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I think one of, if not the, fundamental difference(s) between BBSes and other services such as Compuserve, Prodigy, AOL (all of which I got a chance to experien
by basilgohar 4y ago
I think one of, if not the, fundamental difference(s) between BBSes and other services such as Compuserve, Prodigy, AOL (all of which I got a chance to experience in my youth), and the Internet as we know it now, is that BBSes each very much had their own character, communities, and so on, exactly as you outlined. They were islands or oases with very little overlap.
The early Internet for some of us, where a lot of that character overlapped into online communities that were highly geek-oriented due to our early adoption, held a lot of that individual character that we often look back on with nostalgia and an awe of charm. This, perhaps, was the more BBS-like period of time, which can only survive now in closed communities, which are very much unInternety of today, and even frowned upon by some of us geeks to a degree. But at the same time, that individual character is tough to maintain without the artificial exclusivity brought about by digitally gated communities. We did not need that in the BBS are nor the early public Internet days because the exclusively was afforded by the technical know-how required along with the requisite hardware (a modem or early broadband access through work, universities, or other arrangements).
The Eternal September of widely-available public access to the Internet took all of that away, and while it's not all bad, that small-level community charm is all but impossible to come by now.
- giantrobot 4y agoPart of a BBS' character was the character of the sysop and users that lived close enough for it not to be a toll call. A BBS around Chicago was going to be very different from one in the Bay Area or London.
- jeanchen 4y agoIt's been on my mind now that Discord servers are close to the BBSes of old. They are also closed communities and members get to know each other instead of shooting messages into the void. They don't quite have the charm and culture, possibly because they exist in the context of social media as a whole. But they have a lot of similarities. Even command-line text games, the revival of which really amuses me. Message boards/forums certainly have that community culture but sadly they're on the way out. Subreddits of a certain size do also but they're fragile... they're subject to takeover by bad actors and if they become successful enough to grow larger the culture is diluted and/or replaced.
- Dracophoenix 4y ago> The early Internet for some of us, where a lot of that character overlapped into online communities that were highly geek-oriented due to our early adoption, held a lot of that individual character that we often look back on with nostalgia and an awe of charm. Before 1993, was there really a distinction between USENET and the early Internet? It seems that most of the geekery that you refer to took place on newsboards as opposed to the ostensibly more serious nets like BITNET/NSFNET.
- icedchai 4y agoThere was a pretty big distinction. I was on the Internet since 1991. Early Internet was being able to use IRC and telnet to MUDs. It was a whole other world. Email and Usenet was a subset, just "offline" access through UUCP. Many people had that for free or low cost since one UUCP node could just give feeds to another over dialup.
- Dracophoenix 4y agoWhat popular MUDs do you recall there being in 1991?
- icedchai 4y agoI don't remember the names, but I remember telneting into some from university dialups with lax security. This was definitely 1991 - 1992.