Social Media’s Dial-Up Ancestor: The Bulletin Board System (2016) | Hacker News Reader

Social Media’s Dial-Up Ancestor: The Bulletin Board System (2016)

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I used to run a BBS in Florida (904 area code) on an Atari 800XL with two acoustically coupled 300 baud modems. I eventually found a pair of 1200 baud USRobotics modems at a garage sale (!) for $50 (!!), and started curating ANSI graphics and RIP menus and Atari demoscene (such as it was), along with all the code and scans I could find for Atari projects (like a WeFax decoder, my favorite).

Man, I was so addicted to Door programs like TradeWars.

I ended up going to a few (I guess you'd call them) meetups of other SysOps and learning all I could about FidoNet and NNTP gateways and so many things I think I'm starting to ramble out of pure nostalgia.

Those were the days; watching a roughly pixelated scan of a swimsuit model slowly paint on the screen while downloading at 300bps via ZMODEM.

Yep. Those were the days.

Especially when your BBS was running on your home phone lines, and your older brother needed to call his $%{*3H# NO CARRIER

My first paid programming gig was $20 for a piece of relcoatable machine code to calculate the XModem checksum in a USR$ call instead of in BASIC for the BBS operator who had just upgraded to a 1200 baud modem and found the transfers were only barely faster.

I remember thinking I was doing great in tradewars

Then overnight I got my ass kicked, handed to me, and my hold was filled with money (or whatever it was). Happened to a lot of people -- someone who really did do well was clearly fed up with not having any real competition.

I was always a huge fan of Usurper. We played it enough that we eventually figured out a class combination that could kill even the strongest players. When we started actually doing it those guys lost their minds. You’d never guess how much being the big dog in those games meant to people.

If you ever get a chance to play it, the Troll Alchemist is basically cheating. :)

One of the first computers I heavily used were the Atari 520/1040 ST's.

Tradewars was right up there with titles like Usurper.

I used to log into Datalink BBS in 1994 in the 904 area code. Were you the sysop of that by chance?

> Man, I was so addicted to Door programs like TradeWars.

I still dream about re-making SRE/BRE.

one interesting thing is that the BBS would have been impossible if the government hadn't forced AT&T to allow people to hook their own chosen devices into the telephone network.

In other words, in the old days, phones did not have a jack in the wall - AT&T came to your house and wired their network directly into your telephone. They did not want the RJ-45 jack which made consumer Modems possible. The government forced them to open up their network to other device makers, to competitors.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carterfone

I really wonder if the modern techno giants would be able to be regulated by the government if they became stagnant monopolies.

I remember using a 300 baud modem with an acoustic coupler (rubber-cupped cradle). After a while, that got swapped out for a electrically-connected/jacked 1200 baud modem.

That also made "war dialing" practical. Not something I engaged in (kind of wish now that I'd been more "interesting"), but the business I was connecting to had to block an ex-employee a couple of times, who kept finding their dial-in number.

Today's systems may be way faster and more "entertaining", in a mass sense. But I miss the old culture.

Including the openness and exchange. If you were interested, and you weren't a jerk, people would bend over backwards to help you. And they enjoyed doing so -- well, most of them. Which is how I ended up on those first systems, anyway.

I think a lot of people miss that culture. But, it just doesn't scale to the general population.

> I think a lot of people miss that culture. But, it just doesn't scale to the general population.

I think that's the crux of it. It worked because it wasn't instantly accessible to everyone. There was a certain minimum level of tech savvy, or at least intellectual curiosity, required. Most people were emotionally invested, at least a little, and that helped form strong communities.

I love that the internet is so egalitarian, but I do miss the days when things were smaller and tighter-knit; when most services were run for love, not for money.

Surely people today have watched Wargames - Broderick used an acoustic coupler in his nefarious attempts to get into his classmate's pants

Which, perhaps ironically, is a small plot hole in the movie. "Wardialing" is not possible with a coupler - since the computer has no ability to hang up, or dial. When using a coupler, you have to dial manually.

Could you not run a relay from thr parallel port and pulse dial?

Yeah, you could. But there’s no pulse dialing depicted in the movie.

I was wondering about that, but I didn't update my post. Was there an acoustic hang-up signal? I've forgotten.

Regardless, the 1200 baud modem, in addition to feeling like it was "keeping up" with the user, also made connecting more convenient.

Nitpick, RJ-11, but before that was a four-prong.

I can confirm the four prong. My father installed phones. Had support for two lines black and yellow wires and red and green wires. Two wires per phone.

Yep, can also confirm. My parents have a four-prong to RJ-11 adapter in their house, built in the 60's.

So that's why early modems were accoustic couplers!!

I never even questioned it. It was just "wow it's so old it just works that way."

Similar story to the CCC Datenklo [1].

[1] - https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datenklo

A strong point against the "deregulate everything" crowd, especially now with net neutrality under attack.

Count me as yet another person who would likely not be here, commenting on HN, without discovering BBSes and falling in love with the merging of hacking, designing, and community.

I ran a heavily, heavily modded Renegade board in 412/724 (Pittsburgh) with some good distros into the art and demoscenes in Europe. Nearly every free minute of my life back then was related: drawing ANSI, tracking MODs, trying to figure out how to get Lightboxes to work with Renegade, playing LORD and hanging out with other users from around the Pittsburgh area.

I consider myself incredibly lucky to have been a curious teenager in a time when BBSes were a thing, and the web as we currently know it was born.

I love the “ancient tech” topics :) as time marches on I tend to think “...wow...I used that!” BBS, Gopher, and other tools which are still (maybe not commonly) used like Pine and Lynx are a few items that come up in conversation that prompt a sense of wonder in me. Things have come a long way since I first started to dabble...and I’m not even “that old”!

Then you realise that this happened 30 year ago and then you feel old. At least I do.

I used to use a bbs offline "mail" client called blue wave, and it would import .qwk files from the bbs, then you spent your time replying offline and in the end would upload a .rep package containing said replies.

In some ways I miss it but in other ways I have a 500/500 internet fiber connection now and do not miss the days when donloading a 10 mb file took the rest of the day.

I had to pay hourly for CRIS BBS Direct's 1-800 dialup because everything was long distance to me, and keep detailed usage records so I didn't exceed my teenage income. 25 hours of Internet usage in a month was "a lot" then, now I think I use it 18 hours a day.

Dialing up every morning, exchanging QWK/REP files, getting off as soon as possible was my first forte into scripting things.

I saw a review of Incredibles 2 which opened with "you may remember the original from when you were a kid"

Sigh.

Mid 90s, summer break. I had dialup to a BBS/ISP hybrid from which I could telnet to my university account. I randomly found the source code for uqwk on the server. It compiled. It worked. uqwk built a file of new mail and usenet posts. Then I zmodemed them back to my computer where I wrote some software to split them up and read them at my leisure. Not sure if I ever get posting working or not.

Yep, same on CiX in the UK. We had to pay for phone access by the minute, so an offline reader was absolutely necessary.

Same here in Norway. I remember being jealous of people in the US with a flat local rate. We paid by the minute for everything, even more for "long" distance. My father got rather upset when we got a phone bill of 5000 NOK back in the day because I had downloaded something from a BBS in Bergen from Oslo.

Funny how things have reversed, now we are the ones with unmetered fast internet and the US has datacaps and whatnot.

Did CiX also charge per-minute access on top of that? Compuserve did.

In the late 90s, pre DSL, there was a pressure group to allow unmetered phone calls. The site is still online: http://www.unmetered.org.uk/

Blue Wave was amazing. I vividly remember many of the discussions I had with folks at the time - particularly on assembly, demoscene, and electronics. Learned a ton, and it helped shape my entire career.

RIGHT!?

I remember the late 80s and early 90s as an absolutely wondrous time; using the computer as a means of connecting to someone else somewhere else was a little bit mind blowing.

I just spent a few minutes going down memory lane looking at the BBB's on this site: http://bbslist.textfiles.com/503/ remembering some of the door games I used to play.

The big difference is everyone on bbses had a handle for some reason everyone uses there real name / posts where they work.

Social media wouldn't be such a problem if people stopped using their real name

Anonymous handles have a different set of problems which I think is why we've landed on real names for much of social media. Personally I prefer real names in most contexts, but I get why some people don't.

Anonymity is very comforting, you brought your discussion to the table without stereotype or preconception getting in the way, much like this very site and the reason why reddit is so popular. It is the basis for free discussion, a foundation pillar of the internet.

It's truly amazing that the early internet was a social experaince that went though a weird product/service commercial driven phase, and now we find ourselves trying to balance both of those out.

right, but I don't think we can ignore the problem of cesspools of really toxic behaviour that is at times enabled with anonymous handles. Moderation is much more important in those contexts. HN works because it's pretty heavily moderated (both by users via downvotes + comments and admins).

But a heavily moderated forum is not a completely free discussion environment. And the forums full of toxic comments aren't really that free either, because a huge portion of potential participants choose not to participate because of the nasty environment.

Clearly in some (many?) contexts there's a need for anonymity, and in some cases (HN) it seems to work out ok. I'm just not sure if anonymous is the right default for a lot of social media contexts. Both Slashdot and Reddit have become unusable for me because of the signal to noise ratio is so low (reddit may have some subreddits with better behaviour, but not any of the ones I found personally interesting).

For one, it's easier than ever for the public to go all lynch mob-y on someone today and cut them off from society or otherwise ruin their life.

I think very nearly 100% of the reason that we've landed on real names for social media is because the dominant companies in social media make their money by extensively profiling their users and selling access to finely tuned selections of them for the purpose of advertising, political engineering, and so on. Encouraging, if not requiring, people to use their real name helps with this end.

The interfaces are also designed with this in mind -- encouraging people to post personal information and to reward your 'friends' for doing so. Even using mobile devices as two factor authentication or, increasingly, even to sign up to a service is part of the game. That mobile number immediately usually gives you an substantial amount of demographic information. And in any case also allows for near 100% certainty cross-compiling information between companies who trade and sell your information among each other to generate even more extensive profiles to everybody's benefit. Well, everybody except you.

It is still tricky, because a sufficiently motivated doxer could uncover your real legal name if they saw your logs. Things like IP addresses and who your friends are could possibly out you. It's not sufficient enough to use an anonymous handle. You have to sign up for the service using an anonymous proxy and use burner phones which are virtual and not tied to a particular cell mast nearby (if the service demands phone verification).

It probably depended on the kind of BBS and the era too: in my country, on Fidonet almost everyone used his real name.

IIRC Fidonet had a real name policy.

A bit of searching seems to indicate that it depended on each Echomail conference (== newsgroup); they had flags, and one possible flag was "real names" (== mandatory real name). Most of the echomails seem to bear it.

(I could not find the document describing those flags, but they appear in echolists.)

Probably of interest: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PTT_Bulletin_Board_System which is the largest of its kind in Taiwan

I keep meaning to get the documentary they mention - http://www.bbsdocumentary.com/

Be curious about reviews of it.

It's a great documentary; worth watching.

I have a friend and former co-worker who had relevant role in the movie (and, funny enough, I only discovered years later, when I re-watched it).

It's fun to compare and contrast the games of the BBS era to mobile games today. In the BBS era there were countless time-regulated games such as LORD, Trade Wars, Usurper, and many more. By 'time regulated' I mean that you were given a certain amount of turns/energy/etc per 24 hours, and then had to wait to do more. It's literally the exact same model the seemingly vast majority of 'free' mobile games today use, except they did not try to coerce users into paying for more energy/turns/moves/...

Didn't sysops usually give donators extra time? Not sure if that mattered, I didn't spend much time playing those games.

That's on the BBS itself. E.g. a regular account might get an hour per day whereas an 'elite' might get 4 hours per day. BBS' were of course run through phone lines and while many operators set up multiple concurrent lines, access was still relatively limited so time limits on the site were necessary. Donors, by contrast, enabled operators to expand their service and buy even more lines and so on.

The games themselves are a different story. It's of course impossible to prove a negative, but I certainly never experienced any paid cheating or favoritism in Trade Wars - which I played on dozens of different sites and later on on the large telnet sites once the internet became a thing.

Yes your daily time was limited. If you donated you got a higher security level and more time.

If there was military, police, firefighters we gave them more time as well for their service.

It was a blast installing, running, and later modifying BBS software. Usually the source was available somewhere, even for shareware stuff or via a warez site. Or you'd just hack it directly with a hex editor.

You'd have your usual haunts where you'd dial in to check messages (before fidonet). The haves were on HST dual standard, the have-nots on v32bis. Having a sysop break in for a chat was a fairly common occurrence.

Fun times...

I frequented Image BBSes with my best friend of the same name; we dialed in from our respective Commodore 128s. Our favourite story was when one of our local boards was doing a promotion on download points over New Year's Eve. I was the last visitor on 19xx and he was the first visitor on 19xx+1, and we never had to upload a file ever again to that board. :)

Recommendation for checking out Digital: A Love Story, a free PC game set mainly on BBSs in 1988.

http://scoutshonour.com/digital/

The New Jersey BBS communities from the early 90s were great. I assume that many of the members are doing well today, considering their interests were well aligned with the economy. I hope all are well.

many of the ... cultural practices that we now recognize as social media were first developed

I caught the tail end of BBS culture and modern internet culture is nothing like it. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17534985 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17535165 for an example

Agreed. It may be safe to compare BBS culture with Usenet culture, not least of which because Fidonet enabled so much overlap toward that tail end you mention, but the sheer ubiquity alone makes today's Internet a different situation entirely.

I have a lot to thank BBSs for in cultivating my life.

Textfiles.com for nostalgia.

Come on, no mention of Global Wars? :)

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