Social Media’s Dial-Up Ancestor: The Bulletin Board System
spectrum.ieee.org
spectrum.ieee.org
I wish there was some way to convey the excitement of getting online back then, and to recapture that magical feeling. Try to imagine sitting at your dining room table in the dead of night, and it's completely silent, except for the (muted) sounds of your modem. And then holding your breath in the hopes that the BBS answers, and you don't get a busy signal. And then finally when those colorful characters started scrolling across the CRT screen... It was magical... I don't have any other word for it.
Oh the things I learned on BBS.
Back then black boxes, free compuserve, phreaking and other nefarious things got allot of my "social group" in trouble. My favorite thing was to try and find a server and figure out who owned it. To bad my friends who were brothers in Virginia. They had all their computer equipment confiscated by the FBI and were national news. One stupid friend (Capt Kirk) took carbon copies of sales at work and bought tens of thousands of dollars through Compuserve for over a year. He got caught at 17 or 18 and was hired for $40,000 to help their security.
I had learned Assembly for cracking purposes at 14 and I didn't have the heart to throw away my two black garbage bags full of floopy disks away till 2004.
Watching the movie War Games knowing I already owned all that equipment was pretty cool when that movie came out.
You would think such BBSs would have failed, but many were super popular in spite or even because of it. As a whole though, the bigger and better ones were multi-node and always up though.
I still wonder if it's possible to have a large community (beyond, say, Dunbar's number active member) that is able to sustain the feeling of those small ones — as far as I'm concerned, it's an open question in modern design. Points and reputation systems (such as HN, Slashdot and Reddit sport) and closed doors (secret groups on Facebook and other communities that are hard to access or join) are fair compromises, but I still feel no-one has quite squared the market opportunity around those communities yet. But maybe they do have to stay small. And maybe it's a thing that will elude monetization forever, who knows. Right now, as far as I'm concerned, no-one's making money out of those small-and-focused community patterns which are the best and oldest of the Internet.
It's not complicated. The rate of assimilation has to be kept higher than the rate of immigration. That doesn't mean small, but does mean a bit insular and/or "LURK MOAR."
no-one has quite squared the market opportunity around those communities yet.
I think they have. Forums, slack, blogs, their own websites, email lists, subreddits, twitter, facebook, g+, etc...
The problem with the types of community you describe, is not that they're small, but that they're actually communities. Not userbases branded as a community. They can flit on and off services as they come and go because the community has multiple ways to talk among itself.
You can sell them a tool or host a place to talk to a group of friends. But they're in too strong of a negotiating position with you for you to start a social network and scale it to the moon. They're already on the social networks anyway.
If you're targeting a community, your competition isn't facebook. Your competition is a guy with a dreamhost account and a copy of phpbb.
If you really want a killer app for communities, I think it was called Trillian. But that was back when the popular communication platforms were less rigorous at keeping everyone in the branded client.
The Commodore 64 boards had a quite a few BBS systems from pretty spartan 6485-BBS, Compute's Gazzette BBS (yeah they even had a magazine type-in BBS: Dec'84 & Jan'85), up to more advanced ones like Color64/128, C-Net 64/128, and Image BBSs - the high end ones used either a bunch of 800k 3.5" drives or hard drive (comparatively expensive but was worth it for speed and storage), or RAM drives.
Near the peak of Commodore BBSs some publishers and SysOp worked up their own Commodore BBS networking schemes where BBSs could exchange emails and forum postings (like FIDONet, but specific to Commodore), there was even a couple multi-line Commodore BBSs, and a few got the different makes of BBSs cross communicating as well. Such things were a labor of love, as us SysOps footed the long distance bills to exchange messages on top of the cost of an extra line, hardware, etc. (the automated exchanges happened during lower cost calling hours, like 2am.)
Now a days there are still a few that either held on or have started new Commodore BBSs - with most BBSs now being accessible via telnet (though I hear there are a couple dial up ones out there).
Of course there was a bits of rivalry between computer models as well as BBS brands...
Any former SysOps/Callers out there?
Me: Joe Commodore SysOp of Silicon Realms BBS 1987-2004
From a look at a list of software on Wikipedia I think we were running Remote Access (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RemoteAccess). I remember hooking up a Fido mail feed which fetched email at 5am every day towards the end of things, and playing a Mud (Mud 2) and Lord.
Crazy to think how far things have moved on in 20 years.
hah.
At least in terms of people who I wanted to talk to were doing. By mid 1995 I was pretty much Internet only other than to dial-in a few times a week to check a few local boards I participated in.
Good times.
A gray disk, the color of Chiba sky."
Which of course now means a clear, deep blue.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remote_Imaging_Protocol
[2] http://archives.thebbs.org/ra108a.htm
[3] http://www.bbsdocumentary.com/library/PROGRAMS/GRAPHICS/RIPS...
Anyway, check http://sixteencolors.net/
300->2400 (now we're cooking)->4800->9600->14.4->19.2->28.8->56k
USR, Courrier, and Hayes were usually the best ones for me. I skipped 33.6 among other upgrades. The Courrier also had that extra punch if you were lucky enough to get one on the other end.
The Unix stuff was pretty pedestrian as far as programs, but on Dos, Windows, Amiga, Atari ST, C64, and some others, some cool programs for connecting. I think on Dos I remember using Terminix and Telix quite a bit, but the names mostly escape me by now.
Anyway, I guess now it's better I don't have to dial with options like *70 or use the various AT codes to get online, handshake, and stay there.
Still sometimes find these, but more often the 9600-56k more modern ranges in random server rooms and offices, still running all kinds of things that no one understands or wants to touch. If I didn't hate consulting so much now, I thought about going into this at some point to charge breakneck prices to do archaeology for these companies. I'd feel bad though replacing or touching such beauty, not to mention they often are the backbone of many businesses so that's why they are so paranoid to go near.
The high school teacher was later (the following September) in my freshman comp sci class learning assembler. Very strange to have your math teacher (doubled as computer teacher) in class with you.
I have this Linksys VOIP router that I used to use on my old landline to interface with an Asterisk server, but I don't think the firmware supports this use case.
That's an A4 piece of paper for scale.
C-U had a hopping BBS scene at the time, but the real standout for me was Tranquillity II, which was conversation only with no downloads. At first it ran on, of all things, a TI 99/4 with the expansion box. Later it was moved to an Amiga. There were several Fido systems, and I ran a point (a subnode of an existing Fido node) for a while. Since I was out of school by then, echomail was the closest thing I could get to Usenet newsgroups.
When I got back to the Chicago area, I continued with Fidonet until the local ISPs started popping up. It still surprises me just how quickly the Internet bulldozed the BBS scene, and I think we've lost something because of that, even though we've gained a lot as well. Sure, there are still BBSes here and there (and Fidonet still exists even today), but telnetting into one halfway around the world just isn't the same as dialing into one that's a couple of miles away.
On a BBS, a sysop would disconnect you mid session if you were being an idiot. You'd be warned, banned for some amount of time or forever. On newsgroups, it just got much more out of control with bad actors because the scale was so much larger and the authority was so much less in terms of credibility, fear, and activity.
In defense of Reddit and HN, it's just hard to scale things up with more people and deal with the related concerns of post visibility, spam, moderation, and more. I know you're not saying this, but sometimes people point that 4chan is more like BBS messages, but it's not true because most BBSs were heavily moderated, complete with co-sysop users who would log on just to do this or moderator users with escalated privileges. If anything, BBSs were the most moderated of all, it's just that some people didn't mind if you talked about certain things or used certain language because it's their BBS and they just did what they wanted.
Regarding email-length replies, I obviously love them. I generally don't agree with short = powerful in most cases except in code sometimes. Of course short replies can be focused and have a lot of value and I certainly appreciate the people that do that well. Unfortunately, short for many people means <drop 1 sentence random mental garbage> thought and leave or <me too thought>.
Finally, regarding text, I couldn't agree more. I sometimes wish all websites just gave me a command line as a second interface. I know I can use curl and APIs for a lot of similar stuff, but yeah, no, that is not the same as hitting "f" for files or even just simpler unix commands. Lobste.rs kind of did this as a joke if you want to check it out, but it's not quite right IMO but good for fun.
Yes, a funny anecdote, obviously there was no central registry of names so sometimes there would be multiple BBS of the same cool name in the same LATA, so when I was about 12, operating on a tip from a schoolmate at 1200 baud I log into one of the several pirates cove bbs, or whatever the name was, and try to send the sysop a mail asking for private access to the files because I know XYZ from school and sysops cousin is XYZ (XYZ and I are still IT-type people 30 years later) and the sysop breaks into the session (which they could do in those days) and reads me the riot act about how he has no warez and he works real hard and spends a lot of money to make a BBS and what would decades later boil down to darn kids get off my lawn type lecture and never set foot here again and I'm deleting your brand new account and at 1200 baud it took awhile. And being a little kid I'm like "ok sorry about that" because what else am I supposed to say to mr angry wall of text? Then I go to school the next day and talk to my friend and "you idiot, call the pirates cove in suburb ABC not the one in suburb XYZ" or whatever. So that's what passed for a good time in the 80s. Sysops would sit there and spy on you, while you tried to work the social game to get access to the good stuff.
Several of the boards I was on with access to the special stuff were basically BBS embedded secretly inside a normal looking BBS so that made it fun. One of the special boards as a requirement to make it look good, required us to participate in the political debate forum if we wanted to keep access. Oh that board, thats just teens trying to debate federal tax policy. When actually it was full of software trading, hiding under dumb debates. On the modern internet of course instead of trading software we just skip right to the dumb debates, LOL.
Another "only 12 year old boy in the 80s could believe it" is back then we were pretty paranoid with people getting busted left and right and stories on TV so before XYZ gives me his tip he asks me between classes if I'm a fed and I told him no and I asked him if he was a fed and he said no, and that was it, we believed each other as if that proved anything (and neither of us were a fed, but I've known this kid since we went to kindergarten together and we're asking each other if we're a fed... well its just what you did in those paranoid days). I do not think modern stuff like GPG key signatures are quite as paranoid on a personal level as we used to be back in the old days.
Regarding boards with fake or legit parts, I used to routinely page sysops on boards I thought were underground or had hidden parts. The classic ones later on were almost always based on PCBoard and later Ami/X, but highly customized. The early ones generally just ran on whatever the best software was at the time and boasted about the hardware. They'd have all sorts of legit content typically and even legit users, but so much of it was a joke. I used to call one board that was big with HAM radio people and early Internet adopters. The most nerdy discussions you can imagine. What they didn't know is that there was a second part of the board that had a huge ROM dump, Amiga, C64, and PC warez scene.
As far as sysops go, I will also admit to spying on my users as sysop and as a co-sysop on various boards. I sometimes would break people into chat and kick them off. There were also many plug-ins that initiated fake chats and logged the results. A particular one that I'll never forget on one board I was co-sysop on featured an ANSImation (animated Ansi) by JED of ACID with some troll I think flipping you the bird as it brought up chat. Sometimes we'd post the fake chats for other users for comedy purposes.
I was nice and would help people find files, talk about fun stuff, meet in person, but I was also a dictator and would boot anyone on short notice. There were often periods of paranoia from alleged "busts," most of which probably never happened though I know for sure some did. Lots of calling people NARCs and so on.
One of the funniest things I used to see people do was upload fake files. Early on it was random binary or generated text files. Later it was things like blank audio or the same pictures renamed and zip'd. They were just so desperate for upload credit and time that they'd do this insane stuff. Checking files was really a pain. Thankfully on my boards, we were snobs about content, like on the warez boards we'd think we were so cool having 0-30 day, then it was something like 0-14, then 0 day stuff. So stupid banning and deleting people for uploading something 2 months old. Same thing happened on various FTP dumps that started to displace BBSs for file purposes later on.
Anyway, BBSs and the relationship to various underground scenes was a funny thing. On the one hand, a lot of the communities could be very exclusive and created all sorts of protections, barriers, precautions, and more. On the other hand, they'd then make it super obvious what they were up to in so many ways. Classic examples include:
- Advertising your BBS on other not-so-secret boards
- Commissioning ANSI art from a group like ACID, ICE, etc. with the name in the ANSI and often the area code too. Not uncommon to see things like +1-212-YOU-WISH Sysop: Mr Man. Awesome, now I know the name and what area code to look for the number at least, if not people who run it.
- Logon screen with ANSI depicting group affiliations. THG Eastern HQ = Genesis Distro = Legion of Doom HQ. It was hilarious because even if you didn't have access, you instantly knew you called a pirate board, cracking board, art board, whatever.
- New User Application filled with terminology from whatever scene. Again, same as the previous item.
- New User Password. As if most BBSs without anything illegal would have this.
- Users with huge ratios listed. Hmm, not many files on this BBS and yet this guy uploaded 500 megs!
- Certain BBS Software. You could be pretty sure that someone running things like Ami/X were into warez, Oblivion, Iniquity, Eternity, etc. - art, and so on. The more customized with nice ANSI too, usually the more likely it was underground. Huge tip-off the board was legit if it ran something like WWIV, Wildcat!, Celerity, and a few others we all considered hugely lame. Renegade and other Telegard or Forum hacks always made you wonder on the other hand. The old stuff on Atari ST, C64 etc was harder since there was a huge deluge of stuff and not as many ones that were 100% preferred yet.
We thought we were pretty cool in those times, but wow I look back at some of it and cringe. Good times and I was lucky enough to be involved in most underground scenes, while still getting time to interact in the legit scenes too.
Looking back, those were amazing times. By day, I was an awkward teenager who was still battling a pesky speech impediment. But, by night, I was part of communities where I was judged by the quality of my writing!
All that said, while I see what you're saying, BBS and Usenet both had their problems.
With Usenet, the biggest problem was discoverability. There were amazing, inspiring threads, but it took work to find them. When you would find an amazing thread, you had to parse through (often hundreds) of meaningless replies to find the few gems. Then, there was the sheer hostility of some of the communities. While much of that was reserved for newbies who violated the oft incomprehensible etiquette, some of it was just insane. For example, massive flame wars would erupt over the slightest provocation. This sounds silly in retrospect, but there was a point where typing 'Reconstruction of the Fables' in rec.music.rem would provoke serious hate.
With BBS, particularly when they were popular enough to be busy, the biggest issue was that people are really fucked up when they think they're anonymous.
The end of that article makes a great point. There was a huge diversity of communities back then, and each of them was small enough that they didn't devolve into spam and mindless trolling. It's something I really miss, and something that can't be replicated by uber-sites like reddit or facebook...
It all disappeared incredibly fast in the mid 90s as ISPs and the net grew.
Social is, ironically, far less personal with none of that sense of community.
I think that's overstating things. I can certainly think of a fair number of exceptions in my case. One thing that could be different in the BBS world, however, was that there often were organized meetups and BBQs because the BBS users tended to be clustered locally because of phone costs.
OK I'm from a smaller country (UK), many BBS's were national, but still organised BBQs. The differentiation was usually for the platform rather than geography.
By that point I'd only tried out BBS once or twice from my old Laser 128, and didn't really get it. After my new friend invited me to hook into his BBS, and I found all this great stuff to download and try out, I was hooked. I feel like that's where I first learned about the Anarchist Cookbook as well.
Also all of these 312ers and no mention of Ripco in these comments? Ripco and its G-Files changed my world. [Edit: many of which are on this textfiles.com site, if you poke around!]
Randy, AFAIK, still holds CBBS reunions from time to time. Went to a couple back in the day. They were a very tight group.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PTT_Bulletin_Board_System
Interestingly, none of my friends that use it know what Telnet is. It's almost exclusively accessed through unofficial dedicated smartphone apps.
Not to hijack the topic, but has anyone watched the show Halt and Catch Fire (available on Netflix)? I'm curious how accurately that show captures the culture of that era.
Would love any additional reading recommendations around BBS' emergence as well. Already bookmarked the documentary series: https://archive.org/details/BBS.The.Documentary
If you like phreaking as well, Exploding The Phone is really good.
The thing is, the history of that era is huge and has many parts. The BBS Documentary covers some of it, but IMO it has a lot of flaws and underwhelming segments given the subject matter. I personally know a few people who were in that video and I can say there's nothing inaccurate or bad about what they said, but I don't feel like Jason really "got" it that well. It's better than nothing and I appreciate it was made, but it's a bit ambitious and thus needs to gloss over things.
I'd probably look into reading about some of the following which relates some to the different parts of the BBS era:
* BBS Software w/ interesting stories - Clark Development, Wildcat, Renegade, Telegard, WWIV, Oblivion/2, Forum...
* ANSI Scene - ACID, ICE mainly, then the smaller groups like Dark, Fire, etc.
* Demo Scene - Future Crew, TRSi, etc.
* Warez Scene - Razor1911, PWA, DoD, Pentagram, TRSi, THG, Fairlight, Paradox
* Music Scene - Trackers, MODs, S3M, XM, music groups, artists (Purple Motion, Doctor Awesome, etc.), Sound cards (AdLib, Roland, Sound Blaster), MIDI
* HAM Radio WRT to BBSs
* BBSs and the Internet - Mail gateways, usenet, IRC
* Phreaking - Captain Crunch, War Dialing, Boxes (blue, red, etc.), and more...
* Cracking - Mostly overlap with warez
* Emulation - Overlap with warez a lot, but there was a pretty interesting ROM dumping scene and early NES emulation scene starting
* Alternative Lit/Anarchy/Etc - Spreading this kind of stuff was really popular and most of it is now "illegal" per many laws in western countries. Most famous is Anarchist's Cookbook, the first version.
* Early Internet and versions thereof
* IRC, Usenet, Gopher, Archie, FTP, etc. is all interesting as some of those things rose and fell during these times
* Programming Languages - C, C++, Basic, Pascal, Smalltalk, Delphi, VB for a range of where some of the industry was going or didn't go. Obviously many more.
* Platforms/OS - IBM, Tandy, Amiga, C64, Atari ST, CP/M, Unix, HP/UX, Windows, Dos, DRDos, OS/2, OS/2 Warp, BeOs (later), Novell Netware, Apple II/Mac, Sparc, SGI (Irix), Desqview (used to run multi-node BBS sometimes) and many more.
* Law Enforcement Operations - Raids (ex: Steve Jackson Games), Busts, etc.
The above list is not meant to be comprehensive, just to guide you what articles, books, videos, and such that might turn up if you search for some of these things. It's a long road.
Regarding Halt and Catch Fire, I think there are things about it that ring true, but it's not so accurate. People get things done way too fast, act too much like we do today, and the office culture feels off to me. They really don't capture some of the more innovative cultures at various big companies of the time. Not even the more crazy ones like Atari's old office, though there are clear nods to companies if you pay attention. It'd be a long post to dissect it, but the short answer is no, but it's not like I experienced all there was to experience. It feels to me more like they took a lot of real things at the time, composited them together for story purposes, put on some 80s clothes, and otherwise threw things out the window. I do enjoy the show anyway though for even daring to touch that material.
Anyway, I hope that gets you started on a long, interesting path and I could add tons of more bullets to that list.
One thing I will add is that the energy and excitement was just so much more genuine and the passion was at a different level than today. I'm not saying there aren't extremely talented and energetic people these days - there are actually more simply due to the sheer size of the industry - but the density of them is far less. The self-selection filter was much stronger back then and while most folks were relatively well paid it wasn't mostly about chasing VC funds and hitting the next IPO. It was about "holy crap, I'm actually being paid to do things with computers!" - at least my tiny slice of the experience.
Things also were a lot more "simple" for lack of a better term. Today I'm not sure how I would have gotten my foot in the door and made myself minimally useful enough to start learning skills and gaining reputation (which then later led to a career) simply due to the sheer number of layers of abstraction on top of everything you have to punch through.
It was certainly a simpler and much wilder time though!
* 2600
* Cult of the Dead Cow
* Phrak
I've gotten behind but what I've seen strikes me as reasonably accurate although I wonder to what degree later episodes are sort of overlaying a stereotype of today's silicon valley onto that era. I admittedly worked for a large east coast computer maker at the time but I think the overall busines culture even at smaller companies was a lot more buttoned down at the time.
The first season captured Comdex well enough to give me unwelcome flashbacks :-)
I wish AMC had put the same effort into it as Mad Men, in terms of attempting to be an extremely accurate period piece. I suppose the viewership for HaCF didn't get large enough to warrant it, and/or the showrunners just aren't up to it?
But, yeah, what I've seen of more recent seasons feels more like aspects of Silicon Valley of 2015 startup culture meets 1980s tech.
I wrote some software for a friend's board that used an NTSC frame grabber and Soundblaster card he had attached. You could upload a sound file (WAV or VOC) and it would play over the PA downstairs in the gym he ran. After your sound played the machine recorded 5 seconds of audio from a mic in the gym and pulled a single black and white frame from the gym's surveillance camera. You'd get back a ZIP file with a single GIF and a VOC file in it. That was a ton of fun.
I really miss the old "hacker" boards, too, but that's arguably nostalgia for my youth more than anything. I'd still love to talk to somebody who frequented the old Bit Truth BBS (203). I very occasionally talk to friends who were on the old Unphamiliar Territory (602). The Internet helped change that "scene", but the it was already a pretty established tradition that most people would either go to college or get a "real job" and move on. Ahh... growing up...
Within a few years, we got a second phone line and I started up my own. Through a lot of incarnations, but it was most popular as the Chelsea Hotel and was a hangout for miscreants, hackers, and skaters. Through it, I got to meet some people who are very influential today, as well as plenty of anonymous friends.
The experience certainly piqued my interest in other areas of tech, and I can easily trace my path from there to where I am today. I miss the limited access and smaller communities of BBSes, the excitement of hearing the connection tones after having auto-redialed for 30 minutes of busy signals, and of course, Trade Wars.
I remember it being pretty crazy that I could play BRE or LORD with people, even across BBSes in some cases.
And each BBS had a different setup for LORD. There were some that seemingly just tried to install every possible in game module, and it was the most broken thing ever...
I still remember my fathers face when he saw the 5000 NOK phone bill from me dialing a non local bbs a few too many times in the early 90s :) Here in Norway we had charges by the minute for all calls, but long distance (outside your area code) was a lot more expensive.
In the end i had a separate phone line installed on my room and ran my own bbs using https://no.wikipedia.org/wiki/MBBS (I can't find any non Norwegian sources, use translate).
I'm fairly certain I didn't hit the Internet at large until the Windows 95 days. However, I have very fond memories of Usenet and IRC. I am glad IRC is still around, but I still miss Usenet. Even after Eternal September, Usenet was just amazing.
Anytime I'm forced to use literally any website forum, I'm reminded just how far back we've fallen. Usenet clients were amazing. I could quickly and easily catch up on posts in groups I was paying attention to. I could quickly and easily find new groups for literally any interest. Access to a fast server was included in almost any ISP subscription.
Web forums are just so painful to use these days. Especially since there are 400 forums for a particular topic that are all very disjointed.
Tilde Club (http://tilde.club/) was(is?) an attempt to revisit 1990s-era UNIX community tools from a 2010-era perspective.
Back then, turbo pascal was a popular language. I knew nothing about programming and found it beyond me to learn it on my own. I tried to find help but failed. I wonder how my life would have changed had I taken up programming at age 12.
Has anyone seen the BBS Documentary? http://www.bbsdocumentary.com/
It's important to note that your average decent BBS had most if not all of the following:
* Files - Often meticulously organized, with sometimes user voting or strict moderation. Unlike a lot of file sharing today, most boards also had things that would extract descriptions from archives or otherwise let you write them manually, along with providing other file metadata.
* User Management/Registration - Complete with idiot filters for the more underground boards (apps, voting on users, new user passwords)
* Mail - Even later, various versions of distributed mail including early email access for many people as well as things like FIDOnet
* Instant Messaging/Chat - There were entire huge multi-node boards entirely devoted to this, and even a single node board at least had sysop chat usually
* Games - Door games, mail/message games, offline sync'd games
* Timelines/Walls - Lots of plug-ins for this type stuff to leave short messages, shouts, etc.
* Time Management - Not necessarily a good thing, but on some boards you could bank time. Moreover, the fact there was time involved with your login on some boards created a sense of purpose and urgency.
* Keyboard Shortcuts - Godsend compared to your average web app, but also a drawback for some.
* Customizable UI - Most boards at least let you change menus, if not install plug-ins and other add-ons
* Distributed Content - Various boards would call each other or a sync service or otherwise download sync files to sync data such as games, not just mail.
* Groups/Subcultures
* No Frills - Despite being over modems primarily and thus slow, BBSs were pretty fast. In fact, I still feel like I got to more relevant information faster. It's not just a keyboard and mouse thing, it's about flow and the fact that the goal of the BBS was to deliver you some content quickly and efficiently. Navigation in web pages just sucks sometimes in so many ways - multi-page ads, long click funnels, huge percentages of random things I don't need on the screen like sidebars, etc.
I think for me the #1 thing about BBSs is at least for the better, BBSs, they tended to be more restrictive and served as great content filters. If you were an idiot, you simply could not join or got banned. There was a sense of excitement to get on a new BBS and see what it had, and with many, a status attached, especially in various undergrounds. There were always troublemakers, but they were limited and it was part of the fun usually to fight and have factions.
The small scale really made you feel like you knew everyone, even on large BBSs with tons of users. Sometimes this also meant that we all met up in real life and that changed how you interacted with people. It also sometimes deflated your view of certain people.
On the flip side, there were many things that were pains not limited to busy signals, slow speed, lots of bad BBS software that was popular, file transfers in the earlier days, limited to calling or receiving per number of phone lines unless you had expensive hardware/telco, and so on. I've often thought of writing some sort of newer, hybrid Internet modern BBS software. I am keenly aware of the many efforts to do things over SSH, telnet, web sockets, but they are mostly just unfinished rehashes of a lot of the less impressive parts of the old stuff. I have a list of many somewhere if anyone cares.
There are just so many things I could write about what we could learn from BBSs. Sadly, I still think the filtering aspect was really what tied it all together. Regardless, I would like to see someone build something new starting at the protocol level that isn't just sitting on top of what exists or at least is not just copying the old stuff. Some things like Hotline and other file sharing were close in a way, but lacked the same feel. I really wish at least the idea of getting to information fast and without bs would come back more. Gopher in the early days sometimes felt like this, and many web pages were like this to some degree.
Anyway, I am sure there are a lot of people who disagree and I believe there is a lot more good and bad things to say. I feel like BBSs are really ignored by a lot of people, and misunderstood by another large amount of people including former users. There are still some BBSs out there and the good news is most don't require a modem (just SSH or telnet), but it's just not the same.
1. Because you tied up a phone line (on both ends), your time was limited. This results in not only not wasting time while on there, but also an increase in anticipation for when you can next get on. It prevents people from getting to far ahead in games.
2. Banning could actually mean something. You were not really anonymous (at least on the local ones) since you can be identified by your phone number and maybe banned that way. How do you effectively ban a person nowadays? Can't do it by IP or email, which leaves... ? That results in large amounts of spam, trolling, sockpuppets, etc.
Hypothetical question: if we would see a new emergence of mobile based BBS's, using some novel protocol without identifiable phone numbers but with ability to assign unique IDs to users and solve those problems, could it take off today?
It doesn't have to be perfect, but at least much harder to game than the current situation.
The fact things were on a phone line helped in some ways (exclusivity, time, identifiability), but doing it all through a mobile phone or other telephony does not really capture that. For one, there would only be single node BBSs unless you got creative, so I think the mobile phone part is too literal on the concept of phones.
Secondly, while this is less popular, a lot of us including myself were not actually identifiable unless we wanted to be. This happened because you could call a BBS through an intermediary such as a PBX, and it was common to war dial to find and hack these (or use open hardware) to dial out long distance. Another way was carding (stealing credit cards) to pay for calls, which would also often answer caller ID requests with another number than your own depending on what you bought.
The anonymity was more complicated as you can see, but yes, it did help quite a bit to have some sort of reputation attached to your name. A BBS handle could carry weight across many systems, and word did spread. Some Sysops were pretty nasty to people and went out of their way with that, but I think most people accepted it and didn't do things like try to take them to court like we have today. Somehow, whether they knew who you were or not, it just was not worth it and getting other users to accept you in one form or another was important. This happened via message bases, uploads (try to be top, avoid being banned for bad uploads), new user signup, games, and more. So souring your reputation had a cost if you were an avid BBSer, and even more so if you had met people in real life.
I think anything remotely similar to BBSs in terms of success needs to do at least some of these things:
- No frills access
- Tie things together as a cohesive hole
- "Character" per system. Logging on to X should not be the same as logging on to Y, but familiar enough to still be usable.
- Distributed (run by a person/people)
- No advertising. Advertising is at the root of ruining a lot
- Cross-over between the real-world and the virtual-world. Ex: In person meetings.
- Sense of urgency
- Connections to several rabid groups of sub-culture that will drive future updates, modding, usage, etc. In the old days, this was HAM Radio operators, ANSI artists, Anarchists, Punks, Crackers, Warez kids, Phreakers, D&D players, and many other groups.
- Decent give and take type systems. Ratios, time, and chat often worked this way and sometimes were all interconnected. The more you upload, the more time you get, and the more you can chat for example.
Many more things, but I'll stop there.
I remember enormous controversy at the time about modem manufacturers who would sell you a high speed (for the time) modem for free or a substantial discount if you put a little advertisement for their modem on your board and it was NOT well received. I think this was around the era of dueling and completely incompatible 9600 baud modems. I skipped that horrible era and went right from 2400 to 14400 then rapidly to 28800.
Class based access levels were a thing in the BBS era. It seems hard to believe in 2016 web page world where there's maybe "have an account vs no account" or at most "guest/free/paid" but some BBSes had a zillion levels of participation and allowed time and ratio requirements. Some got a little eye roll-y over specific.
Active discouragement of lurking, is how I'd phrase it.
Ugh, modem incompatibility was an awful thing. The modem manufacturers often got greedy or out right lied about supporting standards correctly. It really was a case of needing to pay for quality. The worst period I remember was toward the end of the era with "Win modems" tied to windows. They'd pop these pieces of junk inside Dell, Packard Bell, eMachines, Compaq, and other consumer junk.
You're absolutely right about tiered access. I will say that torrent sites, especially private ones do have some levels of tiered access. As do some web forums in terms of moderation privileges. That's about the closest you get, but it's no where near as nuanced, draconian, or as powerful. The class-based access did have positive effects like you hint it such as discouraging lurking, creating exclusivity, encouraging uploads, discouraging bad actors. I kind of laughed at the web when years back they tried to do some version of that via game-ification and in most cases it ended badly excluding the obvious notables.
Here's some open source BBSs I had bookmarked:
* Oblivion 2 XRM => Obv 2 remake, C++, looks OK but no killer new features really and uses Boost - https://github.com/M-griffin/Oblivion2-XRM
* Enigma 1/2 => Looks interesting and possibly the best of the bunch, but also more of the same. Good ANSI support. node js-based, so major downvotes from me here - https://github.com/NuSkooler/enigma-bbs
* x84 => Python SSH/Telnet/BBS Core => Interesting, but I didn't like the code on code review, and I think both C++ and node js are better choices. Forked a few times too, so need to see what's up - https://github.com/jquast/x84
* Synchronet => I don't know much about the modern version of this, but I hated the old one. It looks quite dated, but is updated somewhat it seem - http://www.synchro.net/
* WWIV => I wonder why this cockroach keeps living, sorry. It's written in C++ and the new version may be good, I don't know since I didn't try it. What I do know is at one point I co-sysop'd someone's WWIV board and learned how bad it really is. Truly one of the worst of the popular BBS softwares ever IMO. Perhaps a base for a derivative work though - https://github.com/wwivbbs/wwiv
Some BBSs that I am relatively, but not 100% sure there is source floating around for:
* WWIV - There are 2 sources of the old, 1 Pascal and 1 C++ . The core is not so bad for the time, it's just the implementation further up is garbage.
* Oblivion/2 - I think 2.3 or something like that. Source is pretty awful, but it looked good out of the box and had lots of add-ons from art scene especially.
* Renegade - I believe this was leaked at some point, maybe official release later? It was backdoored as well for some versions. Based on Telegard.
* Forum - Used to build lots of other software. Lookup "Forum Hacks" for a ton of other source. This includes Vision, Vision/2, Vision/X. All are insanely hackable and/or backdoored. There's also Oblivion/2, Emulex, Emulex-2, and Celerity based on this I believe, and many more.
* Telegard - Based on WWIV but with monster spaghetti of Pascal, C++, and ASM. No real reason to study this unless you want to create your own hack on it, which I don't recommend. Bunch of hacks on this as well, like Renegade.
* PCBoard - Not good source (a mess), but was the creme-de-la-creme of non-underground boards and for warez boards (customized). Supported its own Pascal-like language (PPL). I think version 15 source was leaked, or at least I somehow had it/have it (somewhere). Also very extensible compared to others.
* AmiExpress - I believe source is floating around for this. Was great on Amiga and oft-copied in art scene/pcboard setups.
Other:
* BBS Archive - Bunch of source here - http://archives.thebbs.org/ra103c.htm
* Old BBS Software List - http://software.bbsdocumentary.com/
* Mystic BBS - I ran this for a bit to mess around for a few months long ago. It was never the best of the best, but always pretty good if you want something like Obv/2 but better. It seems like it's been updated a lot since and still going. Didn't find source and license is marked as some sort of proprietary freeware. Supports SSH, telnet, etc - http://www.mysticbbs.com/
In general, there's also a lot of source floating around for C64, Amiga, Atari ST, and CP/M and it's even more nostalgic than the rest. I've seen the source of tons of BBSs and they are notoriously a mess. The most common languages you'll encounter are Pascal/Turbo Pascal, C, C++, and assembler (per platform).
I'm falling asleep, but plenty more floating around. Hopefully that is a start. A few final tips
* If you want to run door games, be careful, lots of infected binaries.
* If you are running old stuff and get a hacked version of Doorway itself to run door games or a fossil driver because your BBS needs it, these also are commonly infected. Funny enough I once wasted several days trying to get a copy of Doorway to work on a friend's board, not realizing he pirated it and it was specifically infected with the Taipan virus. This copy seems to be everywhere, so clean it and it will work or find a different copy.
* Do not run any Forum or Telegard hacks to the outside world.
* If you want to build a nice BBS that's via the Internet, start with the socket side of things and don't build on a rotten core. You can do a lot with what's available on the JVM (Java, Clojure), Go, Rust, C++, Erlang, Lisp, and any language that supports concurrency to a decent amount. Don't use PHP, Python, Ruby, etc. because you're just handicapping your BBS from the start.
* If you really want to emulate the experience, you need to get ANSI support correct, and support the full spectrum of codes, fonts, and so on. Get a handle on code pages and differences between platforms like DOS vs Amiga. Some of the links above cover this pretty well.
Some people actually dislike it for its ease of use on the sysop side -- for a while in the early aughts, too many insufficiently-customized Synchronet telnet boards were popping up. Some of the Mystic and Renegade fans feel Sync is bland.
In any case, the new Synchronet is substantially different than the old one, which oddly I never ever encountered in my area (Philly) in the 90s. Around there it was almost entirely WWIV for 1-line boards, WildCat for 2-3 line boards, and the occasional giant MajorBBS/WorldGroup board. The amount of regional differences in popularity of bbs software and doors always fascinated me.
I am sure Synchronet is solid in many ways in the new version. The problem I have with a lot of software is there are big drop-offs across many of the categories I'd evaluate at least classic BBS software on.
These qualities includes but are not limited to:
* Messages - Message formats, compression, support for sync/distribution optionally, message interface
* Files - Warez boards often correlated highly with this. Things like tools for organizing files, scaling out to large numbers of files, and so on.
* Protocol Support - Does it support or can support be easily added? Ymodem, Xmodem, Zmodem, Kermit, BiModem. all are examples. Moreover, how good is the support and is it stable? Does it prevent things like Leech Zmodem? This is all less of a concern these days though obviously.
* Core Stability - Can it handle a lot of nodes, connections, users, without falling on its face? Most of the "boring" software is pretty good here, while things like the software used by the art scene or warez scene often is awful here. Even in newer stuff, a lot of software leaks resources over time or gets weird bugs when left running, which is the point of a BBS.
* Chat - Does it support multi-node chat? Can you change chat and such?
* Sysop Tools - Monitoring, paging, alerts, stats, etc.
* Add-Ons/Plug-ins - Lots of software popular in underground also was good here. Does it have an object model, programming language, scripting interface? If so, are there actually things in the wild for it? PCBoard was huge in this area, so much so it made up for many faults because of this.
* Games or other app add-ons - In the old days, supporting door games and at least a core of some games was a must. One or more of LoRD, Trade Wars, BRE, SRE were generally musts.
* Security - Does it allow adding virus scanners and such? Does it check input thoroughly? Is it or was it ever backdoored?
* OS Support - This is more something I'd judge new boards on, but in the old days choice was often determined just by what you had so it's worth mentioning. There wasn't much that was cross-platform and also good.
* UI - Can you customize the UI? Can you inject things dynamically using the API or even just simple things like MCI/Software specific codes? Can you do things like adjust key mappings? Does it support various terminal modes properly (lot of new ones fail here)?
I'll stop there, but the point is that very few if any pieces of software do well across all those. For as much as I value things like stability, so many other things used to make or break your board. Somehow we were a lot more OK with downtime then, but less forgiving if things lacked functionality. This is just my opinion of course.
I think Red Dragon and Usurper were the big ones that we played. It's funny that I was actually thinking about Usurper the other day because the best thing to be in that game was an Alchemist which struck me as funny because now that I'm into Elixir that's what the devs like to call themselves. :-)
In the late 80s I used to have whiteboards all over my bedroom with various graphical trade routes in my local tradewars game. From memory the solar systems were all numbers so you'd go 3-6-99-8 or whatever.
Around the same time a local set up a machine with UUCP email and usenet. The same people are on rec.pyrotechnics today as were on in 1989, probably because they're FBI honeypots not people.
Around the early 90s I would download Phrack magazine from its internet site when it was released using an email to FTP server where pre-mime days you'd run uudecode on the email it sent back to get your short file. You'd email it batch style a list of FTP commands and it would email you back whatever you wanted to download. Then I'd upload the new Phrack zine to all my local BBSes to get a better upload/download ratio. I distinctly remember ftpmail@sunsite.unc.edu. I'm not sure the concept of a zine or Phrack (or 2600) would make any sense to anyone under 40.
(God, did I just say global village, what's next, "Information Highway?"