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> "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 ge

> "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.
  - 300bps 5y ago
    I noticed the same thing probably 15 years ago when I bought a TV with a digital tuner. You mirrored my experience exactly with one thing to add - another thing that cracked me up was when they would order it in Spanish! That pausing thing was annoying - on Friday or Saturday nights though you could usually change to another channel and find someone else watching the same movie at almost the same spot that didn’t have it paused. Oh and around 1985 and 1986 I wrote my own software to guess calling card numbers between midnight and 6 am. I would either use Sprint or MCI access numbers and get about 20 working codes per night.
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.

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.
- 300bps 5y ago
  I noticed the same thing probably 15 years ago when I bought a TV with a digital tuner. You mirrored my experience exactly with one thing to add - another thing that cracked me up was when they would order it in Spanish! That pausing thing was annoying - on Friday or Saturday nights though you could usually change to another channel and find someone else watching the same movie at almost the same spot that didn’t have it paused. Oh and around 1985 and 1986 I wrote my own software to guess calling card numbers between midnight and 6 am. I would either use Sprint or MCI access numbers and get about 20 working codes per night.

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.