 5y ago
    Remember that the internet as we know it today is young. At the peak of BBSes, you called actual phone numbers to connect to places. If you've ever seen Hackers or War Games, the hardware wasn't too far from reality If the phone number was long distance, you had to pay more - just as it is today. Local calls were usually free. Hence the GP's comment :)
  - 300bps 5y ago
    He’s not kidding. When I was 14 I mouthed off to the brother of a friend of mine on a local BBS. He knocked on my door 45 minutes later to talk to me about it.
  - giantrobot 5y ago
    With BBSes you were literally dialing in to the machine via a modem. Local calls were free but long distance charges were expensive. There were even local toll calls, a number might be in your area code by far enough away you were charged to call. You wouldn't pay long distance rates but it wasn't free. Charges were also billed to the caller rather than callee. So just by nature of tolls you wouldn't call many out of area BBSes. If you did it was brief calls for a post or to check mail but not sit around playing a door game or downloading some big file. That all meant BBSes were very local for most people. This is in addition to the fact only a small fraction of homes had computers, a fraction of those had modems, and a fraction of those actually called BBSes. That aspect also meant the populations were relatively small. A small web forum might have a hundred users spread over a large area while a BBS would have a dozen in the same town.
    - danachow 5y ago
      > There were even local toll calls, a number might be in your area code by far enough away you were charged to call. You wouldn't pay long distance rates but it wasn't free. And in the late 80s long distance rates meant something like $4/minute inflation adjusted. Even "local" toll calls were up to $1/minute. Of course the billing scheme was far more complex. The paper phone book would usually have a page or two to determine the rate between various exchanges.
    - ipaddr 5y ago
      The phreaking scene opened up access to any bbs bypassing long distance/toll charges. What some use to do is put a 1-800 on a 1-900 number. By calling a 1-800 number you could connect to a sexline for free. We had so much as kids calling and making fun of the operators. A few years back I got a tv for Christmas. Christmas night I setup it up and it scans the cable channels available. Next day I notice some channels with fractions like 88.2 were programmed but the screen was blank. I rescanned and discovered new channels at different freq and they were playing really new movies. I watched a movie and when it finished there wasn't any content. I rescanned often and new movies would popup during the night. Then sex movies started to show up. I realized whatever anyone ordered via ondemand in my building was being broadcast and my tv could pick it up. If someone paused the movie I would have to wait. Mornings were a mix of cartoons and fast-forwarded porns. Day was mostly cartoon. Evenings were when people would order the hit movies. Interesting things are constantly happening no matter what era you are in.
  - 01100011 5y ago
    It wasn't the only online experience, but maybe it was the most common one. You also had services like Q-Link(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7jLBOIvxhg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7jLBOIvxhg), which later became AOL.
  - dccoolgai 5y ago
    Yeah. Not uncommon to have BBS picnics at the time, where you would meet like all the other people on the internet.
  - floatingatoll 5y ago
    My hometown had 300 BBSes that I wrote a set of expect-like automation scripts in {COMMO} to dial in, download a ZIP of any new DMs and forum posts, and then log off and rotate on to the next one. When the number was busy, the dialer would move to the next, and when it connected successfully, the dialed would mark it completed until I clear them.
  - egypturnash 5y ago
    Sometimes the people on the local BBS would even get together for stuff! See a movie together, have a potluck out in the local park... you know, human social stuff. Hang out with the people you've been chatting with regularly.
    - TedDoesntTalk 5y ago
      Yeah, we had “get-togethers” at one of the local malls.
      - discardedrefuse 5y ago
        We called them GT's for short!
      - empressplay 5y ago
        here in BC they were colloquially known as 'meets'
      - BeefWellington 5y ago
        We had user baseball a few summers, that was fun.
    - technofiend 5y ago
      Oh, heck yeah. I was a member of several BBSs but found a true home when I came across one run by a local newspaper reporter (Sredni). Everyone was at minimum an avid reader, and two were writers including the reporter. The BBS was run out of her home and had only one phone line, so people had to wait their turn to dial in, batch upload messages and download replies using software similar to uucp. Even with that software a BBS with a large user base like hers was often busy, so the software had a war dial mode that just retried forever. One of the members (Skippy) literally had everyone's birthday and there was a celebration or meeting just about every weekend. When my apartment lease ended but I didn't want to move home and had no money for a deposit, Vermithrax Pejorative let me sleep on his couch. One of the guys (Dorothy) came to every event dressed exactly like Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz. My point is we were a very friendly and non-judgemental crew. Sort of the polar opposite of the modern-day internet. I was eventually lucky enough to date Sredni I think in part because I actually knew who Sredni Vashtar was. LOL. She called me incredibly excited after I gifted her a Spider Robinson novel and it had a word she'd never seen before on page one. It was an elegant community for a more civilized age.
- Karrot_Kream 5y ago
  > Everyone on it lived nearby and if you were an ass you were close enough to get punched in the face. Didn't stop folks from flaming and trolling. The BBS Documentary [1] has an example of a kid who follows around and threatens a BBS owner who owns a computer so because he didn't like the computer it ran on. [1]: http://www.bbsdocumentary.com/ http://www.bbsdocumentary.com/
  - giantrobot 5y ago
    > Didn't stop folks from flaming and trolling. Definitely not but the prevalence was far less. The local nature of BBSes inspired a lot of prior restraint we don't see a lot on the Internet anymore. That's not to say anonymity or pseudo-anonymity is bad. It just creates a different environment than what you'd typically find on BBSes.
    - Karrot_Kream 5y ago
      Oh totally. Plus you were using your cash on minutes so there's only so much bad behavior you could do.
      - giantrobot 5y ago
        > there's only so much bad behavior you could do Or afford to do. Trolling is a lot less attractive at 1200 baud for a dollar a minute.
- williamtwild 5y ago
  On the bigger local BBSs there were many people who were phone phreaks. What you say might be true for your area but certainly was not for mine.
  - technofiend 5y ago
    Yup. Plus if you were plugged in enough, you knew about OSUNY BBS, telenet and hidden places to exchange messages like WSMR. The phreaks were everywhere. Uh, so I'm told. cough
karaterobot 5y ago
Shout out to a fellow Renegade sysop. I don't believe I asked for anybody's home address, but maybe I've just forgotten. In the town where I lived, most of the BBS people knew each other, plus everyone was in the phone book anyway, so it wouldn't have made a ton of difference. But I agree that I was so much less concerned about privacy back then. Likely that was out of ignorance, but also because the threat to privacy is different on the internet. In a widely networked world, the .001% of people who are malicious actors still amount to a huge number of malicious actors that didn't exist in a community of a couple hundred people.
ipaddr 5y ago
The kind of bbses I was on required references but never a real name. I visited big warez bbses locally/Europe.
j45 5y ago
Oh, Renegade. What would so many have done without Cott Lang democratizing creating BBSes without commercial software.
- EarlKing 5y ago
  ...run any of the 50+ other non-commercial BBS softwares instead, including Telegard, the software Renegade was a literal hack of.
  - j45 5y ago
    Telegard was pretty old in comparison at the time iirc. There were a lot of non-commercial options but Renegade was one of the early ones to bring in a lot of the commercial features into it.
    - EarlKing 5y ago
      As someone who used both Telegard and Renegade... no. Just no. Renegade literally just lifted the Telegard 2.5i source code, added a few trivial changes, and made a few bugfixes. Disagree? Name five of these 'commercial features' it added. It's a sad truth of bulletin board software that sysops often didn't know what other software was capable of and blindly engaged in the sort of bit-bashing people engaged in when it comes to hardware... not because the other guy's stuff was genuinely bad, but because the sysop didn't want to admit that maybe they wasted a bunch of time and effort on a piece of shit.
      - j45 5y ago
        http://software.bbsdocumentary.com/IBM/DOS/RENEGADE/whatdone.zip http://software.bbsdocumentary.com/IBM/DOS/RENEGADE/whatdone...

giantrobot 5y ago

Thanks to local toll or long distance fees your local BBS was literally local. Everyone on it lived nearby and if you were an ass you were close enough to get punched in the face. Contrast with Usenet where trolling and flamewars were rampant because instigators could hide behind a veil of anonymity or pseudo-anonymity. The BBS era was also long before public doxxing and spammers scraping any and all personal info. At least before the Internet made such things easily amplified and trivial to do.

jcims 5y ago
>Everyone on it lived nearby and if you were an ass you were close enough to get punched in the face. That and getting banned actually hosed you.
gavinray 5y ago
> "Thanks to local toll or long distance fees your local BBS was literally local. Everyone on it lived nearby and if you were an ass you were close enough to get punched in the face." What? This is mindblowing to me, being born in 1997. I can't imagine an online experience like this, it sounds pretty neat.
- junon 5y ago
  Remember that the internet as we know it today is young. At the peak of BBSes, you called actual phone numbers to connect to places. If you've ever seen Hackers or War Games, the hardware wasn't too far from reality If the phone number was long distance, you had to pay more - just as it is today. Local calls were usually free. Hence the GP's comment :)
- 300bps 5y ago
  He’s not kidding. When I was 14 I mouthed off to the brother of a friend of mine on a local BBS. He knocked on my door 45 minutes later to talk to me about it.
- giantrobot 5y ago
  With BBSes you were literally dialing in to the machine via a modem. Local calls were free but long distance charges were expensive. There were even local toll calls, a number might be in your area code by far enough away you were charged to call. You wouldn't pay long distance rates but it wasn't free. Charges were also billed to the caller rather than callee. So just by nature of tolls you wouldn't call many out of area BBSes. If you did it was brief calls for a post or to check mail but not sit around playing a door game or downloading some big file. That all meant BBSes were very local for most people. This is in addition to the fact only a small fraction of homes had computers, a fraction of those had modems, and a fraction of those actually called BBSes. That aspect also meant the populations were relatively small. A small web forum might have a hundred users spread over a large area while a BBS would have a dozen in the same town.
  - danachow 5y ago
    > There were even local toll calls, a number might be in your area code by far enough away you were charged to call. You wouldn't pay long distance rates but it wasn't free. And in the late 80s long distance rates meant something like $4/minute inflation adjusted. Even "local" toll calls were up to $1/minute. Of course the billing scheme was far more complex. The paper phone book would usually have a page or two to determine the rate between various exchanges.
  - ipaddr 5y ago
    The phreaking scene opened up access to any bbs bypassing long distance/toll charges. What some use to do is put a 1-800 on a 1-900 number. By calling a 1-800 number you could connect to a sexline for free. We had so much as kids calling and making fun of the operators. A few years back I got a tv for Christmas. Christmas night I setup it up and it scans the cable channels available. Next day I notice some channels with fractions like 88.2 were programmed but the screen was blank. I rescanned and discovered new channels at different freq and they were playing really new movies. I watched a movie and when it finished there wasn't any content. I rescanned often and new movies would popup during the night. Then sex movies started to show up. I realized whatever anyone ordered via ondemand in my building was being broadcast and my tv could pick it up. If someone paused the movie I would have to wait. Mornings were a mix of cartoons and fast-forwarded porns. Day was mostly cartoon. Evenings were when people would order the hit movies. Interesting things are constantly happening no matter what era you are in.
- 01100011 5y ago
  It wasn't the only online experience, but maybe it was the most common one. You also had services like Q-Link(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7jLBOIvxhg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7jLBOIvxhg), which later became AOL.
- dccoolgai 5y ago
  Yeah. Not uncommon to have BBS picnics at the time, where you would meet like all the other people on the internet.
- floatingatoll 5y ago
  My hometown had 300 BBSes that I wrote a set of expect-like automation scripts in {COMMO} to dial in, download a ZIP of any new DMs and forum posts, and then log off and rotate on to the next one. When the number was busy, the dialer would move to the next, and when it connected successfully, the dialed would mark it completed until I clear them.
- egypturnash 5y ago
  Sometimes the people on the local BBS would even get together for stuff! See a movie together, have a potluck out in the local park... you know, human social stuff. Hang out with the people you've been chatting with regularly.
  - TedDoesntTalk 5y ago
    Yeah, we had “get-togethers” at one of the local malls.
    - discardedrefuse 5y ago
      We called them GT's for short!
    - empressplay 5y ago
      here in BC they were colloquially known as 'meets'
    - BeefWellington 5y ago
      We had user baseball a few summers, that was fun.
  - technofiend 5y ago
    Oh, heck yeah. I was a member of several BBSs but found a true home when I came across one run by a local newspaper reporter (Sredni). Everyone was at minimum an avid reader, and two were writers including the reporter. The BBS was run out of her home and had only one phone line, so people had to wait their turn to dial in, batch upload messages and download replies using software similar to uucp. Even with that software a BBS with a large user base like hers was often busy, so the software had a war dial mode that just retried forever. One of the members (Skippy) literally had everyone's birthday and there was a celebration or meeting just about every weekend. When my apartment lease ended but I didn't want to move home and had no money for a deposit, Vermithrax Pejorative let me sleep on his couch. One of the guys (Dorothy) came to every event dressed exactly like Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz. My point is we were a very friendly and non-judgemental crew. Sort of the polar opposite of the modern-day internet. I was eventually lucky enough to date Sredni I think in part because I actually knew who Sredni Vashtar was. LOL. She called me incredibly excited after I gifted her a Spider Robinson novel and it had a word she'd never seen before on page one. It was an elegant community for a more civilized age.
Karrot_Kream 5y ago
> Everyone on it lived nearby and if you were an ass you were close enough to get punched in the face. Didn't stop folks from flaming and trolling. The BBS Documentary [1] has an example of a kid who follows around and threatens a BBS owner who owns a computer so because he didn't like the computer it ran on. [1]: http://www.bbsdocumentary.com/ http://www.bbsdocumentary.com/
- giantrobot 5y ago
  > Didn't stop folks from flaming and trolling. Definitely not but the prevalence was far less. The local nature of BBSes inspired a lot of prior restraint we don't see a lot on the Internet anymore. That's not to say anonymity or pseudo-anonymity is bad. It just creates a different environment than what you'd typically find on BBSes.
  - Karrot_Kream 5y ago
    Oh totally. Plus you were using your cash on minutes so there's only so much bad behavior you could do.
    - giantrobot 5y ago
      > there's only so much bad behavior you could do Or afford to do. Trolling is a lot less attractive at 1200 baud for a dollar a minute.
williamtwild 5y ago
On the bigger local BBSs there were many people who were phone phreaks. What you say might be true for your area but certainly was not for mine.
- technofiend 5y ago
  Yup. Plus if you were plugged in enough, you knew about OSUNY BBS, telenet and hidden places to exchange messages like WSMR. The phreaks were everywhere. Uh, so I'm told. cough

karaterobot 5y ago

Shout out to a fellow Renegade sysop. I don't believe I asked for anybody's home address, but maybe I've just forgotten. In the town where I lived, most of the BBS people knew each other, plus everyone was in the phone book anyway, so it wouldn't have made a ton of difference. But I agree that I was so much less concerned about privacy back then. Likely that was out of ignorance, but also because the threat to privacy is different on the internet. In a widely networked world, the .001% of people who are malicious actors still amount to a huge number of malicious actors that didn't exist in a community of a couple hundred people.

ipaddr 5y ago

The kind of bbses I was on required references but never a real name. I visited big warez bbses locally/Europe.

j45 5y ago

Oh, Renegade. What would so many have done without Cott Lang democratizing creating BBSes without commercial software.

EarlKing 5y ago
...run any of the 50+ other non-commercial BBS softwares instead, including Telegard, the software Renegade was a literal hack of.
- j45 5y ago
  Telegard was pretty old in comparison at the time iirc. There were a lot of non-commercial options but Renegade was one of the early ones to bring in a lot of the commercial features into it.
  - EarlKing 5y ago
    As someone who used both Telegard and Renegade... no. Just no. Renegade literally just lifted the Telegard 2.5i source code, added a few trivial changes, and made a few bugfixes. Disagree? Name five of these 'commercial features' it added. It's a sad truth of bulletin board software that sysops often didn't know what other software was capable of and blindly engaged in the sort of bit-bashing people engaged in when it comes to hardware... not because the other guy's stuff was genuinely bad, but because the sysop didn't want to admit that maybe they wasted a bunch of time and effort on a piece of shit.
    - j45 5y ago
      http://software.bbsdocumentary.com/IBM/DOS/RENEGADE/whatdone.zip http://software.bbsdocumentary.com/IBM/DOS/RENEGADE/whatdone...