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The Lost Civilization of Dial-Up Bulletin Board Systems

59 points by ForHackernews 4y ago

OrangeMonkey 4y ago
BBS's are a pretty big nostalgia trap for me. I spent my childhood using an old 8088 dialing up boards / exploring our local areas bbs scene. Hell, I met my wife on a BBS originally - we were chatting later at a party and it came up and we realized we had spoken a few times before. The BBS period reminds me of freedom, exploration, and a time when everything wasnt monetized by ultra corps. Its that memory that worries me. I sometimes wish I could go back to that time but you can never swim in the same river twice. Its moved on. We need to also. Its a trap. One I fall into every once in a while.
- stolenmerch 4y ago
  It's a huge nostalgia trap for me too. Probably because we can't go back. There's nothing else that brings me the same feeling. For people of a certain age, it's almost like being homesick for the house you grew up in. Sometimes I'll dink around setting up a Syncronet board or connect to House of Lunduke or something, but it's never the same. You just can't recapture the magic. In retrospect it was such a brief, intense love affair. For me it started in 1990 when I bought a modem from the back of a magazine in high school, installed it in my Tandy 1000 myself, and used every penny of pay from my job on long-distance calls. When I went to college I was the only student in the dorms who could dial into our school's Sun System and telnet to ISCABBS, so our room became a late night hang out for friends every night. I still visted ISCA for a while at my first job out of college, but it just petered out as the web became prominent. What I would give to discover a new technology that inspired so much wonder and optimism.
- m463 4y ago
  I used something called PC Pursuit. It was a way to dial into BBS systems in other metropolitan areas without using long distance. fun :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telenet#PC_Pursuit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telenet#PC_Pursuit
graderjs 4y ago
In Taiwan they got something call PTT. It's not dialup, but I think it used to be. It's an app/web/maybe some other client BBS type system. Totally looks like an 80s / 90s BBS. It's all in Chinese language tho mostly. It's very big here. It's like Taiwanese folks main online forum. Kind of a weird anachronism, sort of like how Japanese are obsessed with fax machines.
melagonster 4y ago
this is interesting to read how BBS worked at its home land. In Taiwan, even now the only BBS still live good: https://www.ptt.cc https://www.ptt.cc
UncleSlacky 4y ago
There's still Level 29 (courtesy of the retrobattlestations subreddit) which can be accessed over dialup (as well as by browser or telnet): https://bbs.retrobattlestations.com/ https://bbs.retrobattlestations.com/
tashian 4y ago
I ran a BBS as a teen, on my Amiga, out of my bedroom, and it was such a fun project for me. At the time, it was expensive to make phone calls outside of your area code. And that was a healthy natural constraint on the community: Nearly everyone calling into a BBS was local. One of the bigger BBSs in my town even had meetups. Other great things about BBSs: Most of them were run out of someone's home. No one was going for growth at any cost, as a VC-backed startup would. There were dozens of BBS software platforms, no single walled garden, lots of room for customization. And, of course, the ASCII art was amazing.
bluedino 4y ago
Most of the popular boards in my area code only had one line, two if you were lucky. This of course meant only one user could be online at a time. As the evening falls, and more and more people would turn their modems on, you were met with nothing but busy signals. You'd redial over and over, waiting, and then you'd hear the modem connecting! You were now online, and if the BBS had a time limit, the clock was ticking. You'd go through messages, play a couple rounds of door games, maybe download a new file. After your time was up, you'd connect to some other BBS that wasn't quite as popular. But the door games weren't as fun, they didn't have as many downloads, and maybe the messageboards were dead. It's weird now, since everyone can use Twitter (or the rest of the internet) at the same time. There's no limit to the amount of people who can download Angry Birds from the app store. When the PlayStation Network or HN is down, I guess it's kind of a reminder of those times.
- Mountain_Skies 4y ago
  When BBSes started using QWK and similar tech to allow message downloads (and response uploads), the constant busy signals became less of an issue. There also was another traffic jam of busy signals at midnight for those BBSes with door games that started new turns at midnight. Some sneaky folks would take a turn right before midnight and then another right after midnight, getting two turns without anyone else getting on in between since they never relinquished the line between turns. Worked well for combat games like Global War (Risk).
grepLeigh 4y ago
I remember my high school friends thinking I was crazy for attending BBS meetups. Kudos to my mom for not stopping me, even though I was a 16 year-old girl. I remember she collected everyone's online handles, names, addresses the first time she dropped me off. I met my best friend that day (and many other close friends). 10 years after the first meetup, I attended my best friend's wedding - he'd met his partner on the same BB. They're still together! I even lived with them for a year, after a nasty breakup with my own S/O.
StanislavPetrov 4y ago
Talk about memories! In 1986 when I started calling BBSs with my 300 baud modem on my Atari 800 even local phone calls were somewhat expensive. It was a dark day indeed my parents got the first $250 phone bill (which was a lot back then).

59 points by ForHackernews 4y ago

BBS's are a pretty big nostalgia trap for me. I spent my childhood using an old 8088 dialing up boards / exploring our local areas bbs scene. Hell, I met my wife on a BBS originally - we were chatting later at a party and it came up and we realized we had spoken a few times before. The BBS period reminds me of freedom, exploration, and a time when everything wasnt monetized by ultra corps. Its that memory that worries me. I sometimes wish I could go back to that time but you can never swim in the same river twice. Its moved on. We need to also. Its a trap. One I fall into every once in a while.

stolenmerch 4y ago
It's a huge nostalgia trap for me too. Probably because we can't go back. There's nothing else that brings me the same feeling. For people of a certain age, it's almost like being homesick for the house you grew up in. Sometimes I'll dink around setting up a Syncronet board or connect to House of Lunduke or something, but it's never the same. You just can't recapture the magic. In retrospect it was such a brief, intense love affair. For me it started in 1990 when I bought a modem from the back of a magazine in high school, installed it in my Tandy 1000 myself, and used every penny of pay from my job on long-distance calls. When I went to college I was the only student in the dorms who could dial into our school's Sun System and telnet to ISCABBS, so our room became a late night hang out for friends every night. I still visted ISCA for a while at my first job out of college, but it just petered out as the web became prominent. What I would give to discover a new technology that inspired so much wonder and optimism.
m463 4y ago
I used something called PC Pursuit. It was a way to dial into BBS systems in other metropolitan areas without using long distance. fun :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telenet#PC_Pursuit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telenet#PC_Pursuit

graderjs 4y ago

In Taiwan they got something call PTT. It's not dialup, but I think it used to be. It's an app/web/maybe some other client BBS type system. Totally looks like an 80s / 90s BBS. It's all in Chinese language tho mostly. It's very big here. It's like Taiwanese folks main online forum. Kind of a weird anachronism, sort of like how Japanese are obsessed with fax machines.

melagonster 4y ago

this is interesting to read how BBS worked at its home land. In Taiwan, even now the only BBS still live good: https://www.ptt.cc https://www.ptt.cc

UncleSlacky 4y ago

There's still Level 29 (courtesy of the retrobattlestations subreddit) which can be accessed over dialup (as well as by browser or telnet): https://bbs.retrobattlestations.com/ https://bbs.retrobattlestations.com/

tashian 4y ago

I ran a BBS as a teen, on my Amiga, out of my bedroom, and it was such a fun project for me. At the time, it was expensive to make phone calls outside of your area code. And that was a healthy natural constraint on the community: Nearly everyone calling into a BBS was local. One of the bigger BBSs in my town even had meetups. Other great things about BBSs: Most of them were run out of someone's home. No one was going for growth at any cost, as a VC-backed startup would. There were dozens of BBS software platforms, no single walled garden, lots of room for customization. And, of course, the ASCII art was amazing.

bluedino 4y ago

Most of the popular boards in my area code only had one line, two if you were lucky. This of course meant only one user could be online at a time. As the evening falls, and more and more people would turn their modems on, you were met with nothing but busy signals. You'd redial over and over, waiting, and then you'd hear the modem connecting! You were now online, and if the BBS had a time limit, the clock was ticking. You'd go through messages, play a couple rounds of door games, maybe download a new file. After your time was up, you'd connect to some other BBS that wasn't quite as popular. But the door games weren't as fun, they didn't have as many downloads, and maybe the messageboards were dead. It's weird now, since everyone can use Twitter (or the rest of the internet) at the same time. There's no limit to the amount of people who can download Angry Birds from the app store. When the PlayStation Network or HN is down, I guess it's kind of a reminder of those times.

Mountain_Skies 4y ago
When BBSes started using QWK and similar tech to allow message downloads (and response uploads), the constant busy signals became less of an issue. There also was another traffic jam of busy signals at midnight for those BBSes with door games that started new turns at midnight. Some sneaky folks would take a turn right before midnight and then another right after midnight, getting two turns without anyone else getting on in between since they never relinquished the line between turns. Worked well for combat games like Global War (Risk).

grepLeigh 4y ago

I remember my high school friends thinking I was crazy for attending BBS meetups. Kudos to my mom for not stopping me, even though I was a 16 year-old girl. I remember she collected everyone's online handles, names, addresses the first time she dropped me off. I met my best friend that day (and many other close friends). 10 years after the first meetup, I attended my best friend's wedding - he'd met his partner on the same BB. They're still together! I even lived with them for a year, after a nasty breakup with my own S/O.

StanislavPetrov 4y ago

Talk about memories! In 1986 when I started calling BBSs with my 300 baud modem on my Atari 800 even local phone calls were somewhat expensive. It was a dark day indeed my parents got the first $250 phone bill (which was a lot back then).