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I remember daydreaming about how one day "running a BBS" would become mainstream. It just seemed to make sense that a day would come when almost every entity (p

by mmccaff 11y ago

I remember daydreaming about how one day "running a BBS" would become mainstream. It just seemed to make sense that a day would come when almost every entity (person, business, etc) would have their own BBS, as they do a voice phone number. The WWW is not far from that. It really was a special time. Some early 90s BBS-related memories for me: * Getting my own phone number so that I could run a BBS. * Buying an external US Robotics modem at a 50% discount in return for advertising for them on my BBS. * Getting a donation to pay for that from a member of my BBS. * Not being very good at ANSI art, but spending lots of time in TheDraw, and joining an "art group" anyway. * Trading BBS source codes and feature snippets with local developers and late nights hacking on the C code of my BBS. * Switching to the OS/2 operating system and introducing a multi-node feature; so that I could login to my BBS at the same time as members. * Getting cassette tapes for a lot of music I had not heard before from local BBSers. * Tracking my time in a notebook for my "LD calls" .. so that I would not go over my "budget" for calling Long Distance. Good times.

tracker1 11y ago
I think some of my fondness was that communities on bulletin boards were local... you don't tend to get that online, and they tend to be centered around interest not location. Interesting thing on LD calls, a friend of mine had a disagreement with the person that ran one of the support networks for a BBS software, and had his node/bbs removed from the network, so my friend got permission from the author of the software in question, and dialed into the author's BBS in order to continue participating in the support network... "they aren't going to kick my board off," was the comment the author made. The early-mid 90's was definitely a fun time... then things tended to migrate to icq and irc... then a lot of it died off. There's still some art released, not as frequently, but you should check out sixteencolors.net which has most of the scene packs ever released... the archive is on github, if one wants to snag the entire thing. https://github.com/sixteencolors/sixteencolors-archive https://github.com/sixteencolors/sixteencolors-archive

by mmccaff 11y ago

tracker1 11y ago

I think some of my fondness was that communities on bulletin boards were local... you don't tend to get that online, and they tend to be centered around interest not location. Interesting thing on LD calls, a friend of mine had a disagreement with the person that ran one of the support networks for a BBS software, and had his node/bbs removed from the network, so my friend got permission from the author of the software in question, and dialed into the author's BBS in order to continue participating in the support network... "they aren't going to kick my board off," was the comment the author made. The early-mid 90's was definitely a fun time... then things tended to migrate to icq and irc... then a lot of it died off. There's still some art released, not as frequently, but you should check out sixteencolors.net which has most of the scene packs ever released... the archive is on github, if one wants to snag the entire thing. https://github.com/sixteencolors/sixteencolors-archive https://github.com/sixteencolors/sixteencolors-archive