Ask HN: What was it like to use BBS? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What was it like to use BBS?

144 pointsranuzz230 comments

I want to understand how the experience was

what was the cost involved

what were the entry barrier for an average person to join

How similar was it to current social media networks

How big the industry around it actually become

From a tech point of view what do you think were the major breakthroughs and what made it to the internet we see today.

I have watched the documentary www.bbsdocumentary.com , so I have some context but want some more anecdotes if I can :)

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A nerdy girl fighting with her much more socially-adept little brother over use of the phone line their parents gave them for Christmas, typing AT commands into XModem on the TRS-80 her uncle gave her after he moved on to PCs, using a 300 baud modem that did plug into the telephone line (not an acoustic), but required listening to the carrier tone and hitting the red Connect button at just the right moment… to play Legend Of the Red Dragon and download the Anarchists’ Cookbook and see if someone responded to a message you posted on FIDONet a few days ago

Were you lucky enough to have the RIPScript Graphics enhanced version of LoRD ? :)

RIPScript was the bane of my existence as a Trash-80 BBS user - a screen full of slowly-unfurling rubbish from which I had to pick out the actual text.

(I never called my Model 4 a “Trash-80” at the time - her name was Trissy, and she was decorated with a tasteful assortment of glittery flower stickers.)

I found a 300 baud modem at a yard sale, the owner let me have it for $1.

Proceeded to crack open the family computer (a 386sx-33 with 4 megs of ram and a 80 mb hard drive) and found a long spool of telephone cable and connected, only to realize that I had no idea what number to call or how to dial out.

I learned how to use telnet by reading the massive 800 page Dos 5.0 instruction manual and in a copy of the yellow pages I found the number to a local BBS (generic Sherlockian starting point provided courtesy of a "Computer Shoppers" magazine) and dialed in.

Man, that was electric.

Being a dumb kid with a screwdriver and just the unbridled desire to make something happen and suddenly seeing bits and blobs of ascii characters appearing on my screen from dozens of miles away... man. That just can't be beat. I feel like even the air smelled different during those moments, like if electric copper and possibility were an odor that crawled out of the nether, summoned by the buzzing harmonies of the modem.

Reading the anarchists cookbook was a blast. It seemed so real and so full of BS at the same time. Oh, you can make drugs out of banana peels? Sure, yeah, ok. Not gonna do that, lol.

I think my favorite game to play was Usurper. it was LORD but with drugs and cyberpunk PK violence, and if you killed the current king you became the king. It was rough and gritty, pretty perverted, and perfect for a teenager who just wanted to play on the edge, lol.

Part of me wishes I could experience it all over again. I was the only person I knew who was "jacked in". It was great.

LORD was fantastic! Had so much fun playing that back in the day

tw2002 was epic

Upload ratios for all the interesting stuff (demos, MOD music, software) were a real headache for me as a teenager.

Typically the ratio was around 4:1 downloads vs. uploads. In other words, to download 4 megabytes, you were required to first upload a megabyte.

Since disk space was expensive, sysops on high-quality boards kept a close eye on uploads and verified them. If you uploaded junk, you'd probably get banned.

Where does a 13-year-old go find something to upload? There were a few older kids in my school who were connected to the "scene". I would sometimes try begging them with a floppy disk in hand. I don't recall it working often.

Upload ratios motivated me to create something of my own that would be decent enough to upload and not get me banned. That strategy didn't pay immediate dividends either, but it set me on a career path that has been mostly fulfilling and interesting.

Government BBS systems had Census data and other fun stuff... and no ratios. Good for a seed library.

Another challenge was have enough time to download. Most BBSes had a limit on the number of minutes you could use per day, which could severely limit how much you were able to download.

For example, on a 14.4k modem, it takes about 15 minutes to download a single 1.44mb floppy disk image. A typical game could be anywhere from 1 to 10 disks, so if your daily quota is 30 minutes, it would take multiple days to download a complete game.

On very popular systems, you might not even have enough time to download a single disk. Keep in mind that many early modem transfer protocols didn't support resuming downloads, so if you ran out of minutes before finishing your file, you just had to start over again. So what to do?

The solution was to use the "time bank". If you were done using the system for the day, you could "deposit" your unused minutes and store them in your account, up to some max limit. Then once you had enough time saved up, you could withdraw them and finally download that big file you've had your eye on. At least, as long your parents don't pick up the phone...

> Keep in mind that many early modem transfer protocols didn't support resuming downloads, so if you ran out of minutes before finishing your file, you just had to start over again. So what to do?

You're not wrong, but it's also worth defining "early", as Zmodem was out in 1986 and had restartable transfers:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZMODEM

There may have been some version of Zmodem available in 1986, but as Wikipedia itself says, it didn't become widely supported until at least the early 1990s. For example, it wasn't built into ProComm Plus, one of the leading terminal programs, until 1991 [0]. If you didn't have native support, you could add it to your terminal software as an external binary, but that was a bit trickier. [1] And, of course, the BBS you were calling had to support it too.

But when it was available, it sure left Xmodem in the dust!

0: https://books.google.com/books?id=aAtUrtU87kQC&pg=PT180&lpg=...

1: https://github.com/fredrikhederstierna/fymodem/blob/98af4588...

P.S. Old schoolers will recognize the infamous Rusty n Edie's BBS in the directory screenshot in the linked PC Magazine article...

Thanks for the link! Rusty n Edie was run out of Boardman, OH (suburb of Youngstown) in a plaza at the corner of California Ave and York Ave. In fact, the sign for the plaza is still there: https://www.google.com/maps/@41.0212018,-80.6563805,3a,27.1y...

We had lots of BBSs around here in the 90s, including Viper's Den run by Bob McCoy and K's Korner run by Dennis Klaustermeyer.

To answer the OP question, compared to now it would seem terrible, dialing up to a text interface on 2400 baud modems. But at the time it was AWESOME. For most of us this was the first time we'd ever used a network of any kind.

Wow, that's crazy there's still a sign! It's also crazy how far out the 216 area code used to extend...

After 2 hours of download, 98% complete...

Hearing your Mum talking to your Dad downstairs.. "I'm just going to give Aunt Lucy a call.."

Me: "NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!"

*click*

Luckily protocols like zmodem supported resuming downloads.

Ha. As recently as about 3 years ago I was suggesting Zmodem to someone who was tasked with creating a wireless download protocol.

I don't know if he ever went with that idea or not.

You can think of a BBS as a single web site that only one (or maybe a few) users can use at a time.

It is really slow, with a text user interface or menu driven interface.

It might have a forum or text-only email that does not get updated very fast.

There are some files that you can download, but not very many (maybe a hundred), but it takes several minutes to download one file. You can upload files you want to share, but that takes several minutes per file as well.

There are some multiuser games, but in most cases only one or two users are playing at a time. One of my favorite was Trade Wars 2002: http://wiki.classictw.com/index.php?title=Jumpgate

It was not at all similiar to today's web and social media because each BBS was local (who had the money to call long distance for far away BBSes?), and it was so much slower than today's Internet speeds.

Seriously, BBSes over a 2400 baud or 9600 baud modem were so much slower than the data speeds that most cell networks offer today.

Another big factor was that calling BBSes used a phone line. If your family had a single phone line, it was in use when using the modem. No one could make or receive phone calls when you were online. This meant that serious BBS users and sysops running BBSes had multiple phone lines. Those who couldn't afford multiple phone lines were calling late at night when no one else was using the phone.

> Another big factor was that calling BBSes used a phone line. If your family had a single phone line, it was in use when using the modem. No one could make or receive phone calls when you were online. This meant that serious BBS users and sysops running BBSes had multiple phone lines. Those who couldn't afford multiple phone lines were calling late at night when no one else was using the phone.

My brother would pick up the phone and yell into it to knock me offline.

BBSes were the gateway drug to MUDs for me. And even at 1200 baud a DIKUMUD was plenty playable.

> My brother would pick up the phone and yell into it to knock me offline.

Yup this is why I rerouted the phone line through my room and had it hooked up to a switch :P

> It is really slow, with a text user interface or menu driven interface.

It should be stressed that "really slow" is relative. 1200 baud for text, specifically scrolling text, is really usable. You feel it much more if you're constantly repainting a screen (because now you're sending 2K of text over at 120 cps).

But scrolling simple prompts, simple menus, text messages are all fine at 1200 baud. That's faster than reading speed for most people. Systems were kept terse due to slower rates, but when it came down to actually "using" the systems, folks weren't typically shouting at their machines to go faster.

When BBSs became more focused on software than messaging, speed became a much bigger issue.

>> but when it came down to actually "using" the systems, folks weren't typically shouting at their machines to go faster.

Did you ever download or upload files?

>> scrolling simple prompts, simple menus, text messages are all fine at 1200 baud.

Yes, on a 80 column text screen, there was only so much you could see at a time. People who have only seen web pages with inline images at high resolution that load instantly would probably see 1200 baud as slow.

You are arguing the exact same points the GP made but using selective quoting to make it sound like a rebuttal.

Really slow -- as in waiting for the messaging system to search/display the list of all waiting messages, being loaded over a slow IDE hard drive with limited memory ....

But yea. Once you got to 1200 baud; the phone line could fling text at you just beyond normal reading speed; if all it was doing is sending that. Add in a lot of ANSI or terminal escape codes, and it can feel a bit sluggish till 56kbps

Emacs still has aggressive terminal optimization code in it that calculates the smallest set of terminal commands necessary to repaint a screen in one state, into the desired state. So Emacs may still be usable -- not ideal but usable -- at 1200 baud.

Something similar exists for vi, but I don't know if Vim has it.

ITS Emacs (the original TECO verision) using the SUPDUP display protocol supported "line saving", so it could tell your terminal to stash a line in memory before overwriting it, so later it could almost instantly redisplay that line when you scrolled back to it. That was really great at 300 baud. 1200 baud too, of course. But modems used to cost about a dollar a baud.

https://github.com/PDP-10/supdup/blob/master/supdup.mss#L635

I posted this earlier about the Gosling Emacs screen redisplay algorithm. That was the code that RMS rewrote.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26114104

To be fair, RMS a right to fuss and complain, because UniPress did kind of pull the rug out from under him. The display update optimization code that Gosling wrote was pretty ugly but amazingly brilliant dynamic programming stuff, and it had a skull-and-crossbones warning in the comments.

RMS originally used the display update code from Gosling Emacs, but then rewrote it all from scratch for later versions of Gnu Emacs, after UniPress threatened him not to use it. As modems and networks became faster, and people started using window systems instead of terminals, having an "Ultra-hot screen management package" became less important. But it's a really cool algorithm, a great example of dynamic programming, and Gosling even published a paper about it!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22849522

James Gosling's Emacs screen redisplay algorithm also used similar "dynamic programming techniques" to compute the minimal cost path through a cost matrix of string edit operations (the costs depended i.e. on the number of characters to draw, length of the escape codes to insert/delete lines/characters, padding for slow terminals, etc). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gosling_Emacs

>Gosling Emacs was especially noteworthy because of the effective redisplay code, which used a dynamic programming technique to solve the classical string-to-string correction problem. The algorithm was quite sophisticated; that section of the source was headed by a skull-and-crossbones in ASCII art, warning any would-be improver that even if they thought they understood how the display code worked, they probably did not.

https://donhopkins.com/home/archive/emacs/skull-and-crossbon...

Trivia: That "Skull and Crossbones" ASCII art is originally from Brian Reid's Scribe program, and is not copyrighted.

https://donhopkins.com/home/archive/emacs/mw/display.c

    /*  1   2   3   4   ....            Each Mij represents the minumum cost of
          +---+---+---+---+-----        rearranging the first i lines to map onto
        1 |   |   |   |   |             the first j lines (the j direction
          +---+---+---+---+-----        represents the desired contents of a line,
        2 |   |  \| ^ |   |             i the current contents).  The algorithm
          +---+---\-|-+---+-----        used is a dynamic programming one, where
        3 |   | <-+Mij|   |             M[i,j] = min( M[i-1,j],
          +---+---+---+---+-----                      M[i,j-1]+redraw cost for j,2
        4 |   |   |   |   |                           M[i-1,j-1]+the cost of
          +---+---+---+---+-----                        converting line i to line j);
        . |   |   |   |   |             Line i can be converted to line j by either
        .                               just drawing j, or if they match, by moving
        .                               line i to line j (with insert/delete line)
     */

https://donhopkins.com/home/documents/EmacsRedisplayAlgorith...

https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1159890.806463

A redisplay algorithm, by James Gosling.

Abstract

This paper presents an algorithm for updating the image displayed on a conventional video terminal. It assumes that the terminal is capable of doing the usual insert/delete line and insert/delete character operations. It takes as input a description of the image currently on the screen and a description of the new image desired and produces a series of operations to do the desired transformation in a near-optimal manner. The algorithm is interesting because it applies results from the theoretical string-to-string correction problem (a generalization of the problem of finding a longest common subsequence), to a problem that is usually approached with crude ad-hoc techniques.

[...]

6. Conclusion

The redisplay algorithm described in this paper is used in an Emacs-like editor for Unix and a structure editor. It's performance has been quite good: to redraw everything on the screen (when everything has changed) takes about 0.12 seconds CPU time on a VAX 11/780 running Unix. Using the standard file typing program, about 0.025 seconds of CPU time are needed to type one screenful of text. Emacs averages about 0.004 CPU seconds per keystroke (with one call on the redisplay per keystroke).

Although in the interests of efficency we have stripped down algorithm 5 to algorithm 6 the result is still an algorithm which has a firm theoretical basis and which is superior to the usual ad-hoc approach.

More info:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22850973

The QuickEd external message editor for QuickBBS was perfectly usable at 1200 baud. During screen repaint it gave priority to updating the current line so it was responsive and went back to repainting the screen as soon as you stopped typing. It would ensure that it does not have too much data in the output buffer to keep latency down.

I wrote it with my brother.

Uhmmm try running your terminal at 9600 baud, and see how quickly you get bored with it :) And that's 4 times as fast.

I did this for a while recently because I needed to access something over a serial port and it was not fun. 1200 is really slow.

This slow speed is one of the reasons the curses library and its descendants try to only repaint small sections of the screen using escape codes to move the cursor. Ironically it's also quite helpful with some modern terminals that are very heavyweight on graphical (pixel) redraws.

E.g. I can refresh a TUI app using MacOS Terminal.app 30x a second using ncurses; but a naive wipe/redraw at that rate produces visible flickering and artifacts.

That's true, though it really surprised me how slow it felt.

In the end I pumped the terminal speed up to 115k2 and it still felt very slow. Especially quickly paging through logfiles with 'less'. I remember spending part of my college days on green screen 9600 baud terminals (before they bought enough X terminals for everyone) and they felt snappy back in the day. And there was already a lot of TUI stuff going on back then. And in those days I didn't even know about gnu screen (or today's tmux) yet!

I think I've just gotten spoilt with today's computer performance.

1200 is not too bad on a bbs, I'm often doing that on my c64. 300 is slow!

I used 9600 setting up an rs/6000 last week, and it was fast enough that I didn't notice.

I live in a weird alternate universe.

Not that weird, I still have a bunch of SPARC Netras with serial ports only (no video) and several HP-UX boxes <3

I love that old stuff, and figuring out how to use their boot managers etc. On the Netras the configuration is actually stored on a smart card. Very cool.

300 you have to wait a little for text but 150 was really slow. When I got my 2400 and 9600 things were crazy fast.

One day in the mid 1980s we were checking the speeds available in our VT100 terminals. For fun we dropped it down to 150 to see what that was like. It was so slow that when you hit the delete key, you could watch it backspace, type a space, then backspace again.

I would also toss out the concept that what moderns call "speed" is actually latency.

Latency of even a 300 baud modem is essentially instant, in some cases faster than modern heavily buffered cable modem services. Hit enter and it starts responding instantly.

People are used to a second or so latency on modern web pages, when shopping on amazon or whatever. Then they see a 300 baud modem vs a 30 megabit cable modem and think if "hit a key see response" takes a second at 30 megabits/sec then at 300 bits/sec 100K times slower, it must be "hit a key see response 100K seconds later" LOL no nothing like that at all.

UIs were generally lower latency aka "faster" back in the old days than they are now.

Bufferbloat is easy to address if you've got a $50 ubiquiti router that can shape traffic. A bigger I'd say is when ISPs add jitter and other forms of unreliability to make SSH unusable unless you upgrade to business class.

> It was not at all similiar to today's web and social media because each BBS was local...

This is an important distinction, because depending on the size of your town and how social you were, there was a good chance you might meet these people in real life. Imagine if everyone in this thread actually went out for a beer or played disc golf with each other every once in a while.

Yeah, I ended up meeting a bunch of the regulars on my local BBS.

Indeed, we often had meetups. This really made it much more fun.

On the packet radio side it was even more fun because you could see all the packets flying through the air and you could 'eavesdrop' on other people's conversations. Which sounds worse than it is - on the CB it was already a given that conversations were public so everyone was already used to that. And it didn't require any wizardry, pretty much every program showed a running log of the packets received. We're talking 1200 baud so you could actually follow it. People would often send stuff by broadcast too (usually many times because of the high packet loss and the chance of people missing it).

In fact this really helped my early grasp of network tuning, messing with window and repeat timers to improve performance. Because it was all going in slow-motion you could really see the effects.

IBM PCs didn't come out until after I was out of high school. A few years later I decided to join a meetup of the people who were users on the BBS I was on. It was mid 1980s, and it turned out that all the users I had been chatting with were in High School. First of many experiences where I felt pretty old.

I got into BBSes around 1992, and started running one around 1994 (when I was 14). I was living in a medium sized town (150k) in Texas, and our city had around 20 boards.

The main costs were a computer ($2000-ish, $3700 in 2021 dollars), and a decent modem ($200-ish, again, $370-ish in 2021 dollars), which wouldn't stay decent for long. In the around 4 years I was doing BBSes, I spent something like the equivalent of $700 2021 dollars on modems alone. (I supported all of this with my juvenile lawn mowing business, where I mowed several of the neighbors lawns.) After a few months of serious BBSing (and before I started hosting my own), I convinced my parents to let me get my own phone line, which was around $15/month, which I also paid for.

Compared to being online today, virtually everyone was local. I wasn't aware of anyone else on the boards being from significantly out of town.

Comparing it to today's internet doesn't really seem possible. There are some structural similarities, but the scale is so radically different that the comparisons break down. It'd be like trying to describe the social lives of someone in a town of 200 in terms of the social dynamics of New York City. Except that that's still off by several orders of magnitude.

A lot of these boards had a few dozen regular users. That was it. In larger cities some had hundreds or thousands, but really you'd recognize the handles of all regular users.

There were also meetups in town, which I only went to once since I felt kind of out of place for being a young teen. Most of the folks were either university students or adults, almost all men, and it kind of blew my cover to be a 14-year-old sysop.

Some boards used a lot of inter-board forums (FIDOnet), but most of the ones I was on didn't. There it was funny because usually they'd all exchange messages in the middle of the night through a network of long-distance calls. But because of that, messages weren't real-time -- they usually took a day to arrive. My board was a FIDOnet node, but almost nobody used it on my board (including me).

But also, a lot of the content wasn't about chatting or forums. A lot of it was multiplayer games. Honestly, that's mainly what I did. Legend of the Red Dragon was the big game in those days. A lot of it was also about software... for better or worse, almost every board had a "FaF" (friends and family) section where the cracked stuff was, and if you were friends with the sysop, you'd have access to it. That was how I got access to some of the first compilers I'd ever used (which in those days were pretty expensive -- usually several hundred dollars).

The tech ... very little of it seems to have made it over to the web. God, we had vector graphics (RIPscript) already in those days. In comparison, early HTML and Gopher felt pretty backward. They just had access to a lot more info.

Come to think of it I think the faf section was where I got my first compiler as well

I’m your age, and those were my primary BBS days, but as the nearest town with 150k people (Waco) was in my area code but outside our local calling area, pretty sure I didn’t call your board - the hell I caught the time I dialed up CompuServe made me cautious.

Magic moment for me: my high school history teacher telling me about TENet (Texas Educators’ Network) and pointing out that my mom was entitled to that $5/yr Unix shell account with a local dial-up as a public school teacher.

Thank you, Mr. Horner.

While I did later briefly live in Waco, those were after my BBS days. I was running the board in Beaumont (called Pilot's Hanger).

I was aware of TENET in those days, but the Unix shell was still a couple years away from my radar. A lot of the boards were run on OS/2 (since it could run Windows apps, and had much better multitasking than Windows 3.11) or Amiga back then.

I used to run an 8-line BBS (Fidonet mail hub) on a single 486DX2-66 machine with 8MB of RAM under OS/2 2.11 back in 1993-97. I often played games or used C compiler at same time. This same machine also was a local LAN server (running IBM LAN Manager), serving files to tens of other machines on 10Base2 coax ethernet in the office. Somewhere about 1996 we got a leased line internet connected directly to this same box over a serial line, the machine became an IP router and a remote access server allowing premium BBS users to run PPP/SLIP connections. That's how I got involved into ISP business. :-)

Huh. Didn’t know that about OS/2’s popularity among sysops. One of Temple’s BBSes (Waverley Park) presented what I now think was a Unix shell, or at least supposed to look like one, but I can’t imagine they were actually running Linux (ca. 1993)

TENet was the beginning of the end of my BBS days, with its real email and fancy WWW browser - lynx.

Full circle: being the old lady on the team talking about the digital American wild west of the 90s with BBSes (the saloons) and town ISPs (the general stores) to young German colleagues who have known nothing other than gradually increasing Telekom DSL speeds. (Texpats in Germany, represent!)

OS/2 was sort of a must those days for PC geeks. Like Linux today, or even like FreeBSD.

Fun Texas fact: Beto O'Rourke was also part of the BBS scene (Cult of the Dead Cow).

For me, I've been in Germany longer than Texas, so I'm not sure I could still call myself a "Texpat", though points for introducing me to said term. ;-)

It was sometimes hard to get in (unless the BBS had multiple phone lines, and even then the popular ones were often busy), so there was always a bit of anticipation waiting for that modem connect tone, and you’d leave it on auto redial for ages sometimes.

Checking out what files other people had uploaded or what comments they had made was fun, and you could sort of have a real-time chat with the sysop when they were online. Downloading stuff took ages, sometimes overnight.

Warez was a big part of it, but so was all sorts of text files for making various stuff, tracker music, demos etc. It was a real DIY culture and a lot of fun.

If someone else in your household picked up the phone to make a call when you were online, the connection dropped (the modem used the main phone line). That was the worst! Luckily you could continue downloading where you left off usually after reconnecting. Many BBSs had leech ratios - you needed to upload stuff as well.

This was late 80s/early 90s… Beyond the PC and modem cost you’d pay for local calls, which was pretty expensive for a bunch of 12 year olds. International calls were out of the question

I recall "Anarchist's Cookbook" and phone phreaking manuals as ubiquitous text files found on every BBS's file section.

Haha yes that was a classic! Also bunch of demo coding and electronics stuff as text files.. sound cards were pretty expensive back then, I remember downloading DIY AdLib instructions/schematics and my friends dad built it for a fraction of the cost of a real one

I'm imagining everything was ASCII character art schematics, given the available toolset back then.

I told a friend about something I read in it and he went and asked his chemistry teacher about it and got a trip to the principal's office.

I remember printing it at school on the single dot matrix printer in the computer lab, which took a couple weeks during lunch breaks and after school IIRC. A lot of students were initially upset that I was always in there taking up printer time... until they saw what I was printing, then suddenly everyone wanted me to print them a copy. I also got some extra credit doing a presentation about it in chemistry class. I'm pretty sure our teacher even took one of the less destructive recipes and made something go boom behind protective glass while everyone cheered. The 90s truly were a different era...

Don't forget ascii and ansipr0n.

BMP and PCXs begat JPGs, GRASP animations begat GIFs. Grayscale, super low res seconds-long loops, but yes, I can fap to this.

> Many BBSs had leech ratios - you needed to upload stuff as well.

Ashamed to admit I was unzipping my zips and re-zipping them with `pkzip -e0 ...` to disable the compression before uploading them to another BBS. It inflated my upload ratio several times over and the upload looked unbelievably fast because zmodem transfer protocol would do decent in-line compression on uncompressed files.

Yes! I did the same thing. So funny to hear that here.

There was also a BBS that had a door for queuing downloads that just assumed everyone had a 14.4K modem, and I only had a 2400. When you picked your downloads to queue up, it checked your minutes to check if you had enough time. But since it did the math wrong I was able to queue up more downloads than my minutes allowed. Since it was a door, it didn’t return to the BBS software until my downloads were done. Fun times!

Thank you, Kermit and ZModem. I remember a few legacy BBS didn't support the newer protocols which would let you resume downloads.

Even better was when these were combined with an image viewer that would let you view an image as it downloaded. Progressive gif let you see it in full, but blurry and watch as detail filled in.

I cannot believe no one has mentioned "Computer Shopper" yet!

It was a large-format magazine (glue-binding) with hundreds of pages, mostly ads in the front, and international BBS's in the back.

The back was basically a paper version of WHOIS. Not every BBS listed what it did, and some were lame, but others had up to 16 (gasp) modems. Most you just got busy signals. And porn, lots of CGA 4-bit porn (this was before 320x200x8 VGA). But sometimes there were multiplayer games where you got one turn per day.

The ads were for Chinese/HongKong companies that made clone parts. "Clone" was the big word back then, as in PC Clone. It was DIY without a helmet! I bought my first 32MB MFM HDD (back when you had to manually enter cylinders, heads, and sectors into the BIOS) and a 286 mobo out of Computer Shopper (with 512KB of DRAM in DIP format that cost like $500). And then started calling random BBSes all over Europe. Learned real quick to read the costs on my phone bill.

There were also simple services for businesses. For example, my first job in the 80's used Novell token-ring netware in the office computers, but a few lucky people had modems. I remember using a service called EaasySabre [sic] to buy a plane ticket for business travel. It connected you to a TTY terminal that looked just like the screens the airline counter agents used. I felt supremely cool booking a ticket at 2400 baud from my first office, despite it taking FOREVER.

From the UK:

I was about 15, in 1993, when I managed to convince my parents to buy me a modem. I used to use it out of hours when phone calls were cheaper. Nevertheless, I think I managed to rack up a £200 phone bill in the first month or so.

Eventually I started running my own BBS, which would only become available at 8pm and come offline at 8am. If I remember correctly, I called it "The Graveyard". I had a steady stream of callers on the single line that it shared with the home phone. I would often chat to them via "Sysop Chat" whilst simultaneously talking to friends nearby over CB radio.

When I wasn't doing that, I was calling into all sorts of odd places - hacker boards (one of which I was thrown off for asking if there was a non-colour version, "l4mer", me on my Commodore PC20-III) - some cyberpunk boards (including the CyberCafe in London), and "Ooh!", on which I remember being repeatedly propositioned on various insalubrious chat groups, when I wasn't reading posts about Babylon 5 on Fidonet. On another I learned about raves happening vaguely nearby.

The whole thing was a wonderful, glorious chaotic mess. It felt like exploring a mysterious universe which was growing and mutating every day, full of infinite possibilities, and of course it was much better than what we have these days.

In the early 1980s:

Dial the rotary phone, listen for carrier. If you got one, unplug the handset and plug it into the back of the VICModem. And have fun reading posts by the locals at 300 bps. :)

Basically it was 99% computer geeks using these things, I'd wager.

The experience was very similar to Hacker News, actually. It was a bulletin board, after all. Except far more local and the threading UI was worse. Same arguments. :)

Most BBSes only had one phone line, so if someone was logged in, you couldn't connect. You'd get a busy signal. When I finally got a Hayes-compatible modem, I could at least autodial until I got through.

Some BBSs had games you could play. If you managed to get through before midnight, sometimes you could play today's turns, roll over midnight, and then play tomorrow's turns before anyone else, giving you an edge.

The games I remember most were TradeWars and one called Dominion, IIRC.

No cost as long as you weren't making any long-distance calls.

Not really similar to existing social networks. And it was often a bunch of people in town that you knew in person, if the town was small enough.

I remember when the first BBS in town joined WWIVnet and we were able to send email (very slowly) over longer distances without incurring long-distance charges. Then someone else got on FidoNet. And there was a Waffle BBS with NNTP, I think.

Bang paths to send mail...

Eventually in the early 1990s I got internet through my college and BBSs went largely forgotten after that.

I used to run a BBS called "The Off Hour Rockers", was originally formed as the Jersey Shore BBS. It had 3 19.2k USRobotics modems for the dial-in lines plus a local node. It ran on PCBoard software. I think at its peak I had over 400 members, most were pretty active. There were many "rooms" and a large file download area. I used to host "nerd parties" where people would come over with their floppies to copy or contribute software to the download areas. This was all before other online services like Prodigy or AOL came into being. The main server was a home-build from parts, the dial-in nodes were AT&T 6300+ PCs, and were all originally interconnected using LANtastic, then converted to Token Ring. It was a lot of fun, we met some awesome people!

At the time the experience was "first class" [1] ;)

I was lucky enough to be a middle schooler when BMUG [2] was going strong. And even attended a few of the Thursday night meet ups they had. I remember one person talking about "encryption" for the first time for me. And how they were thinking about maybe one day computers would need to find more "entropy." E.g., use the random variations in the hardware to seed/salt communication. That was a 'hmm, interesting' experience for me that drew me more towards technology.

I also remember getting access to BBSes via friends of friends that specialized in 'software'. And having handles / trying to come up with badass handles. And other mischievous things.

But it was fun - and with Macintosh software - freeware, shareware, etc., I variously remember different BMUG catalogs - with CDs full of shareware in the backs of paperback books per year or per season, etc. Funny how things have changed and yet the most advanced stuff that was going on then is more or less what's just normal now (higher quality videos, bandwidth, etc.). People have been chatting and posting online for a minute.

UPDATE. These icons are a throwback: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FirstClass#/media/File:FirstCl...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FirstClass

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_Macintosh_Users_Group

FirstClass was amazing. I saw this thread and immediately searched in it to make sure someone referenced this incredible piece of software.

BMUG was a special place. I still have most of their newsletters, each on the order of ~400 pages. Here's a representative article:

https://twitter.com/ridiculous_fish/status/13078734651148492...

9600baud was revolutionary compared to 2400baud, text would load & scroll faster than you could read it!

Some sites has upload/download ratios - you could only download so much many files without uploading files, forcing an exchange rate.

There was a selection of download protocols you'd choose from, based on what your client support and the BBS supported: "KERMIT", "XMODEM", "YMODEM", "ZMODEM", and "JMODEM"

The better protocols supported batch, multi-file, compression, and resuming interrupted downloads - very important for when your session was interrupted by someone else in the house picking up the phone and trying to dial.

We had a second phone line installed for the modem; I learned how telephone wiring worked and re-wired the our phone outlets to use the correct lines.

Dont forget fucking with IRQs and DIP switches and jumpers to get that fancy 300 baud modem up and running so you could dial your best friend for a head-to-head game of Populous on your ever so amazingly awesome new EGA monitor! No more Cyan or Amber for this guy! 16 colors FTW!

EDIT: And oh yeah - please insert Game Disk #2

All this talk of IRQs and DIP switches and no one has mentioned N81 or E71. There was a time when you had to pay attention to the parity before dialing. Also, it looks like 8N1 and 7E1 have become the more common notation now.

Having lived through the modem era and having run a BBS, I've never seen N81 or E71 before. You must have been running a particular piece of software that made up it's own nomenclature.

The grandparent is talking about parity, data bits, and stop bits[0]. Different serial communications protocols had different framing needs. If you were dealing with PC-based BBS's, for the most part, you wouldn't have run into anything aside from N81. I didn't see much E71 outside of X.25 networks.

[0] https://www3.nd.edu/~lemmon/courses/ee224/web-manual/web-man...

Also haven't heard anyone mention that early manual terms required using "ATDT" to dial with a touch tone phone because the default dialing method was rotary back then and there was no GUI.

“Mom, don’t pick up the phone!”

You must have been using DOS or Windows. We Macintosh, Atari ST, and Amiga users had no such IRQ, DIP switch or jumper issues. Also, the Amiga wasn't limited to 16 colors.

Well look at the dead technology on this husk of a 'human'

9600 baud definitely felt like a quantum leap! I remember upgrading from 2400 to 9600. It was huge.

And then there was the commoners and the elites: Those who had USR Sportster modems and the superior USR Couriers.

Worth mentioning since it's unimaginable to many kids today, in the BBS days, there was no multitasking. When you kicked off a download that took 40 minutes, you couldn't do anything at all with your computer while it was transferring. (at least for MS-DOS users, who were the vast majority) All you had on your screen was the progress meter, some statistics, and an abort button.

One day I came across a drop-in replacement for the zmodem transfer executable called "super zmodem" that let you play ascii Tetris while a transfer was going on and it blew my fricking mind.

In total I probably played more Tetris on that download screen than I did with my Nintendo Gameboy that only had three games.

You couldn't do anything unless you had software like Desqview. That was a revolution.

OS/2 was better. It had pre-emptive multi-tasking like the Amiga, but with memory protection to prevent crashes. A friend ran a DOS BBS so I left him my OS/2 Warp so he could use his computer while the BBS was up.

Not if you used DESQview [1]. I think everyone serious about BBSing used DESQview to multitask in DOS. Then along came DESQview/X...

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DESQview

Yeah DESQview was interesting but you couldn't do everything in it because most serious programs would need all the resources of the computer, or they'd interfere with the IRQ assignments, leading to many crashes.

We're talking a time before even as much as cooperative multitasking of course. DESQview was multitasking programs that were not even meant for it.

Most people I knew didn't use it for that reason. If I really wanted to multitask while BBS'ing I'd just grab my Amiga I had beside the PC (which in itself actually had a real pre-emptive multitasking OS in ROM!).

There were a few programs that could do something else while a download was happening, like Telemate. It gave you at least a text editor and a file manager IIRC.

I did all my BBSing with my Amiga 500. I don't think I ever dared do too much multitasking while I was downloading. First, had to download to RAM:, because if you did something that involved disk, you could get a timeout. If you messed up the transfer, and you got disconnected, then you'd have to try and redial to get back on, which could take hours.

This is true... Disk access on Amiga was pretty crap, indeed. Often causing errors. And a HDD was super expensive so I didn't have one (just like a floppy drive was in the 8-bit age)

To be honest I didn't do much downloading at all in those days.. Just didn't have the patience for it. If I did do it I would do so over packet radio that I could just leave running all night. I had a third old PC just for that :)

Another reason that I didn't BBS much on my Amiga was that my modem was inside my PC on an ISA card for most of the time I used BBS'es. So I had to run a program on the PC to forward the modem data over a null-modem to the Amiga so either way I couldn't use the PC. So usually my PC was for modem use and the Amiga for other stuff.

Something else just flashed into my mind from my Amiga days, I believe right clicking paused the serial port. Depending on the protocol, it could resume, but I usually ran Ymodem-G, with little issues with data corruption, but could eek out an extra 5-10% data speed. It also didn't resume all that reliably, another mark against using Multi-tasking while downloading on the Amiga.

Huh I never experienced that at all.. Maybe with certain specific software?

I did blow up my serial ports several times with incorrectly wired cables. Luckily the first time I put the controller IC in a socket so the second time around it was easy :P But it was pretty sensitive to stuff like that. I've never managed to blow up a PC serial port and IIRC the controller IC was the same so I guess they used extra buffering or something.

I had an original IBM PC and I wrote most of my high school essays in Telemate's text editor. :)

Don't forget QEMM.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QEMM

I ran an Amiga BBS so had no issues with multitasking but a friend ran a DOS BBS so I lent him my copy of OS/2 Warp so he could use his computer while the BBS was running.

BBSing with an Atari 800 and a rotary phone at 300 baud was a whole other animal!

Many Fidonet mailers, like Binkley or T-Mail supported Hydra which was novel multi-streaming bidirectional serial protocol. You could download several files while uploading your outbound mail at the same time. It was very useful for those lucky possessed 28800 baud modems like ZyXEL Elite or US Robotics Courier (mid/late 90th).

Nitpick - Baud rate refers to the number of symbols sent by the modem per second, you can't send more than 8000 symbols per second through an analog phone line, as they are sampled at 8 Khz. You can sent multiple bits per symbol, which all modems did. By utilizing a direct digital connection to the phone network, an ISP could send up to 53 kbits/second using all 8 bits of each sample, minus a few for transitions that weren't allowed because of cross talk with other phone lines.

Thus, the fastest modems were 8000 baud.

PS: Yes, it was amazing to see the text actually flow / smooth scroll up the screen for the first time in my life, way faster than I could read it when it got a US Robotics Courier HST modem.

Ah... memories of technical arguments past. :-)

Some clarification for those who might not be familiar:

One way to illustrate the difference is to consider communicating with physical signal flags, where there's a limit to how fast you can raise and lower the flags. The baud rate is how fast you can change the flag. The bit rate is how fast the information flows.

Say you have only a black flag and a white flag, and you let the black flag be 1 and the white flag 0. In this case, the baud rate and the bit rate are the same, as each flag transition represents 1 bit of information.

Now suppose you have also have a red flag and a green flag. You could let white be 00, black be 01, red be 10, and green be 11. The baud rate (rate of running the flags up and down the pole) remains the same, but the bit rate (number of bits encoded by a flag) has doubled.

Analog modems used all kinds of tricks to encode more than one bit on each symbol transition. Later models sometimes even had built-in data compression and error correction (e.g. the Telebit modems, which would actually simulate things like ZMODEM and UUCP g protocol to the computers, while using their own compression/correction mechanisms on the physical link).

57600 baud (V.92) to be precise.

57600 baud is incorrect. It was 57600 bps which was achieved over a 3200 baud connection by utilizing sophisticated signaling and compression.

https://tldp.org/HOWTO/Modem-HOWTO-23.html

8000 Baud (Symbols/second)

According to the spec[1] for the "analog modem" (the one in your office, house, etc)

  6.2 Symbol rate

  The upstream symbol rate shall be 8000 symbol/s derived from the digital network.

1 - https://www.itu.int/rec/T-REC-V.92-200011-I/en

Hehe yeah... 2400bps modems ran at 1200 baud. 33.4Kbps modems ran at 3400 baud (at most)

In the 80s I was in Lexington, Ky and got my first modem (1200 baud). That started me on the path to getting connected to others in the computer scene there. Just starting out it was hard to know where to call into but fortunately someone gave me a number to one BBS and that led to the other local ones (my parents wouldn't allow me to do long distance calls so I was limited to local BBSes).

Lexington had an interesting mix of BBS systems. Transylvania University had a system that was open to non-students and had 3-4 incoming lines so you could do real time chat (!) unless of course someone improperly disconnected (dang call waiting) which would cause that line to hang for 30-60 minutes IIRC until it timed out.

Also another great BBS in Lexington was one running Pyroto Mountain where you're a wizard and there are different chat levels depending on your wizard level. Going "up" the mountain required answering trivia questions. To this day a lot of trivia still in my head is from those early Pyroto Mountain days.

I eventually moved to a 9600 baud (Hayes brand!) and then a 28.8k and then 56k modem. Zipping at a 1gig connection at home (always on - no call waiting!) is really quite amazing to experience in just 40-ish years.

I used to have an Amiga 600 with a 2400 baud modem. I can't remember the name of the BBS I mostly connected to, but the telephone number was just passed around word of mouth.

I lived in Lincolnshire in the UK, a pretty rural county - not very wealthy. It was a local rate number - same area code and it meant free calls. The person who ran it had a pretty big switchboard so could handle about 10-20 connections at once.

The best thing about it was it had a persistent MUD running. You had a character which moved around room to room, slaying monsters but also PvP. If you killed the other person you got all their stuff. One of the problems was if you logged off your character just sat there and would only rudimentarily defend themselves if someone else came along. So you'd need to find somewhere in the middle of nowhere to leave them.

Now the _really_ great thing about this BBS is the owner also had a Compuserve connection. He had it set up so you could trade gold pieces in the MUD game for Compuserve credits - minutes on the _actual_ internet.

I remember finding a logged out player, killing them, getting a jackpot in gold coins and then eagerly spending them to get on Compuserve. It was the first ever time and I didn't really know what to do. I seem to recall their was a directory of _all_ the websites in a big listing with their corresponding index numbers. You could then browse over and take a look.

It felt like some crazy magical sci fi novel at the time. I was about 11 or 12 back then - very early 90s. Just before the blizzard of AOL trial CDs hit the UK.

I thought it was fantastic. Some BBSs were fairly typical clones of base-software-with-messages-and-files, but many were different. Effort put into art in the menus, the selection of games, the content offered. It felt a lot more like a community. No overarching systems watching your browsing habits, no advertising content.

The feeling of creating a space for people to come and enjoy I think is thoroughly missing from todays social media.

Anyone wanting to relive some of the vibe of the BBS era should try out this free indie game, Digital: A Love Story: https://scoutshonour.com/digital/

I've forgotten more than I remember, but the constraints are all important to how the experience was: fixed width screens, chunky graphics, async communication, locked phone lines, whiffs of the larger Internet coming.

The biggest unique aspect was the geographical focus. Phone calls out of your area code used to be EXPENSIVE, so most people only ever called nearby BBSes. This provided psuedo-anonymity that could be bridged with in-person meetups.

It was an amazing space to experiment with identity, especially growing up in a small town, pre-Internet.

Ah, memories.

I got on a BBS through a local university (Bradley University) in 1994 on my first computer: a Performa 630CD, with a Global Village 14 Kbps modem.

If I recall, and I barely do, because I was in 4th grade, I got into it via a “gifted child” (ugh) outreach from the university. We got a floppy disk with ZTerm, a number to dial into, and a default password. That I somehow still remember.

What did I do on there? I really don’t remember much, besides it had what I seem to recall as a web portal. In my memory, it had a predefined set of websites you could pull up, and it would scrape the HTML and return text and links. (Now that I type that, maybe it was just Lynx running on their server, but I swear there were more hoops to go through.)

It felt like the future at the time, though it didn’t last long. We briefly joined Apple’s eWorld†, which very quickly went away, and then we were on to AOL. From a CD. Probably shrink-wrapped Macworld Magazine.

I feel very old now.

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

I hosted a BBS in St.Petersburg, Russia at the dawn of the age of BBS, in 2001-2002. Everybody had a dial-up Internet connection these days but it was too pricy to be the only "connectivity".

File hosting using BBS is almost completely lost its value, maybe only cool demos collections were valuable. And eventually, someone may download some FIDO software.

To me, a BBS was partially a self-expression method (I draw poor quality ASCII graphics), and partially an old school "chatroulette" :) There was a chat in BBS software, and visitors often used it to talk about everything :)

Many BBSes in my city were active at night time only. Mine was open from 11 pm to 8 am, and most active hours were from 11 pm to 2-3 am.

It was pretty awesome. The barrier to entry was a little high for a lot of people in the 80's as you required a decent PC, modem and had to pay the phone bill for long distance calls.

Something people don't remember is that long distance calling was not free, you couldn't call other area codes or states in the US without paying a per minute fee. It was more on-par to international calling today then with mobile phone calls. Oh, and busy lines were not uncommon, you'd spend hours trying to dial into a system to get a file or post on a forum etc.

I would say it is less like social media today and more like forums. So less Facebook/Twitter and more reddit style. Though BBS' were also less filtered and far less big brother IMO. Of course some site admins would be militant about their feelings and only allow certain view points but that was fine because there were tons of other BBS' to play on.

The industry was fairly big and growing fast, one of the larger us BBS systems was execpc, you can find stuff on them still. They started as a small BBS that turned into a fairly large internet provider eventually. But there were tons of players, and there were systems like Tag BBS etc. I both hosted a BBS for a number of years and was a user of tons of them.

Another key thing people don't think about today, disk space was at a premium (especially for personal computers). We used floppy disks for moving files a lot and hard drives were expensive so getting 10Mb or 40Mb drives was awesome. Putting in 3-4 hard drives to get yourself over 100Mb was crazy. Drive technology was still evolving so lots of different types with pros/cons and most were loud, pretty large and obnoxious.

A lot of the search & compression technology we created during the BBS days is still in use, though in different ways now. Compression being pretty critical since for most long distance sites you paid per minute and downloading a 1Mb file over 9600baud was slow. Man I remember going from 1200-2400-9600-19200 then 38400 and 115200. You felt like a damn rock star when your file downloads didn't take 6-8 hours and could be done in like an hour or so.

It was definitely a lot of community and sharing. There were trolls then just like now, but generally I feel like back then they were less damaging or hurtful and more entertaining. Of course, there were scams on most forums just like now, but good BBS sites did their best to keep them at bay.

> A lot of the search & compression technology we created during the BBS days is still in use, though in different ways now. Compression being pretty critical since for most long distance sites you paid per minute and downloading a 1Mb file over 9600baud was slow. Man I remember going from 1200-2400-9600-19200 then 38400 and 115200. You felt like a damn rock star when your file downloads didn't take 6-8 hours and could be done in like an hour or so.

I started BBSing in the late 80s, so saw the very tail end of 2400, but the first modem I bought was 9600, so I missed the big 2400-9600 change mostly. Road the wave all the way up to 56K. I had planned to finally start my own BBS when I moved off to University in 1994, since my parents wouldn't let me buy dedicated phone lines. Saved all my cash from working McDonalds and was all ready to pull the trigger on multiple V.34 56K USRobotics Courier modems and had the BBS (based on WWIV) all ready to turn on. Confirmed that the University would allow multiple phone lines per dorm. Got to University, and lo and behold! The summer before, they outfitted all dormitories with two 10-base-T ethernet connections to the Internet backbone. Mind blown. Ditched the BBS idea instantly and that was it, I never dialed into another BBS or ran my own.

A lot of my BBS friends also instantly lost interest the moment they entered University and had a proper high-speed Internet connection.

Totally agree, I had early access to the internet through one of the BBS's I subscribed to, textual only of course cause the www didn't exist at first and then even in the early 90's it was still very new.

But in the early to mid 90's we had a dedicated T1 trunk (at work) to connect us to UUNET. All fun times. Even then, I still used a few BBS' at home (including for home internet access) until say like 1995/96 when I moved solely over to Mindspring. Might be a little off on the year I switched but not by much, that is a long time ago.

My first modem was a used VIC-MODEM for the Commodore VIC-20. I used it to access a "free" data service not realizing the phone calls weren't free. Ended up with an $80 phone bill. That's $220 in today's dollars.

One thing to remember of message hopping. I ran a BBS in Oshawa, if you posted a public message to it, it was copied to the Whitby BBS, who in turn copied it to the BBS in Pickering, who in turn copied to a Toronto BBS where it was copied to multiple systems. In affect the public section was one big BBS it was just that messages would take days to relay around.

I remember some silly reporter did not understand and he called BBSes all around North America posting the same message, and for the next week or so you would see repeats of his message all the way from California and Florida.

> one of the larger us BBS systems was execpc

Around 1990 they started a parallel "less serious" service called execpc chat, or something like that (had a few names) and I played online trivia on exec chat for MANY hours. For some strange reason I seem to remember Thursday nights. For a long time if you had a subscription to the "serious" execpc they gave away a subscription to the "fun" exec chat service. Eventually around '92 I got on the internet and IRC (later MUDs) then dozens of people because normal.

Exec-PC the main service had an interesting file search system that used an enormous number of PCs in parallel and they called it hyper-search or something like that and it was ridiculously fast, like Google search speed.

You could tell if someone was serious about BBS stuff because they had multiple PCs on their desk. The fancier PC for gaming or programming or using in general, and the lame PC that barely booted but could be dedicated to downloading files for an hour or whatever who cares. Magnetic interference between adjacent CRT monitors was a problem, or some company named "Black Box" sold monitor switchboxes so you could have as many as four analog VGA PCs plugged into one monitor, only one visible at a time of course, or a similar switch could connect one keyboard to multiple computers. I remember seeing an ad for my first KVM switch, well, KV, anyway, and that was pretty mindblowing that you only need one box instead of two. I had multiple PCs on my desk from the late 80s until about 2018, habit I guess. Many people also had a TV on their desk; start a download, watch TV, who cares how long the download takes.

>Something people don't remember is that long distance calling was not free,

"Local" calls weren't always free either. Each locality had their own set of exchanges that were considered "local" and beyond that it was "local-long distance." It was completely arbitrary. The "local-long distance" rates were often higher than the actual long distance since there was still something of a monopoly.

Then in some areas they didn't have flat rate lines, where local calls calls were "free". There were message rate lines where calling different places within your locality cost a different number of message units per call, and only a fixed number of them were included with your service. It's very similar to cloud pricing now.

>Something people don't remember is that long distance calling was not free, you couldn't call other area codes or states in the US without paying a per minute fee.

Here in New York, you couldn't even call within the same area code without paying a per minute fee and a connection charge. On Long Island the plans included unlimited calling to several close, adjacent towns, but calling towns even 10 miles away in the same area code incurred a substantial per minute surcharge.

I cut my teeth learning to program by writing a script to play my Tele-Arena (MajorBBS MUD) character while I was at school.

It took advantage of a simple game exploit: in TA, your character gained experience simply by attacking; darts, a throwing weapon, did almost no damage but any class could use them; thrown darts would land on the ground at your feet so you could pick them up and reuse them, even if you threw them at a mob in a different room; the Sorceress in the tower was programmed to never leave her room, so she wouldn't chase you if you threw a dart at her from the next room over.

So I wrote a script to stand one room away, throwing darts at the Sorceress all day, drinking when I was thirsty, eating when I was hungry, and going back to town when I ran out of food or water to buy some more.

My favorite memory of the BBS days was stumbling across an “elite” BBS full of warez and txt manuals like the jolly roger cookbook. In order to get access you needed to be voted in by others. How does a 10 year old know anyone to get voted in? Well, messing around at the “front door” of this BBS got me to realize that new users were still able to login with limited status. However, one thing they could do was vote on other new users. Boom, I created 3 fake accounts to vote my real account in ;)

ha nice ;)

lol

>what was the cost involved

For BBS system operator (sysop), he typically bought a high-end modem like US Robotics for $500 to $1000. A dedicated computer with expensive harddrives. Some paid for commercial BBS software such as PCBoard. There were monthly costs for dedicated phone landlines.

For most users, they just bought a modem and re-used their existing voice landline.

>How similar was it to current social media networks

In terms of participation, the dial-up BBS scene seems somewhat analagous to today's Mastodon instances that are run by altruistic admins who foot the costs themselves. BBSs typically had 1 or 2 phone lines which means only 1 or 2 people could be "logged in" at a time. Some BBS had discussion forums but unlike Mastodon, each bulletin board run by a homeowner was very local/regional because extra charges for long-distance phone calls was still a thing. So 99% of the regular users of a particular BBS would be in the same area code.

There were some commercial BBSs with multiple phone lines that had paid memberships. The attraction there was larger harddrives with more things to download (shareware, etc).

>How big the industry around it actually become

The BBS community was very small because it was mostly computer enthusiasts. A very niche communications platform like CB radio for truckers or ham radio. The dialup modem service that attracted more non-computer folks was AOL.

> So 99% of the regular users of a particular BBS would be in the same area code.

One side effect of that was that it was pretty common for the users of a particular board to get together for pizza, a nerd-oriented movie, or occasionally even a camping trip (this was called a "GT" in this area... I don't know how widespread that term was).

I used to run a sysop group, once a month most to the BBS operators in my area meet at my house. Amazing who shows up when you offer free pop and chips?

I'm still friends with several people I met that way, 30 or more years ago.

It was great until the operator had to jump on and tell you his mom needed to use the phone add if have to log out. The best part was you knew most of the people running them, we'd met at tech oriented stores like babbage's or radio shack, usually trying to buy some software and them giving us access to their bbs with everything you can imagine on it.

Looking back on it now,I would trade almost everything about the modern web to have that experience back. Some anecdotes that stick out in my memory:

It was pretty common for BBS communities to have annual picnics.

Tradewars and other doors games were so much fun. I don't think another game experience even came close to that until World of Warcraft like 20 years later.

It was sort of a proto-Web/pre-AOL experience,but Q-Link was amazing. I think not enough people realize how much that set the tone for everything that came after it.

http://wiki.classictw.com/index.php/Jumpgate

Can still play TradeWars

As a teenager, I got so into BBSes at one point that I started calling the long-distance ones just to see what was out there. I didn’t know what I was doing to some degree. One month I ended up generating a bill of something like $300—not exactly a fun thing to explain to a parent.

Soon after that happened, we signed up for a traditional ISP with unlimited hours.

I was a SysOp from the twilight years of BBS. To answer your questions:

The costs were mostly paid by the SysOps. In the form of additional phone lines, disk space, maintenance time etc... A user would have to worry about long distance charges.

Re: average people. At the time, there was much more of a dividing line between computer people and average person. Not that you had to be an expert, but you did have to be an enthusiast. The average person would have neither the skill nor inclination/interest.

Not very similar to social media. Closest description would be a combo of 4chan, HN, and sourceforge, but much more local and inward looking. Like comparing a small town bar vs tinder.

"The BBS industry" was so small that the phrase sounds silly to say. Certainly there were official business bbs and larger players but scale was nothing compared to modern tech companies.

The hardest thing to explain now is how novel participating in a network like this was. Prior to large scale internet access, computers were stand alone devices. Networks were arcane company owned things. Having your computer dynamically bring up what others were publishing was new and interesting.

The BBS scene wasn't completely homogeneous. In terms of absolute numbers, a majority of boards were hobbyist systems: single phone line, free to use (but limited time per day per user), often a teenager sysop, heavily customized menus and ANSI graphics, curated selection of games and files.

Some of these hobbyist systems were underground "HPAVC" boards, focusing on pirated software and viruses and the like, usually invite-only, and everyone using pseudonyms. Others were clean systems, sometimes requiring real names, usually an adult SysOp. Most hobby systems were somewhere in between the two, at least in my area.

But there were also larger systems with 10-50+ phone lines, running more expensive software (usually MajorBBS/Worldgroup, costing several thousand dollars). These were usually pay-to-use. Sometimes membership also included dial-up internet access; as the BBS scene waned, some of these transitioned to become regional ISPs.

Most boards had local message subs, meaning different discussion topic areas you could post in. Some boards also participated in message networks, such as FidoNet, where you could converse with people across the country or globe -- it just took a day or more for your message to reach all BBSes in the network.

It wasn't a utopia. There were still trolls and ignorant people. I suppose the difference in the dial-up days was that those trolls tended to live in the same region as you, which arguably isn't an improvement.

At its peak, in relative terms there was definitely a bit of a real industry built up around the BBS scene: a few small to medium sized companies, several hundred independent developers of BBS software and games, publications such as BoardWatch, industry conferences such as ONE BBS CON, etc. Compared to the modern software industry, it was absolutely tiny; but the software and computing landscape as a whole was much smaller then.

I started using dial-up BBSes in 1993 (Philly area), and later developed a couple BBS games from 1999-2003 -- by which point most boards had moved to telnet, allowing them to have many concurrent users instead of being limited to physical phone lines. My games took advantage of this by being highly multi-player, and one of those games became relatively popular for that time period, running on several hundred boards at its peak. Developing BBS games was an interesting experience, definitely a mix of positive and negative though.

I can bring you back a little further than BBS system. I was in University n Europe in the 1980s and thanks to IBM European Universities got free access to a European academic research network (EARN). We soon discovered that you could use various gateways to get stuff off the much more developed US academic / defense research network called internet called ARPANET. The most reliable way of communicating was to use specially constructed emails and the servers would send files back in ASCII encoded pieces also by email that you had to reconstruct to get the original files. It always amused me that the biggest server around was hosted by "White Sands Missile Base" and I downloaded a lot of stuff from there.

It is worth noting that back in those days you couldn't just type an email as John@company.com. You needed to tell the mail server what path it needed to take to get to the recipient. We developed quite ingenuous ways of bouncing emails around various connected networks in order to get them to our intended destinations.

I was using bbs’es in the late seventies, so not quite further back. Still, cool story, bro. :)

The mailing system your are referring to is called UUCP (Unix to Unix copy protocol). It can use serial link or IP as a transport to transmit batches of tar-gzipped emails. Binaries were usually uuencoded in mail body (if you are on FreeBSD, type: man uuencode).

For me it was mostly a social experience. It was all about posting on the forums, which were largely just about chatting at the time. There were some specific focused topics, but most were general and were people meeting people.

Because of long distance phone charges, the vast majority of people on a given board were local to that board. In my city we had regular parties and meetups, so online friends frequently became real life friends.

I'm currently working on a project with a friend I made in the early 80s on a bbs, so those connections could definitely last. Come to think of it, another of my current projects is a direct result of another connection from that era.

One thing I don't see mentioned muc was that there was a lot of sex-driven bbs's. Maybe that was just my region. But many of the adults were swingers and/or bdsm aficionados. They'd be at the parties, but us teenagers were doing our own things and mostly didn't care what the olds were up to. It was definitely there, though.

You can try it for yourself. Download SyncTerm and connect to House of Lunduke BBS. I mostly logged in to my local BBS to play door games like Legend of the Red Dragon and The Pit. 100% of the money I earned from my high school job went to paying the insane phone bill I'd rack up calling boards all over the country looking for files. The best was Rusty n Edie's BBS.

https://sourceforge.net/projects/syncterm/

https://lunduke.locals.com/post/264191/the-house-of-lunduke-...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rusty_n_Edie%27s_BBS

I used a Commodore 64 to get on BBS' I had a TI 99/4a before that. It was fun getting online back then, the Wild West. Fighting for phone time, like others mentioned, was a hassle. But getting into computer systems was easier back then too. Often, you'd just keep adding one number to the last digit in the business phone number and keep adding until you'd get in. Opps...

Your biggest misconception seems to be that the BBS scene was a for-profit thing. It mostly wasn't, although there were a few for-profit BBSes, which were larger. Most BBSes were a computer hobbyist with a modem; a lot of them (maybe half?) only operated during certain hours of the day, so that the owner could use their computer at other hours (we mostly didn't have multitasking OSes) and maybe also receive calls on their phone line (most people didn't have two phone lines).

The internet predates BBSes and evolved concurrently with them before eventually displacing them more or less completely.

Social media networks are pretty different. BBSes were more like Hacker News.

I got my feet wet in the BBS world during the mid/late 80s, when I bought a Commodore-branded model 6499 modem for my C64. Unfortunately it allowed only 1200/75 bps and 300/300 bps links, but all services I could try it on were either payware or of no use to me, also there still were no interesting private BBSes around, so I put it in a drawer and eventually sold it to someone else. A few years later (early 90s) the experience has been much better with my Amiga 500 and JR-Comm and later Terminus programs, 2400, then 9600 and 14.400bps, and of course Zmodem. The number of local BBSes in the meantime had grown significantly, and Fidonet was a thing. I met lots of interesting people online, arranged pizza and copy parties at our homes (back then we didn't even have a copyright law), some of them became also my colleagues and am still friends with them after all those years. Unfortunately the cost wasn't trivial: hardware aside, just a few years back we still had flat local landline calls, so for example 4 hours spent chatting or transferring files on a BBS would cost about nothing, but as soon as it became clear that an army of people was getting ready to spend hours online every night, the then only national phone company decided to introduce timed fees. I still recall my parents screams about my phone expenses, and luckily I had no girlfriend back then (of course, I'd say) otherwise they would probably have killed me:).

The difference with today's social networks? Here's one: Latency! Back then there was no such thing as flaming someone and expecting a reply within 5 minutes; most BBSes had a just few phone lines, sometimes only one, so that the recipient should find a free line to connect, download his messages, read them offline, then upload the replies, or doing all online with other delays. On Fidonet it was even worse, of course, its nature allowed people on different BBSes (nodes) to communicate, but the price to pay was waiting for all those nodes to link each other at night to exchange posts, which meant that your post sometimes could need 2 or 3 hops (=~days) before reaching the destination, especially if between different continents; same with the reply. That would surely not discourage epic flames, but one had to be really really motivated to continue in such a way.

Part of the fun was tinkering the tech of the time. Running a multinode bbs was the ultimate achievement! Multitasking DOS bbs software was a significant challenge. The most reliable I saw was OS/2 but folks used stuff like DesqView, PC-MOS, or mostly a separate PC for every node.

Then there was inter-bbs communication, FIDO net and the like. You could send email across networks! Store-and-forward, slow, unreliable, but it worked, mostly.

I used a pirated ROM to make my USR HST modem a Dual-Standard. 14.4 kbps over a phone line! I was a hog in slop!

I'm old, so I was an adult during the golden era of the BBS. I started off with a Commodore 64 in about 1984, first with the plug-in 300 bps Commodore modem. I was active in my local C=64 user group, and a couple of the other guys worked for the local Baby Bell. They hooked me up with a surplus 1200 bps modem that required me to plug my phone line into a touchtone phone that controlled the modem.

I called only local BBSs, and several of them were run by other members of our user group. We spent a lot of time being technical, talking about file transfer protocols, online game programming, etc. Since it was just my wife and me and we lived in a tiny apartment, there was essentially no competition for the phone.

About the time I became president of our user group, Steve Case started up the QuantumLink online service (which eventually became America Online). As club president I was supposed to get five hours of time free each month. I'm pretty sure they didn't really pay much attention, because I spent a lot more than five hours a month on the service and never got a bill for it.

In the late 80s, BBSing seemed very advanced, and the memory of the duck-choking-on-a-kazoo sound of connecting still stirs something in me. It was oddly thrilling to exchange email and even chat with the sysop, even if he was a guy you saw on the bus a couple of times a week.

It was fun!! connect to other people around the world The cost was a local phone call, but it wasn't cheap. The barrier was to the phone call doesn't fall :)

The experience was like browsing the TV Teletext (google it)

The cost was not too high: if your family already had a computer, you just had to buy a modem, although they were somewhat expensive for a kid at the time.

After you had the hardware, you still needed a few more things though: first, you had to know of phone numbers for local BBSes. In my area, they were all listed in a local computer user newspaper that was available at the local Micro Center.

Once you had the modem and phone numbers of local BBSes, you also needed a terminal program to actually dial in. I think I got mine at a local bookstore that also sold shareware software on floppy disks.

Once you had all those things, you were ready to start. For me it was mostly just dialing around to local BBSes, seeing what files they had, playing door games (i.e. online games hosted on the BBS), and downloading shareware games and stuff. I didn't do a whole lot of interacting with other people on the BBS outside of games - for one, there was never any things like realtime chat with other users except on boards with multiple phone lines which were pretty rare. Also, all downloads took forever, so people were always experimenting with new download protocols to try to eek out a little more speed - that was a big thing at the time.

It was all very niche and not really very mainstream - mostly just computer nerds did it.

Once internet service providers became more mainstream, BBSes died out, because who wants to dial into some local podunk bulletin board service when you could be connecting to people across the whole world?

Back before Micro Center or CompUSA we actually got a BBS list from the local library. On the East Coast we had Focke's list.

This is an interesting article from 1989 about the culture: https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/1989/07/28/...

Being a kid and not knowing it cost so much to dial long distance, my first 600 dollar phone bill, my parents wanted to kill me. Had to limit my hours late at night so people wouldn't pick up the phone and ruin my connection. 300 baud fun times, upgraded to 1200 as fast as I could.

I remember when multi chunk compressed files and zmodem came out (it had resume), it was an amazing step forward.

Ran one of the first bbs's in my area that had a 2400 baud on my commodore 128D, and 80 column Terminal, WOOT!. (One of my bbs friends started Steel Belted Radius on his amiga, and he wrote a bbs, so I learned a bit from him.)

Town paper started a multiline bbs that had chat, met other people in my area.

I had my first internet email via fidonet on WWIV bbs'es.

Started migrating from BBS to tcp/ip via slirp on a education isp, that taught me unix, tcp networking, sockets, etc.

Got an Amiga and learned quite a bit about systems and amiga unix.

Then I started working at BBS's that started converting bbs's to isps with dial up modem banks with livingston portmaster. Learned much at that boot strap startup.

Then I migrated into telecom for my corporate career as a sysadmin/engineer/it work.

Good times.

One funny thing I did was create an Ansi sequence, that looked like the Sysop (BBS operator) entered chat, yelled at you and banned you. It was a nice prank. Good ole +++, lol. Lots of people inserted Ansi graphics and tricks in posts, for amusement.

Thank YOU for posting about the documentary, I had no idea it existed! I love it! My story about the BBS was that I just happened to be paying attention at the right time, and the right moment, which for an ADHD kid in the 80s was pretty damn amazing.

On December 26, 1993, the PBS TV show Ghostwriter aired an episode entitled "Who is Max Mouse?" - which also starred Samuel L. Jackson.

In that episode, a kid explains that his computer can use a modem to connect to their school's bulletin board system. Max Mouse was a hacker that was suddenly causing trouble on their BBS!

Very shortly after that, as I was sitting in 7th grade literature, an announcement was made by our student news team via the in-classroom television; by the way, having a full time television in the classroom was still new at the time.

Students were invited to call the school's bulletin board system with their computer, and a phone number was provided. I scribbled it down on notepaper. Since I had just seen Ghostwriter on this very thing, I knew precisely what that meant. My father setup the monochrome 286 and we dialed in at a screaming 2400 bits per second.

It was all orange, it was slow, but it was absolute magic. I became obsessed with Usurper and other "Door Games." From there I used BBS's for many years until AOL, then Netcom, and the broader high speed web.

One more thing: If there's a guy in India named Anish Nanda who posted to FIDONET about visiting America in the 90s, and wanted recommendations... You were the very first international message I responded to and I have never forgotten it.

Back in the 1980s the barriers were relative low to run a BBS. A computer, a phone line, and a modem.

Since the vast majority of BBSs only had one modem and one phone line, virtually all imposed a time limit on how long you could connect (often 30 - 60 minutes depending on the board).

Different BBSs had different focuses. Most had some sort of message forum. Many had different "doors" or games like Tradeswars or The Pit or huge variety of other ones. These games were multiplayer in the sense that you would take your turns each day against other people who would also log in and play. There were also file forums, where people could upload and download software, often trading "cracked" games and warez.

ANSI art was also huge back then. There were whole organizations devoted to creating ANSI art (some of which was pretty insane). UAA is one that comes to mind:

https://16colo.rs/pack/uaa4-93/

There were also several BBSs devoted to hacking and phone phreaking, which stands to reason since most BBS users back then were techies (modem and BBS use was not widespread in the 80s). Back then, the laws didn't keep up with the technology, and a lot of activities that today can land you in jail for decades weren't even crimes. Eventually the laws caught up and by 1990 and Operation Sundevil you had a lot of old school hacker BBSs closing up as it wasn't worth the risk.

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

It was the wild west back then, a bygone era!

You needed to be very patient... Not only for the slow download speeds but the limited access lines on the popular boards. The one I frequented most had like 8 or so. This was a lot in those days. So a lot of time was spent redialling until you got a carrier tone...

This also answers your question about the 'industry'. There wasn't much of one, as most BBSes were kept small by the capacity of dialup lines. That BBS with the 8 lines was in a friends' garage and every time he needed a new line the whole street needed to be dug up. This kept advancement slow. There was no big industry, at least not in the Netherlands. There were some big networks like CompuServe which were a bit like a mini internet, but in my country we eschewed them because they were super expensive. Most BBS'es didn't charge anything, or a cheap yearly membership for some extra hours or something. It was much more of a hobby thing than an industry.

Cost was ok for local BBSes. Just the cost of a local call. When I started the cost was 16c per call, but this was dropped soon when modems took off, for obvious reasons. It became 16c per 10 minutes which was still not so bad. My parents (I was in school) could afford it. A bigger issue was my hoarding off the phone line.

Because the BBSes had limited dialup lines, there was also a usage limit per day. So around midnight it was extra busy when people wanted to use up yesterday's allowance or take advantage of it renewing at midnight.

In terms of downloading I didn't do that much. It was too slow and expensive, and boring. During a download you couldn't do anything else with the computer. I mainly spent my time chatting. Of course files were much smaller in those days but downloading was still a boring hobby. The sneakernet was often faster!!

I did download a bit over packet radio (using the 27MC band with modems). It was ridiculously slow (media speed was 1200 baud but there was a lot of contention and interference needing a lot of retransmission so the effective throughput was a lot lower) but I would just leave it on overnight. Still, the sneakernet was much quicker. It would take all night to download 1.5MB from a friend 5km away. Just walking over there with a floppy was a lot quicker :)

There were also mail/group mail networks like Fidonet, where you could batch all your mails and upload them quickly. which was more efficient.

I had the pleasure of living with one -- my dad ran The Bailey Information Exchange in Colorado. We had a satellite feed and a few lines for folks to dial into. I would get on a local terminal to play Legend of the Red Dragon and TradeWars, and then see what new shareware games I could copy to floppies to sneakernet back to my own computer (hand-me-down from BBS upgrades).

To me, it was a computer magazine that introduced me to BBS:es. It had articles on how to use them, on good etiquette, and there were phone numbers to some newbie-friendly ones. Eventually I became a "co-sysop" / moderator on one, and when that closed, on another.

I'd think that the BBS:es were the real precursors to many web-based forums later, more so than Usenet News was. Text-based menu interfaces were the template to HTML-based menu interfaces. Etiquette rules were the precursor to web-forum etiquette. (There were both very liberal and very strict forums and everthing in-between then as there is now).

The owner had to devote a computer and a phone line to it. Real multi-tasking operating systems such as AmigaOS or OS/2 were preferred so that the owner could use the computer for other things. In the Internet era, BBS:es got telnet and then SSH interfaces, and there are 30 year old BBS:es out there still running today.

Accessing a BBS required some level of understanding of computers and telecom gear which tended to filter out a good segment of the population. In the US local phone calls we’re unmetered but lines were expensive so most BBS’s in the US were a single computer hooked up to one (or two!) phone lines and most access was local.

Getting access required knowing the phone numbers, protocols and software required to access the BBS and was mostly through word of mouth. Generally if you could get access you must have some connection to existing users and so you were in. Most had time limits so that you couldn’t tie up the line all day.

Some communities that has special access to computers or telecom gear tended to be larger. ISCABBS, for example, was a fairly large BBS because of the access to TTY terminals and donated computing power (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISCABBS)

I couldn't afford a modem, so when an opportunity arose to grab a (then top of the line, newest on the market) Hayes 2400 baud ISA card off an unguarded shelf i had to. Them folks shoulda been less dismissive of a goofy teen asking for a job, anyway. Wikipedia says "Hayes introduced its v.22bis Smartmodem 2400 at US$549 in 1985" and it wasn't long after that.

The phone bills of $0.05/minute and up (and up and up!) were insupportable quickly on my previous budget so some neighbors donated phone lines occasionally; after a few months I'd learned enough and networked enough to get consulting jobs that paid for my phone bills.

One of the things I loved was seeing the wide variety of people talking to each other without regard for "who they are" vs "what are they saying". Getting people out of their bubbles. I liked to help people start "affinity" group BBS systems then link them to wider nets and watch them bloom.

sounds like a huge investment and then recurring expenses. At least if didn't have any ads (I am assuming :D)

Possibly of interest to OP: https://archive.org/details/boardwatchmagazine.

cool thanks ! they did mention this publication in the documentary. thanks for the link.

I had a buddy in Jr high that ran a little bbs. A few of our friends could dial in to it and share files and play some txt based games.

The first thing you saw when you connected was an ASCII art banner that let you know which board you were on. Then there was a menu that let you go to different sections of the site... Games, files, etc.

Most BBSs had a directory where you could see other numbers for other BBSs. I only ever dialed in to free, local boards.

I still remember the excitement of watching an image load a line at a time while downloading it. Oh yeah, this lady has sunglasses and is sitting on a beach chair in the sun... She's smiling... Bare shoulders! Wow she's topless! Boobs! I gotta show my friends what I found!

The next day there were 5 of us crowded around the computer debating which file to download next based solely on the file name and the file size.

> what was the cost involved

There was a textile with every BBS in Australia. I dialed every single one in my state. Later that month the bill came and it was over $500 (in 1990s money)... Consequently my dad threw the modem at the wall and it shattered into a million pieces along with my broken heart.

> what were the entry barrier for an average person to join

Some BBSes had questions to filter applicants, usually seeing how l33t you were.

> How similar was it to current social media networks

Maybe it was just me as a kid, but for me there was zero social. It was you and someone else's computer. On the very rare occasion, your session may be interrupted by the sysop who either wanted to talk (leading to a racing heart because you didn't want to be found out as a kid) or they just wanted to play Tetris with you.

> How big the industry around it actually become

This wasn't an industry, most BBSes were run by like-minded people who liked computers.

> because you didn't want to be found out as a kid

Heh. I remember sitting in a friend's basement computer cave and watching a kid log on to his board as a new user. It did ask for your age (he had some nekkid pitchers in the file area, etc.), so it was amusing to watch the kid type in that he was 11, then backspace and type in 35. Nice try, but no.

It wouldn't have worked anyway, as my friend always did voice verification of new users, and 35-year-olds named "C00L D00D" don't live with their mother who says they're only 11. :-)

The big deal about cost was that in the 80s phone calls were charged by the minute for anything beyond a very small local areas (even across town might be per-minute, for some towns).

So unless you happened to have a BBS within a local dialing range, it became very expensive very fast due to phone company bill. For me at the time there was only one BBS within "local long distance" range (IIRC about 25c/minute) but it didn't have much content. Every interesting BBS I read about was over $1/min long distance charges away.

This kept me out of the BBS scene through all of the 80s. By the late 80s I got real Internet access through university, so didn't pay attention to BBSs after that. I did briefly play with BBS in the mid 90s when I was living in an area where I could call into several ones for free, but by then it was the decline of the era anyway.

As a user my only cost involved was purchasing a 1200baud modem for my C64 I was around 13 at the time. Shortly after that I got a dedicated phone line to not tie up the house phone. I don't recall what terminal emulation software I used but I believe that was free. Biggest problem was a lot of the BBSs were single phone line setups so you would get a busy signal trying to dial in if someone else was online.

A few years later I setup my own bbs running Color64 bbs software (upgraded hardware to a 2400 baud hayes modem and 20meg hard drive to facilitate file exchanges).

The experience was nothing like social networks today. Some BBSs had multiple phone lines and supported concurrent users which gave you the ability to chat someone on a limited basis with whoever else was signed in but it was, for me, more file sharing than community focused.

NEVER SMOKE POT AND THEN CALL INTO THE PIT!

Once you are 14 years old and your favorite games are THE PIT and TRADE WARS! on the nearest BBS which is in (408) and you live in (916) - and your parents pay the long distance bill... and you liked to smoke pot and play TRADE WARS and accidentally sell when you should have bought thus fucking up the galactic market-corner you had on wheat...

But then your dad gets a $926 phone bill because you were on the fucking modem all day and then you get grounded for a month....

Yeah - thats what BBS'ing was like...

Then I setup the first CAD network with GeneriCAD and a bunch of Everex machines and then installed a BBS on our School EVEREX STep Cube server... and served warez out of Northlake Tahoe's first ever connection to the online world...

Yeah that was fun.

As a kid, for me it was a place to find fun shareware/free games (like Hack, Rogue's son and Nethack's daddy) and chat with folks from other places in town.

When I was 16-ish I built a few small BBSs (online after 10p until 8am) and signed up to message networks like Fidonet. It was very much like a very, very slow forum to chat with people (I'd say Usenet but BBSs and Usenet both lost ground when HTTP started taking over the net). Eventually the internet rolled out around here and BBSs phased out and/or were bought out. My BBS phased out but we had quite a lot of dedicated users that ended up following us when we were hired by ISPs.

It was a really fun time...

I ran a BBS when I was 9-14 years old and because I did I got sysop(root) rights on lot of the other BBSs. I ran it when my parents were asleep so I often was awake swapping disks etc and downloading from other systems during the day when my parents were at work. I had to pay the costs out of my pocket; this was first paid with money from strawberry picking and a little later from educational software which sold to most grade and high schools in the Netherlands.

The ratios were never there for me as I ran my own bbs and I also helped others mod their bbs software (the Pascal ones) which they rewarded with root rights to their systems.

It was expensive in phone line charges intercity. It was slow, as in hollywood hacker movies where characters printed one at a time making funny noises. And it was a thrill. It is now hard to apraise how isolating is being limited to interact with people you physically know. You got prestige resending interesting content and information had to be free. Now you retweet stuff. You can experience it yourself, google for telnet bbs. https://www.pcmag.com/news/7-modern-bbses-worth-calling-toda...

Back then the cost of calling depended on the distance. Calling numbers in your local municipality was affordable, a little more expensive in your region, and very expensive for long distance calls. Thus people preferred to call BBS:es closest to them which made the community more local. Back in the early 90's the number of BBS:es was massive and there were several in my 20k city. I spent some time trolling by registering and pretending to be some famous tech journalist but eventually got banned from many BBS:es. :)

I was 12 or 13 when I found a 2400 baud modem in my neighbor's attic while babysitting their kids and playing hide and seek, the remnant of an automative repair business that had failed.

When the kids' mom got home she saw my interest and said I could have it, but I still had to track down the right cable (a DB25 if I remember correctly) and then to figure out how to use it (since modems varied widely in the commands they supported and the settings needed to talk to them successfully).

The first BBS numbers I found were in the listing in the back of Computer User magazine. The Seattle boards I still remember are RaT CiTY (24-666-47), Jesus on Ecstasy, the Southern Cross, and the Bat Kave.

At 13 I didn't know what long distance was and so ended up with a $400 phone bill. I'm sure I got grounded for that for a while.

One of the things I remember most poignantly is that you had a finite number of minutes (and actions, in the various door games like Barren Realms Elite, Solar Realms Elite, Legend of the Red Dragon, and Usurper) so that no one person could monopolize the 1 or 2 phone lines most BBSes had for long periods of time. That made the time spent online feel important, and I remember strategizing so that I could reply to messages, check for new files, and play the doors I liked within the time allowed.

I suspect this comment will get buried at this point but if you'd like to see what using a BBS was like you should download and play this demo of a game I'm working on in which you can assemble an old IBM PC and dial out to BBSes using a simulated terminal emulator. It actually will connect to live existing BBSes which run nowadays over telnet or ssh.

https://gamejolt.com/games/thewebsiteisdown/591936

It was pretty amazing. I think my first BBS experience was around the time I was 13 so it would have been 93ish. I actually don't remember how I first got the phone number for the BBS - that was the biggest barrier probably, to first get into a BBS you had to to know their phone number. Once you got logged into your first one they usually had a directory of other BBSs that you could check out. Anyway, that first BBS was probably my favorite, it was called USA BBS and was located somewhere in Central Arkansas, can't remember the exact location but it was an 800 number so I never got charged for using it, otherwise my parents would have killed me! I think they had around 8 lines so that's the total number of folks who could be on at one time and who might be in the general chat. I would usually hang out in chat for a few hours and people would log on and off throughout that time and stop in to chat. It was a wonderful experience for me, I met a lot of friends on that board. When the web started becoming a thing the BBS got a gateway to provide www access so it provided my first experience with websites too. It had a upload and download section as well and provided a lot of music, pictures and apps. I think some of the docs there gave me exposure to what Unix was and subsequently led me to buy my first 10 disc Linux set with early Slackware and Debian. I ran my own little BBS for a bit too so my friends and I could play tradewars and falcons eye. I always had to remember to turn the ringers in my parents room off before they went to bed otherwise if my dad got woken up he'd go mental.

I think one of the biggest barriers to entry was either fighting over the phone line, or having a 2nd phone line. Presumably, if you didn't have a computer, you weren't interested in BBSing. Once you had a computer and the interest, yeah, the modem costs, and phone line costs.

I was very fortunate in that we had a 2nd phone line in our house, so I could use it as often as I wanted. I just had to beg/borrow/steal for a modem. First modem was 2400bps, I later got a 14.4k modem for christmas a few years later (Absolute revolution; 6x increase in transfer speeds overnight. And of course, later, 28.8k, 33.6k. I never did the "56k" scam because they wouldn't push much past 42k anyway.

You had to actually FIND BBSes by looking in a magazine or something that listed them. (or, less frequently, from friends). Most BBSes were 1-2 lines, though one I frequented had 4 lines, and there were a few 'huge' BBSes with a dozen lines. Some particularly SMALL BBSes were listed with certain hours, like 10pm-6am only. I never talked to a SysOp of such a small board, but I imagine they added a 2nd phone line sooner rather than later, and went dedicated, because you'd get tired of modems dialing your home phone "after hours" really quickly.

Many boards had membership/donation models, where you got the 'good' content if you donated.

It was pretty different from current social media because your community was the local BBS community, not necessarily your IRL friends.

It was like Discord servers today but slower, ASCII/ANSI art instead of images, and less real-time chat (although fancy BBS's with multiple telephone lines did have chat rooms).

In the days of yore, phone calls were free (after monthly service fees) within only your own area code or even one of the many Local Area and Transport Area (LATA) within your area code if covering a very large geographical expanse of your area code. This is how Bell carriers make their money: long distance (inter-area-code) and LATA (intra-area-code) calls for larger metro areas.

And often times, phone calls were free to your neighbors who are just immediately across your LATA/area-code boundary.

BBS folks who borders within their LATA often take advantage of free calling to their neighbor LATA running BBS and set up FIDOnet to relay their users’ BBS messages across the area code for free thereby connecting two entire area codes together using these “LATA pair of BBS” as a bridge.

Soon, we were able to send messages across the nation … for free.

That was only significant when making a call across area code boundary was considered a very expensive long distance call.

https://www.att.com/support/smallbusiness/article/smb-local-...

some central pieces to the day:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_terminal#Dumb_termina...

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

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doors_(computing)

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whiz_Kids_(TV_series)

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

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

Мне кажется сейчас (нынешнему поколению) уже не понять того фана и экспиринса, хехе, который был в те времена. С появлением интернета, социальных сетей и мессенджеров, с появлением огромных скоростей обмена сообщениями, с удобными устройствами для доступа к средствам общения - всё это полностью затмило собой общение посредством Fidonet и BBS. Даже чаты, которые также появились с приходом интернета еще до социальных сетей и мессенджеров стали неактуальны и неудобны. Согласен, что это суть прогресса - на смену медленным скоростям через модем и dial-up пришли оптические магистрали, медные ethernet последние мили и мобильные сети. Появились удобные средства общения в виде мессенджеров. Люди стали находиться онлайн на связи круглосуточно. Ты точно знаешь, что твое сообщение будет просмотрено в ближайшие минуты или секунды. А ведь когда-то ты мог дожидаться ответа часами и днями. Когда ты неистово жал на пробел в мейлере, чтобы сбросить модем и набирать номер твоего вышестоящего узла в Fidonet или знакомой BBS снова и снова. Когда ты на слух мог определять скорость подключения твоего модема. Когда ты, задавая вопрос по любой тебе незнакомой или малознакомой теме в фидошной эхе или даже интернет чате, точно знал, что тебе ответят и даже помогут решить вопрос в той или иной степени благодаря энтузиазму, а не как сейчас скажут, что ты не компетентен и обращайся к специалисту или сразу предложат решить вопрос за деньги. Времена уже не те. Я конечно не страдаю от этого, но иногда ностальгия мучает. Сейчас все решают деньги. Раньше подключение к Fidonet или BBS кроме приобретения модема более никаких денежных затрат не требовало. Но обычно, чтобы узнать номер популярной BBS или попроситься подключиться к Fido требовало поощрения владельцу такого узла: соки, воды, пиво, водка ))

Sorry for Russian, thats my IMHO. If needed, i will translate.

PS:by the way I'm still an member of Fidonet and my node since 29 Dec 1995 and continues to work

ok, google translated: It seems to me now (the current generation) no longer understand that fan and experience, hehe, that was in those days. With the advent of the Internet, social networks and instant messengers, with the advent of huge messaging speeds, with convenient devices for accessing communication tools, all this has completely overshadowed communication via Fidonet and BBS. Even chats, which also appeared with the advent of the Internet, even before social networks and instant messengers, have become irrelevant and inconvenient. I agree that this is the essence of progress - slow speeds through modem and dial-up have been replaced by optical backbones, copper ethernet last miles and mobile networks. Convenient means of communication appeared in the form of instant messengers. People began to be online around the clock. You know for sure that your message will be viewed in the next minutes or seconds. But once you could wait for an answer for hours and days. When you furiously hit the space in your mailer to reset your modem and dial your upstream Fidonet or familiar BBS number over and over again. When you could determine the connection speed of your modem by ear. When you, asking a question on any unfamiliar or unfamiliar topic in a fidosh echo or even an Internet chat, knew for sure that they would answer you and even help to resolve the issue to one degree or another thanks to enthusiasm, and not as they say now that you are not competent and contact a specialist or they will immediately offer to solve the issue for money. Times are not the same. I certainly do not suffer from this, but sometimes nostalgia torments. Now everything is decided by money. Previously, connecting to Fidonet or BBS, in addition to purchasing a modem, did not require any more money. But usually, to find out the number of a popular BBS or ask to connect to Fido, it was necessary to encourage the owner of such a site: juices, water, beer, vodka))

Mostly was on BBS between the ages of 12 and 15, starting with a giant 300 baud modem on a card in our Apple ][2. Most of the systems were forums and 300 baud wasn't bad for reading text. Way too slow for warez, so mostly exchanged floppies for games.

When everyone got on the Internet a few years later my younger sister didn't think it was a big deal since she had seen me reading forums and trading email for years.

I started BBSing in 1988 or so. I ran my own from 1992 until 1997-ish, when it kinda fizzled out. I wrote my own BBS software, after teaching myself C. I even had Internet email and a few newsgroups through UUCP.

It was a tighter knit community: you got to know people locally, people you never would've met otherwise. That is something I really miss from the old BBS days: the local community aspect.

What was it like to use a BBS? In a word: awesome.

I was lucky enough to go to middle school in the late 80's with a kid who loved computers even more than I did and actually ran his own BBS on a 286 with a 20? megabyte hard drive. I asked my dad if he could bring home a modem from work. He delivered--I have a memory of 4800 baud, but that could be wrong). I dialed my friend's number and the rest was history.

The BBS experience consisted of three things:

First, trying to log in. A BBS was just somebody's computer attached to a private phone line. The more popular the BBS, the longer you had to wait until you connected. Luckily, ZModem had a redial feature. (Years later, my college would require us to call in to register for classes over the phone with long wait times and I used ZModem to auto-redial until I got in). Sysops would also limit users' time online to a set number of minutes to make sure everyone got a chance. The computer clocked your time. When your time ran out, the computer booted you and you couldn't log back in until 12:01 AM.

Second, the door games. Damn I miss those door games. You could log in and select from a whole host of games against other players. I lived for online Risk! God only knows how many games I played. I also played a little resource game called Space Dynasty and occasionally this other space 4X called Space Dominion or something that might have been programmed by the Sysop and his friend.

Third, the discussion boards. Think Hacker News, but with people from around town. Remember, they're locals because nobody wanted to pay the long distance fees. I actually met some of the people on the BBS. One of them even ran a competing BBS that I occasionally visited. People also played role playing games that way and conducted entire campaigns with strangers. Today, that's normal game play, but in 1988 it felt like stepping into a science fiction movie.

A good BBS honestly felt like a community. The identity you created for yourself mattered in those forums.

Good times!

I used the modem terminal program {COMMO} to automate dialing and logging in to 300 (at peak) BBSes in my hometown to auto download/upload QWK mail packets (think RSS crossed with /var/lib/mqueue) while I slept, and then I’d wake up and open them all in the QWKmail tool and read through all the new posts and occasionally write my own in reply, which would be uploaded the next time the autodialer ran.

Imagine a terminal emulator with Expect scripting built into a UI overlay for editing line-based scripts and running them, and the ability to cause UI for the user to respond to, and you’ll be close to understanding how amazingly unique and precious this tool was.

Sadly, the author died a few years ago, and his family didn’t choose to release the source code. I dream someday of replicating it, or paying someone to replicate it, because it was innovative and taught me ways of thinking about programming that have no equivalent in modern era.

There's a lot you'd have to understand. Not technically, but culturally. In particular:

- Most houses had one phone line. The phone line was shared by the household. Without email, text messages, social media, instant messages, basically the only thing faster than mailing a physical was using the phone. Hence the single phone line could be a point of connection.

- Long distance calling was very expensive compared to now. If your mom was calling your aunt in another state, they'd be paying attention to the time on the call. If you were told to say hi to your aunt, you'd be told "hurry up, it's long distance"

- There was no stack overflow. If you had a question, you were limited to asking those you need in person or maybe a computer magazine.

- The common person didn't interact much with a computer. They would know what it was, but it was novel.

Of course, there were exceptions. I'm sure in the bay area, it was much easier to find someone who understand BBSes, or to get a 2nd phone line just for your modem, but for most of America the above was true.

Hence, BBS action would often happen when other family members wouldn't use the phone. Late at night was great, because that was when it was socially unacceptable to call.

And BBSes would tend to have a local community. Local both in the sense of the board, but also physical distance. The combination of technical proficiency + locality led to it tending to be less like NextDoor & more a cluster of local nerds.

Most BBSes I remember tended to focus on some combination of 3 things: warez, message boards, & games. The games would be similar to what you might get pre-installed on a flip phone, with the advantage of a shared score board.

For warez, the community hated leeches, and often would impose an upload ratio. (You can upload so much stolen software before you could download anything.) As the Internet became more common, FTP servers would replace most warez boards. Likewise Usenet would suck up a lot of message board activity.

My brother ran a popular board in our area. e did a fundraiser to buy an external drive to host more software, and raised just over $1,000. The thing that stuck with me was he used that to buy a massive drive for time -- one gig. As disk prices have fallen, that data point $1,000/gig, has stuck me as a benchmark.

The main barrier to entry was to not be a "twit", and get along reasonably with everyone.

It wasn't much different than here at HN, except for the monospaced fonts back in the days of MS-DOS, and being able to read the text at the same speed it came across the phone line. (You can read about 1200-2400 bits/second ASCII).

No real graphics, no sound, just text and mostly friendly people.

> The main barrier to entry was to not be a "twit", and get along reasonably with everyone.

Pretty much like the internet so :)

You can imagine my shock when the twits opened their own social media site, and started tweeting. ;-)

using bbs was FREEDOM... it was the ability to be anyone that you wanted to be in whatever form you wanted. and there wasn't much censorship either.

The breakthrough occurred around 1991. I started in ‘84 with a Hess modem and C64. I had the house and phone line to myself for 3 hrs after school. I was heavy into BBSing - I only called local/free BBSs in south New Jersey, but occasionally to Redding, Pa. most of the adults I met on BBSes then we’re in tech or worked for the phone company.

I started trading warez on physical discs via UPS or having mom drive me to the next town where I would hop out of the backseat and hastily exchange a box of disks with an equally nerdy kid on the sidewalk.

When I got back into BBSing on a Mac plus in ‘92, the experience was very different - it felt like a Cultural and tech evolution happening before your eyes. I would call ‘the gate’ and other prominent boards in SF area - that was where it was at.

If you're interested in what it's like to use a BBS in the 21st century, as opposed to back in the day, check out the new BBS Documentary series called 'Back to the BBS':

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n0OwGSX2IiQ&list=PLop3s1hMlS...

It's a multi-part docu-series with interviews from the most active and interesting people from the scene, covering the following topics:

    INTRO TO BBS’s
    GAMES / DOORS
    MODS
    HARDWARE
    BBS SERVER SOFTWARE
    BBS MESSAGES
    PRIVACY
    ANSI GRAPHICS
    DEMOSCENE / MOD SCENE
    THE UNDERGROUND

Enjoy!

Setting your computer to redial over and over hopping to get in

Honestly, it was an adventure. Started with a 300 baud modem and no idea what to do because I didn’t know a single person who knew what to do (this was the mid 1980s). I wish I could remember the first BBS I joined, because that would clearly be the first layer of the onion.

Each BBS felt like a club that you needed to apply to. Each had its own mission, which was basically whatever the sysop’s motivation was. Warez, online adventure game, discussion, hell, even dating.

There wasn’t real time chat, because most BBSs were single line (one user at a time).

What really pushed the envelope back then, IMO, was the fun of the dark side — warez (cracking/distribution), phreaking (“free” phone calls), and of course, running your own BBS (or being a co-sysop).

Give it a try, and ideally on a vintage machine. There are lots of telnet BBSs out there today!

Here’s my guide: https://bytecellar.com/bbsing/

Taiwan still has a really active (around 120k active users per day IIRC) BBS site: telnet://ptt.cc or visit the web interface https://term.ptt.cc

Here is a 1994 LA Times article on Baud Town BBS (one of my early favorites) in the early nineties

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1994-06-17-va-5088-s...

I bought my first modem (1200 baud) off an ad in the Recycler magazine -- it cost $20 (used) if I remember correctly. The standard speed then was 2400 and soon after 9600 if you wanted a FAST connection. (early nineties)

A look at my BBS software from '93 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14147583

It was almost entirely asynchronous. Most BBSes had only a single line, so you'd be the only one online (once you managed to get through). You'd read your mail, check the latest forum messages, maybe make some posts, play your turns in the door games, and then... well, nothing would happen until you hang up and let other people have a chance. Maybe if the sysop was around you could have real-time text chat (in split screen). But it was mostly a much more delayed gratification than using the internet is today.

Somehow this just smells like a homework assignment, or possibly article research.

However I'll toss in a couple things I haven't seen mentioned yet.

* Offline mail readers. QWK or BlueWave, there might have been others.

The standard way to use a bbs was to start your serial comm program like a pirate copy of procomm plus, use it to dial in to a board, and interact with the bbs for a while. Navigate menus to download files, read messages in subs (forums), write messages in subs, play games. Then disconnect.

If a given board had qwk module installed, you could do almost everything offline, and all you connected for was to download and upload a single zip file called a packet containing every message that was new since last time.

I don't remember but I think it could do files too. Like you'd get the file list once, and I guess get file list updates with each new packet.

You read the messages (both private mail and forum posts and I think even some games turns) while offline. Write your responses and new messages offline. Select files to be downloaded from the list or uploaded from your machine.

The offline reader program creates a packet containing everything you are going to upload. Messages you wrote and files you're uploading.

Then you dial in to the board and you're only connected for the bare physically minimum necessary time for the computer to download the new packet from the board and upload the new packet from you. No navigating menus, it goes as fast as the computer can go, and if you don't have files in there, then the packet is small because plain text compresses a lot. And so you were only on the phone for vastly shorter time.

I don't remember but I think the offline reader could dial the bbs itself, which skips navigating aany menus on the bbs at human speed. But I might have forgotten. Maybe you manually navigated to a menu choice in the bbs to download and upload the qwk packets manually. Or maybe both are true like the manual option was available even though you shouldn't need it usually.

I remember I used BlueWave which had some enhancements over standard qwk, though it was qwk compatible, so if a board only had a standard qwk door (oh yeah, apps on bbs's were called doors), BW could still use it.

* That was another element of life, a variety of standards. like qwk vs bluewave, arc vs zip vs arj, 100 different bbs host softwares, several worldwide networks like fidonet (fidonet was just the biggest because it wasn't tied to a particular bbs host software, but there were for instance WWIV had it's own network of WWIV boards that called each other just like fidonet, and a wwiv board could also be on fidonet too of course).

Almost everything you did involved knowing enough about it to deal with these different systems and standards. Does your terminal support Ansi? Does your modem support MNP-5 (error correction and compression, they didn't at first) Does the other guy's modem that you're calling? Does the board have a qwk module? Does it allow files or just messages? Some boards even had special client software that let the bbs be graphical instead of text. Does your computer have the hardware necessary to run that? Do you have a cga card? or just herculese? or ega? or tandy graphics? does the software support any of those? Which of the 25 different kinds of sound card do you have, and does this game support the one you have? Does this text file have dos or mac or unix line-endings? Some multiple standards at least shook out to one 99% standard by the late 80s. Eventually all files were compressed with pkzip, all modems had v.42, all boards and comm programs supported zmodem for file transfers, all boards and clients supported pc ansi terminal emulation, all boards used 8n1 serial params. But for some years those were all up in the air.

* Post signatures. These would often get elaborate. There were programs that pasted a quote or a joke to the end of every post you wrote as part of the signature. Many peolple designed huge elaborate flaboyant ascii and ansi art for their signatures.

One of those random joke inserts was one I ended up remembering forever:

REAL programmers use "COPY CON FILE.EXE"

Today's version of that would be:

REAL programmers use ">file"

* Product tribes. That "real programmers" joke was partly about how people would judge each other for the products they used. Delphi comes out and makes programming pretty easy. Real programmers use turbo c. (I might have the timelines on those wrong but it's the idea not the details). Bluewave is better than QWK. Telegard is better than WWIV, Deskqview is better than msdos, 4dos is better than msdos, drdos is bdtter than msdos, os/2 is better than windows, arj is better than zip, ... This is more about the times than BBS's strictly, and somewhat still exists and probably always will, you filthy green bubble serf. ;)

Good catch. I bet you're right.

I'm a big fan of "Do your own damn homework."

OP can do their own research. That said it seems like there's plenty of peeps here happy to tell their stories.

This seems like valid research: asking a bunch of people who lived it for first-hand experience.

I ended up revising the post to add some actual answer as well. It's not a bad thing to ask about and document this era.

If it's homework or article research, I think it's inconsiderate not to say so.

If I'm going to spend the next 30 minutes writing about something, it matters if I'm doing it for you personally, you and a community of people with related interests we're all members of like a mail list, or for your job.

If it's for work or school, you should disclose that, and if you think that will produce fewer responses, that does not justify collecting more and better responses through false pretense.

> However I'll toss in a couple things I haven't seen mentioned yet. > * Offline mail readers. QWK or BlueWave, there might have been others.

I did succinctly, just a couple of minutes before you did :-)

You are right nobody else had mentioned it yet at that point. Perhaps that's because Americans were more concerned about the BBS itself and purely local usage on BBSes with a large number of users, and less interested into FidoNet (or similar networks). Or a difference in eras.

If you lived somewhere rural, long distance charges were very limiting. Even a call to the next town could be a lot of money. So you would spend a fair amount of time figuring out ways around that. Open PBX's that would let you transfer to a dial-out, or dragging your computer to a library that had some unprotected RJ11/12 jacks, etc.

Not sure if it's been mentioned in here yet, but the biggest annoyance was Mom picking up the phone to make a call and disconnecting you. It was rare to have more than one or two phone lines in the average household, so being online competed with voice calls. The bigger the household, the more annoying this resource constraint became.

ooooh, BBS :)

I kinda came in when modems were at the 2400 baud stage and I ran a 286 with a 20Mb HDD which was plenty fast enough. I went through a variety of BBS software and ended up with Wildcat which was a good, expandable commercial product. OS was IBM OS/2 Warp. We originally had a single landline which caused huge rows when I had to take the BBS down so that the family could actually call their relatives and friends. I negotiated a deal with my employers to get me a "fast" (9600 baud) modem that would cost $2100 today and a dedicated landline. The BBS community was very tight-knit and generally helpful, although FidoNet seemed to bring out the worst in people and was often nicknamed Fight-O-Net. By the time affordable 56000 baud modems came in, the BBS world was being threatened by the Internet, and the rest is history...

I had a friend in Castro Valley, his dad got them setup with like five lines! One was always connect to some system at UCB. So I had to dial into Josh's system to connect to Berkeley, to connect to these things called newsgroups.

Oh, and it took for-ev-er to download Leisure Suit Larry. My first disappointing multi-day download attempt.

I used BBSs from around age 13 to around age 18, and ran my own for about 4 years. It's hard to disentangle my feelings about those platforms from just the feeling of being that age: that's where I hung out with my friends, where I met my first girlfriend, and it was the context in which I learned both programming and design.

One thing I'll say is that talking about how slow the connections were, and how little disk space there was to work with, and how only one person could use the system at a time is missing the point: those things sound constraining now, but at the time they made complete sense. They were the state of the art. There were certainly times I wished my xmodem transfer would go faster, but I think the same thing today when I'm buffering a YouTube video. The state of the art always feels great at the time, and old-fashioned just a few years later.

Anyway, the experience of using BBS' at the time was a lot like checking Hackernews for new content. You'd log in, look at the forums, see if anyone had posted anything new, and then log off. You could play door games, but a lot of them could only be played once a day.

Another thing about the experience was that you were always aware that you were on the sysop's computer, and he may have been watching everything you did. They could be looking at your screen, watching you type a message in a forum. Sometimes, you'd try to log in late at night, or early in the morning, when you knew the guy was asleep. Nowadays, that sounds crazy to me: I'd never use a website where I knew someone was watching everything I did. Not tracking aggregate metrics, but literally watching every keystroke as it happened, and seeing everything I saw at the same time.

From my perspective, one of the biggest technological advances was ZModem, a transfer protocol that let you restart failed transfers. Prior to that, transferring something large (say, the game DOOM) took hours, and if anything happened that disrupted the transfer, you had to restart. That happened all the time: someone picked up the phone, or there was just a bad analog signal.

In the case of DOOM, I think it actually took me 2 weeks to successfully download the shareware version.

Another big one was FIDOnet, which was a gateway between BBS forums and Usenet: it let you read usenet forums, and post on them too. I distinctly remember one day there were a bunch of new message boards on a BBS I frequented, with a whole set of new members that all had @ symbols in their usernames. It was so weird. That was the first time I'd ever seen an email address. That morning sort of marked the beginning of when the BBS world switched over to the internet world, for me.

It was nice in that it was inherently local because local calls cost a nickel with unlimited duration. You almost always were interacting with people within your area code if not your immediate neighborhood.

I met a bunch of people irl from BBSes and even some girlfriends, while being confined to an area reachable by bmx bike.

The coolest thing about bbsing in the 80s was a side effect of running the over phone lines: because long distance charges were expensive, you ended up dialing local bbses and organizing meetups with other local users. That was fun and feels like something important that is lost with current social networks

It felt like trying to suck the future down a too-small straw like a thick milkshake and a too-small straw.

It was expensive with per minute phone charging so you usually dialed in at night when the costs was lower - off course the rest of the household slept so you had exclusive use.

A good modem was essential i.e US Robotics and later I discovered Fidonet - so forums became far more important than downloads.

There was me (in the UK), my Commodore 64, Miracle Technologies WS2000 manual 1200bps modem and the 80 (yes, 80) column vt100 terminal emulator with XModem that I wrote in assembler. Oh, and the phone bills. So much simpler than now, and much more fun on a pioneering level.

It was mom screaming upstairs 'are you online again!?' because she could not use the phone.

Not specifically BBSes as those predate me by a few years, but parents on the phone getting deafened when I unknowingly connect to the internet via dial-up is along the same lines.

Lots of screaming from other rooms "HEY I'M ON THE PHONE".

Some modems could listen for the dialtone before dialing.

Yes well ours certainly didn't!

Oh man it was so awesome and frustrating. There was a thing called Fidonet which was like email, but messages were stored and forwarded nightly to reach everyone else. It would take two or three days to get a reply…

Expensive enough that I only managed to use the BBS on our local district during a Summer job, as the call rates where too much for our household.

There was a single one with 5 lines, and required regional call rates.

Not unlike this, apparently: http://mbrserver.com/ (musician, master boot record built a bbs for fans)

I remember that the BBS I used to log into had some rogue arena game. So used to log in for the games, and the dirty jokes and pics. It was fun. So very new. Mysterious.

You can still visit BBSs: https://www.telnetbbsguide.com/

so slow. But, you had to be able to write and communicate well- no emojis, no gifs. My first internet experience was a BBS a friend setup. He gave me a free account. Looking back, the internet was so small then. And, as others of noted, the phone issue- I timed almost all connections after my family went to sleep to avoid being disconnected from my 1200 baud modem.

Just want to mention that amateur radio uses BBSs which are accessible over the radio. A different thing but with a similar feel.

I got my start on BBSs and made most of the friends I started my career with on "H/P/A/V" boards; I ran a relatively popular board for several years. I'm a late-period BBS'er; 80s BBS kids might have different experiences.

Most of the barrier to entry was finding the boards in the first place. They weren't directly connected to each other, there was no search engine you could ask for phone numbers of every BBS. Generally, the good BBS's that were "advertised" in ZIP file archives or whatever were invite-only, and the rest of the advertised boards weren't worth spending time on; the sweet spot were the good boards that didn't do a lot of outreach, where you could reasonably expect to apply and get in.

Expenses were low, even (or maybe especially) to run a board; a modem and an extra phone line.

The first thing you'd notice coming back to boards after using things like Reddit and HN would be the busy signals; you'd spend a lot of time telling your terminal program to poll a BBS phone number waiting for your chance to get in (obviously this was made worse by the fact that those lines were usually tied up with someone downloading some huge series of files).

Most BBSs had only one or two phone lines. You'd live-chat people, but the most typical way that'd happen would be you talking to the sysop; they were mostly 1:1 conversations. For someone getting into the "hacking" scene at the time, the huge amazing win of finding an Internet connection (usually through university dialup, less commonly through X.25; dial-up ISPs were not yet common) was that IRC was a group chat.

BBS's that specialized in file downloads had upload/download ratios, and there was a weird cat-and-mouse of people uploading garbage files to fix their ratios.

Some BBS's were linked with a protocol called FidoNet (there was also a FidoNet net called FidoNet). FidoNet was a little like NNTP and replicated message board posts across multiple BBSs. The win with FidoNet was that you could dial a local BBS and talk to people around the country, because the BBS's were taking on the long-distance call burden. I remember the big deal about getting FidoNet connections was that the software to do it was a nightmare (since these are all modem connections, each attempt with a configuration took a couple minutes, and required participation from the other end of the connection --- or, more typically, the other end would be automated, would try your board a couple times, and then give up for the day).

I'd say the experience of posting on BBS message boards was pretty similar to that of posting on Usenet or on a subreddit, just usually with a more close-knit community of people. The BBS's in my town would throw parties. Several BBS operators went on to start dial-up ISPs.

you could also just read some of the comments about documentary:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9521867

or some other anecdotes here

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19198173

In Taiwan, one of the most popular social network is still a public BBS.

Honestly, the cyber life without any algo is fantastic!

Link: https://term.ptt.cc/

The thing I miss the most is the “door games” specifically Barren Realms Elite!

Dr. Dobb’s Journal, June 1985. Information Age Issues by Dean Gengle:

My first experiences with a modem, a microcomputer, a television set, and a telephone linked together—with me in the loop—were much like my first discoveries regarding the true significance of portions of my own anatomy. These experiences combined the joys of intellectual insight, emotional pleasure, physical involvement, and all the wonder we associate with the notion of “surprise.”

I conducted my early experiments in on-line living with no misgivings at all. I was able to consider only the positive possibilities contained in this new technical capability. Mo- democracy! Distributed networks! Grass roots anticipatory guidance systems! It all seemed within reach if only every¬ one would use these tools. The sheer weight of the new experiences themselves bolstered my initial faith that folks would come to use these tools in the “right” way.

I remember distinctly the moment when the inevitable mental disappointment occurred and reality set in about six weeks after my first modem fix (ca 1980). I was logged on a local bulletin board system (BBS). 1 had just finished entering a private reply to a particular message; it was meant to go directly to another user of the system. On my screen flashed “Hi.” Weird response. Commands issued to the remote computer no longer worked. Instead, the system operator (sysop) had taken over and was typ¬ ing messages at me directly.

“I’ve been watching your session,” he wrote, in the most casual and matter-of-fact manner. “Thought I’d say hello.” In that instant, the scales fell from my eyes, so to speak. My illusion of privacy was shattered, an illusion maintained without my awareness by a number of sup¬ porting factors. I was working out of my own apartment, a bedroom with a spare corner space, in fact. What could be more personal or private? Also, I’ve never had any reason to think that my phone was tapped, so I’ve always regarded phone conversations as “private” My modem is hooked to the phone, ergo .... Besides, the remote com¬ puter system itself reinforced my illusion by allowing “private” messages between individuals and by requiring a password to read “mail.”

All along, that sysop might have been looking over my shoulder, reading what I typed, aware of when and how I used the system. The implications of that made me decid¬ edly uncomfortable. Since then, I have become aware of other sysops who’ve turned their computers into dictator- chips. They not only eavesdrop at will but run their sys¬ tems with the firm style of a Khomeni. (Confess or I pull out your passwords!) Large systems and small are run this way. The truly astounding thing is that some people seem to like that sort of relationship. Still, I hope, there num¬ bers are not great. Not here. Not in the U.S. of A.

https://archive.org/details/dr_dobbs_journal_vol_10/page/n46...

You first would buy a modem for maybe $100, which was a little box you plugged into the serial port of your computer on one end, and a phone jack on the other end. Then you'd plug the modem into your home telephone system. Home PCs didn't typically come with an Ethernet port in those days, and wi-fi wouldn't be a thing for another decade or so. The modem usually came with a floppy disk containing software to use it, which typically looked like a terminal window, sometimes with additional menus to simplify things like dialing and file transfers.

Then you needed to find the phone number of a local BBS. There was no Internet at the time, so typically you'd get this through going to computer trade shows, or asking around, or occasionally computer books & magazines had local directories. You'd dial up this number and connect to the BBS. This tied up your phone line and their phone line, so people who were seriously involved in the BBS scene usually bought another phone line (about $30/month). Modems had a distinctive screech that you'd learn to love, which is apparently now on YouTube.

The actual interface was almost pure text, and had features like forums, file transfer, and occasionally chat. Basically you'd leave messages for people who'd dial in after you, and exchange files. In general, there was no real-time communication, and the scale was much smaller than today's worldwide social networks (typically each BBS might have a few dozen to a few thousand users, so like HN for the first month or two of its existence). Everything was slower-paced than today's Internet; you had to actually delay gratification and check back tomorrow rather than seeing if you got a response in 5 minutes.

The hardware also was slower. On a 2400 baud modem, if you were a fast reader you could read the text as it came over the phone line (2400 baud is only 300 characters/sec, which is like 50 words/sec, and much of that was formatting boilerplate you could skim over). None of this graphics or video stuff. I remember downloading my first MP3; it took 2 hours to download, and every time the connection dropped (like, for example, if a family member picked up the phone) I'd have to start over again. I think it actually took like a week of wall time, and then I found my computer wasn't fast enough to play it back in real time, so I needed to decompress it, which required buying a new hard drive so I could fit the 40MB decompressed that a 4-minute MP3 expands to.

The industry was tiny by today's social networking standards. It was a hobby for most of the players involved, not something you could really make money off of. Really it's the telecoms that made the money, off all the people buying second lines.

The biggest lasting breakthrough was that it showed communications and networking could be a major use-case for PCs, which paved the way for the Internet and WWW a few years later.

First off, there are many eras of BBS'ing. So you might get different responses based on the vintage of the respondee..

In the early-mid 90's, BBS's were still a subculture driven by word of mouth, particularly in the period before the web came to AOL. With BBS's, you came for the technology, but you stayed for the community. There was a huge technical barrier to entry for kids/teens that didn't have a mom/dad that could help them configure things like arcane AT commands for their specific make/model of modem, or explain the differences between things like the various download protocols (named things like "y modem-g" or "z modem"). Sysops took on a mentorship role and probably helped countless 90s teens get into tech. I mention community because it's the most memorable value-add of BBS's. Something that's arguably been lost for most web & app users, but maybe still lives on in tight subreddits or Discord channels. I think there were 2 major drivers of the tight knit community on BBS's. First, due to the cost of long distance calls back then, the people that you were talking to were almost always from your same area/city. You weren't trolling someone on the other side of the world, but someone that could live in your neighborhood. Second, the barriers to entry were pretty high and it filtered out the userbase to mostly just geeks. You had to have a PC ($2-3k) with a modem, dedicated phone line (or an understanding family that didn't mind not making calls), and the luck to have a BBS in your area code that you'd even heard about. I wouldn't underestimate the latter point. Without the web or access to newsgroups, how I even heard about and got the number for a local BBS bewilders me. These were platforms run out of people's basements and didn't advertise through traditional channels. One thing I just recalled was how payments worked. Running a BBS was expensive (paying for multiple phone lines, expensive hardware, and software licenses for the BBS application itself). You could usually mail cash to the sysop, but a major innovation was BBS's that provided a service where you'd call a 900 number that charged $20 to your phone bill and, when you called, would read off an access code that you'd redeem for "minutes" on the BBS. Huge. One major use case for BBS's in this period was as download repositories for text files (tech, counterculture, even pirated software, etc). This sounds ridiculous now, but people were information starved back then compared to today. For BBS text files, imagine Wikipedia but way worse and way more bullshit. Still, it was incredible to get access to text files on BBS's. Porn wasn't a thing on the BBS I went to, but must've been out there. Media files were usually low-res jpeg, gifs (not animated, just static images), and "ASCII art". Video was not possible in any form. A 28.8k modem might achieve 3 kilobytes per second of download speed and rates were sensitive to analog line noise (the wiring from your house to local branch made a difference).

Multiplayer gaming was also a major use case for BBS's during this time. Multiplayer FPS deathmatches on Doom & Descent were very popular and was mind blowing. Id software eventually offered an official dial-up service for FPS Doom multiplayer called Dwango, but it was very expensive and not in my area. For most BBS users, emulating a LAN over dialup was a compelling alternative to building an actual hardware LAN at your house.

Sorry for any typos -- I'm typing this on my phone. Happy to answer any questions about this long forgotten technology.

I'm going to answer mainly from the perspective of the 1980's since that was really the 'golden era' of the BBS, IMO. The 1990's was more the era of the commercial services (CompuServe, AOL etc. Many of these existed in the 80's but were too expensive/niche for most users) which transitioned to Internet gateways by the mid-90's pretty much killing off the BBS/proprietary use cases.

How was the experience?

Slow. Take the baud rate and divide by 10 to get the characters per second. In the 80's you typically had a 1200 or 2400 baud modem so 120-240 characters per second. PCs were mostly text-based (as was the BBS you dialed into) and had anywhere from 40x20-ish (on 8-bit PCs that could connect to a TV) to 80x25 displays (connected to a 'real' monitor, might require an upgrade on some 8-bit systems) so on a monitor you were looking at no more than 3 lines of text per second. You could just about keep up with reading the text as it downloaded. In the late 80's/early 90's 9600 baud became more widespread a bunch of other improved speeds until finally ~56k (IIRC, this was the theoretical limit of the analog phone system and couldn't often be reached. Also, the higher baud rates assumed some compression which really only performed on some types of content... i.e. not images/archives)

What was the cost involved?

Modems typically cost $100-300 (by the mid-80's) and by the end of the modem era were included with your PC/laptop. In the U.S. in addition to paying your monthly phone bill you typically had zone charges (~$0.10/minute for phone #'s more than a few miles but less than ~30 miles from you you paid to the 'baby bell' who had the regional monopoly in your area) or long distance charges (~$0.30/minute for everything else you typically paid to AT&T until MCI/Sprint became a thing in terms of alternative long distance providers). Most smaller BBS systems were free though the larger ones like The WELL charged fees in addition to any phone company charges. All of the commercial services charged hourly connection fees in those days ~$5-20/hr in addition to phone company charges and if you were lucky, they had a point of presence phone # that was near enough that it would only cost you zone charges. (if you lived in say NYC there were most likely POPs a local call away)

Barrier to entry?

There were a lot of free BBS systems that just required you to set up an account by dialing in and selecting a user id and password. Some the more hacker-oriented systems would require a referral from an existing member. And some people just ran systems for their friends but these were typically private and you'd never hear about them otherwise.

One thing to note re: barrier to entry was often the difficulty of just getting a modem connection to a given BBS. On a smaller BBS, their main incoming line could also be their main voice # so you'd have to call (late) at night or a person might answer. On a more popular BBS, they might have multiple (no more than a handful, typically... each line typically cost ~$20/mo in phone company fees plus the cost of hardware) incoming dedicated modem lines but they were often far fewer than the number of people attempting to connect at peak times so automatic redial in client software quickly became a must. In the mid- to late-90's many people experienced this quite frequently when using AOL for their internet access. Lots of articles and posts at the time about the AOL issue(s).

How similar was it to current social media networks?

I remember the conversations as being more real. Typically the content was more technical since it was mostly computer geeks hanging out on them and we were mostly trying to figure things out / get things done. As the years ticked by, a lot of geek culture stuff started being discussed (i.e. sci fi/fantasy, board gaming etc) It's similar to how if you tune in to ham radio frequencies you'll often hear hams mostly talking about ham stuff. Also, there was a cultural distaste for being overtly/overly commercial if not outright banning it. If someone asked a question and you had a product/service that would help them, it was usually OK to mention it with a disclaimer. If you were mainly there to sell something, you could expect to be booted off sooner rather than later.

How big the industry around it actually become?

Dunno... millions, maybe tens of millions of dollars for the BBS side. For most it was a hobby rather than a business. The commercial services (CompuServe/AOL/etc) side was probably on the order of 100 million+ until it exploded in the mid-90's due to them acting as some of the first ISPs for millions of users.

From a tech point of view what do you think were the major breakthroughs and what made it to the internet we see today?

Very little. Probably the main thing that transitioned over was the concept of user forums and the continued use of .GIF and .ZIP files. The BBS era was a Tower of Babel in terms of protocols (we went from XMODEM to YMODEM to ZMODEM for transfer files... sometimes Kermit which covered terminal emulation as well as file transfer), file formats (.ARC, .ZOO, .ZIP as well as a bunch of others best forgotten) and separation of responsibilities (with the higher speed modems data was compressed but you were also transferring files/archives that were compressed which would result in a slower transfer as the modem tried to compress an already compressed data stream making it larger.) One other annoyance was the fact that there was some platform specific stuff that needed to be address: on the Amiga archives had to be zero-padded either on the sending or receiving end and on the Mac there were resource forks to contend with. So this resulted in a few other oddball things such as .SIT/.SEA files on the Mac. The Internet predated the BBS and was growing exponentially at the same time using TCP/IP since the 70's. FidoNet was basically the BBS attempt to do something similar to the Internet in terms of letting BBS's talk to each other. Some BBS operators fortunate enough to have Internet connectivity were also running gateways and you could dial in to them for UUCP/NNTP to the 'real' Internet.

The reason BBS became a thing was very similar to the reason the PC did: the Internet already existed, had better performance, better reliability, better protocols and better software. However, you had to be connected (i.e. know someone / be associated with certain institutions) and have much more expensive hardware/software well beyond the hobbyist/home budget to use it at the time.

The music on that documentary tripped me the fuck out. Amazing series.

You haven't lived until you've used 300 baud.

OMG this documentary is awesome! I had no idea, thank you.

Cost was minimal if you dialed local boards in places where that was cheap/untimed. Expensive if long distance: but people used tricks like corporate PBXs and calling cards and blue boxes to reduce those expenses. That stuff was mostly 1980s. By the mid 1990s the developed world had largely shifted to digital telephone exchanges (Ericsson AXE) and the box tricks were relegated to the very obscure parts of the developing world, much of which skipped copper (and the problem of copper theft) and went straight to mobile.

If you had a computer and a modem, other entry barriers were minimal. Most boards required only the number and you could call in. Cool warez boards required invites and had passwords. Generally IIRC they would agree to a carrier at any speed so you would in practice be able to talk to them on old hardware, maybe down to 2400bps.

The experience was more like a secret group of friends than a public social media network. It was generally local-ish, but not hyper-local, so you perhaps still had a chance to meet people IRL/AFK if desired. First, the sysop would be responsible for creating an environment in which people actually wanted to communicate. This would occur through selection of content, community and policy. Policies might be how long you could stay online per day, that sort of thing. Recall that each board had a limited number of lines and each required a telephone line monthly payment plus a modem plus a spare serial port. There were these ungodly serial ("COM port") expander cards with chains of tens of plugs... forget what they were called. If your friend came on the board you could ask to chat to them kind of like the unix 'talk' command. The codebases were fairly heterogeneous however, many sysops implemented or modified their own codebases. Probably a lot of them had buffer overflows.

As you were your own entertainment and your experience somehow timed, perhaps interactions tended toward an more open intellectualism missing from general society. The sort of thing HN sort-of-kind-of-has but not really. If HN were a BBS, it'd be effectively anonymous, effectively unsearchable (the search experience used to be a lot like manually trawling through a library card-file), and all the good articles would be downloadable with ASCII art and group greets. In the early popular internet era I remember l0pht ran a BBS for a bit but AFAIK it never really took off.

Can't comment on what the industry size was, I guess there were tens of thousands of boards and it was really an offshoot of 1980s computing culture where kids were reaching out to connect with others in an ever-growing subculture that was powerfully disjunct from the rest of society and thus liberating. Years later I found out I had a distant relative who was lesbian and ran a board for queers at this time, I guess much like the internet today a lot of people flocked to BBSs who felt marginalized by the rest of society.

Tech-wise, this was the era of UUCP/FidoNet, warez and batch-transfers. The initial popular commodification of digital information and software. The initial popularization of node-based addressing schemes. It was laying the groundwork for the popularization of the internet, in cultural terms, technical terms and communications infrastructure terms.

What made it to the internet? Initially, everything. Everyone online came from BBSs in the early days. But now .. it's hard to point to anything in particular. Maybe open source, a sort of seeping and perverted globalism of consumption (whereas then we had an excited and optimistic utopian global village) - basically the biggest change is everything - here included - is now commercial. It's a sad testament to human character, despite ever-crashing costs.

PS. I wrote a history of the modem at the end of a thread the other day, consequently nobody read it, but this thread's readers may enjoy: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29052827

My dad got a 300 baud modem in '84. I believe that was hand-me down for me by '86 when he got a 1200 autodialing modem? I wasted a lot of time on Compuserv on his computer. Either way I started mid 80s. I got serious and invested my own money around 1990 I think I paid full list price for a V.32 standard 9600 baud modem around 1990. Modem protocol wars were expensive and I don't miss them, as I recall v.32 lost a battle and I essentially had a very expensive 2400 baud modem by the time of the V.32bis 14.4K around 1992 or so.

Cost: This was an era of fast hardware obsolescence. So for two (maybe three?) decades the top of the line fastest thing you can buy was around $600 today and "it got the job done two years ago at a quarter the speed" is literally free at a ham radio swapmeet or hand me down from relative, etc. You did become an absolute expert on long distance billing, and the difference between unmetered LATA calls and metered out of LATA calls, and billing rates vary by time, and strange deregulated long distance cards, etc. Obviously if you lived at the level of "hand me down modem" it was important to call the unmetered free locals and if you dropped $600 on a newer modem every year you probably didn't care about LD charges, heck those rich guys probably called international bbses sometimes...

Joe6Pack: Average people did not participate. So limited politics, no propaganda, no censoring, etc. Even Compuserv or AOL users were pretty high tech compared to average TV couch potato. There was a problem finding your FIRST BBS in a magazine or a sign at a Radio Shack store or a friend at school or something. Then every BBS you logged into and every file you downloaded usually had some tag lines for "BBSes we're friends with" and you could branch out. And much like ham radio lists of VHF radio repeaters, there were vast lists of BBSes, some of the listings were even current and valid. BBSes came and went. You leave for Basic Training in the military for a summer, come back, and a third the local BBSes are gone LOL, but in the good old days it seemed two sprung up for every one that closed. I'd say at peak there were like 10 BBSes per million population, so about 50 where I lived were toll free calling, and maybe 5% of people were also sysops of their own board, so like a thousand BBS users per million people? Makes hobbies like Ham Radio look practically universal in comparison, maybe 25 to 100 hams for every BBS user in the late 80s? I mean a popular BBS might have an active users list of 30 people and an active two meter "fun net" on ham radio might have 80-100 check-ins nightly, so when ham radio is a multiple of popularity you know there's not many BBS folks in the area.

Similar to social media: Well it was interesting at the BBS level that everyone knew who was online by being friend of friend and advertise on each other's boards and download the latest local BBS list and all that. So you tended to use the BBS where your friends were, or your friends became your fellow BBS users. So now there's Farmville, then there was TW2002. I will say the people who pushed the CGI interface for web servers seem heavily influenced by the people who wrote door games back in the 80s, some conceptual continuity if not literally the same human programmers LOL.

Industry size: Well, its like asking how big the knitting industry is. There's a boat load of people doing it but not monetizing every knot and stitch. Someone was paying a lot of money for those new $600 modems that were technologically obsolete every two years. Someone was paying a lot of money for magazine ads to sell those $600 modems. Someone was paying $30/month to the local bell operating company to get a second line to their house to host all those BBSes. Someone was paying a lot of money for large hard drives to hold warez and even legit files on their BBS. On the other hand not much money changed hands for direct use outside big nationwide services like prodigy/compuserv/aol, almost all boards were free and labor of love/hobby for the sysop.

Tech breakthrus: Someone had to pay for the development of fast modems and big hard drives, and I'd say that's the BBS folks.

BBS documentary: Pretty accurate, having been there for most of it. Note he had to edit down to fit a video time span.

I want to understand how the experience was (this is "user experience" Sysop experience is different.

> what was the cost involved For users the cost of a computer, modem, terminal software, phone line, and any applicable long distance. Maybe BBS subscription fee if it was some pay to use BBS.

> what were the entry barrier for an average person to join

Cost of a modem (before the VIC MODEM modems cost several hundred dollars, after that prices started dropping, but it was still as significant cost.

Long Distance charges - unless you were in a larger area with local and good BBSs you were calling long-distance to connect.

If living with others with one phone, you would battle for tying up the phone to call BBSs, so you would probably do it late at night like friday and saturday (not school nights)

>How similar was it to current social media networks

Think of internet usenet message groups or on-line forums for BBS message boards, email, and some downloading of programs and on-line games. Very few board were multi-line where there was more than one user so not much chatting, except with the Sysop occasionally.

> How big the industry around it actually become

Pretty big, at the high end there were mini-online entertainment services, with fancy multi-line chat boards offering paid content. some businesses had on-line ordering/support BBSs, as well as portals for say government clients to submit data, etc. News agency portals, etc.

From a tech point of view what do you think were the major breakthroughs and what made it to the internet we see today.

Electronic File Transfer (upload/download), Email, message boards, multi-BBS network data transfer (aka FidoNet), terminal graphics.

> I have watched the documentary www.bbsdocumentary.com , so I have some context but want some more anecdotes if I can :)

The hard part if you weren't a kid pre-internet, you dont know how compressed your world was. Back then communication was usually occasional phone with friends, face to face meetings (usually limited to your community's social group/neighbourhood), reading a lot of magazines, going to the library for information, lots of mail (catalogs by mail, order by mail) TV catered more to families and local grocery/clothing/appliances.

BBSs let you expand your reach for interesting/provocative information (see textfiles.com), a big part for me was communicating with other like minded computer geeks (not only nearby but in other cities or even across the US or even world - as a BBS sysop I had a few international callers no idea how much their phone bills were). There were also some less technically minded lonely people able to get on-line looking for connection (on-line pen pal, etc.)

That's my perspective,

> what was the cost involved

Modems were expensive, and well, computers were not cheap either.

You had to pay the communications time, but well, as a final user, with local calls + night rate, it wasn't a big deal. Probably more so for sysops which had to rent an extra line and do the interconnect between BBSes for networks like FidoNet (but again, at night most of the time). It also depended on your country's pricing policy for lines and communications. Americans for example had it better than French in that respect. Each country developed a different subculture based on communication price and organisation, hardware price and so on.

Still I'd say modems where the main hurdle. They were really expensive until 14.4k became popular and cheap knock off appeared.

> what were the entry barrier for an average person to join

First, you had to be into computers. It was mostly before the family computer explosion.

Then you had to hear about BBSes and buy yourself a modem that you would basically only use for that purpose, just to try and dive in an unknown world.

Also, in France we had the Minitel, which was provided for free, so on one hand that piece of hardware was given, available in most households and gave access to a variety of services, and on the other hand you had to buy an expensive modem for ???. Hard sell for a long time. So when the BBS scene finally kind of took off, it was very late, almost already time for it to shutdown because Internet (web, Usenet) was taking over.

> How similar was it to current social media networks

Not much :-)

Personally, I was more into FidoNet than pure local BBS (over here a BBS would only have a small number of users); FidoNet was pretty much like Usenet, a collection of thematic discussion forums anyway.

It also meant I didn't often connect to the BBS graphic/terminal interface. My 'mail' program (Terminate) would simply connect to the BBS, and automatically send my messages and retrieve the conferences content that had arrived since my last connection.

https://dedicatoafidonet.altervista.org/wp-content/uploads/2...

> How big the industry around it actually become

There was no such thing over here; perhaps it was a thing in the USA.

<p>age sysop

...original online chat

much cooler than the internet and a lot less bullshit and drama

Keith F. Lynch wrote up some interesting history of the net from his perspective:

http://keithlynch.net/history.net.html

MIT AI Lab Tourist Policy

https://donhopkins.medium.com/mit-ai-lab-tourist-policy-f73b...

I posted this earlier:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15080221

“The MIT machines were a nerd magnet for kids who had access to the ARPANET,”

Zork is how and why I got on the ARPANET as a nerdy kid. And I wasn't even a Russian Spy! [1]

Connecting to the ARPANET and getting an account on DM was an adventure in itself, almost like the beginning of the game itself.

At the time there were no passwords or anything but security through obscurity on the ARPANET TIPs. And the MIT-AI Lab was kind enough to hand out free after-work-hours "TURIST Accounts" [2] to anyone who asked nicely with the right magic words.

Some dude named Bruce who had a BBS (Bruce's NorthStar Horizon in Northern Virginia) told me how to do it step by step:

1) After 8PM EST, dial up the NBS TIP at (301) 948 3850 [3] at 300 baud, typed "E" to get the banner, then "@L 134" to connect to AI. (NCP host ids were only 8 bits, before TCP/IP's vast 32 bit address space!)

2) Make up an account name (I chose A2DEH).

3) Try to log in with that name, like ":LOGIN A2DEH".

4) If it asks for a password, somebody already has that account. In that case, think of another name and try again. (RMS's password was famously "RMS", after they forced everyone to use a password over his objections).

5) If it doesn't recognize your user name, it asks "Do you want to apply for an account?" Answer YES. When it asks "Why do you want to use the MIT-AI Lab's PDP-10?" answer "Learning LISP." (Which, as it turns out, is a long incremental process pursued over a lifetime, since there are so many implementations of LISP on the inside with names like MDL and JavaScript on the outside.)

6) When the account is approved, now all ITS systems know about you (ITS had network file and account sharing long before NFS and YP), and although you still can't log into DM directly, you could log into AI to learn LISP (and EMACS).

7) The MIT-AI Lab staff would kindly and patiently go out of their way to help you learn LISP and EMACS. (Many thanks to KMP for writing TEACH-LISP and answering my clueless tasteless questions like "how to you set the value of a variable?").

8) To play Zork, dial up the TIP after 8PM and connect to DM with "@L 70".

9) Log in as "URANUS" with password "RINGS".

10) So as not to look suspicious (3 kids from all over the country [4] logged in as URANUS, URANU0, URANU1 at the same time all playing Zork or watching each other play), change your user name to your own with ":CHUNAME A2DEH".

11) Only two people could play ZORK at once, so hang out chatting with other people waiting to play ZORK, or spying (in a socially acceptable manner) on whoever's playing ZORK via ":OS PDL" (for "Output Spy Paul David Lebling"), or snooping around trying to find the Zork source code [5], which was well hidden.

12) There was no file security, so you could snoop around Marvin Minsky's home directory and hurt your brain trying to understand what appears to be line noise, but is actually the Universal Turing Machine he implemented in TECO. [6]

13) When somebody from USER-ACCOUNTS sends you a "nice private message" telling your they know what you're up to with ZORK, and that you should really learn LISP like you said you would because it's such a great language, instead of demanding you commit "seppuku" and "dumping you off the net and be done with it", you simply start learning LISP instead of acting like an entitled dick [7] by whining about how the people who gave you a free account that you bragged about in BYTE magazine are a bunch of communists and threatening to get some Proxmire type to start inquiring into its operations by seeing if your "Pentagon friends can upset them. Or perhaps some reporter friends. Or both., Or even the House Armed Services Committee."

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVth6T3gMa0

[2] http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/text/tourist-policy.html

[3] https://www.saildart.org/TIPS[P,DOC]3

[4] https://archive.org/details/getlamp-rgriffiths

[5] https://github.com/itafroma/zork-mdl

[6] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13514918

[7] http://www.stormtiger.org/bob/humor/pournell/story.html

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