The forerunners of Facebook: an ode to the BBS | Hacker News Reader

The forerunners of Facebook: an ode to the BBS

theatlantic.com

I ran a BBS in the early 90s in Chicago called Mad Macs. It ran on a Mac in my bedroom running Hermes and then later on NovaLink Pro. NLP was one of the first systems to offer a GUI (special client software required). That's where I got my start designing visual interfaces for the web.

I ran a hermes bbs off a mac IIsi back in '93 in Los Angeles. Mostly gifs and warez, such as it was. That's how I ended up with Modelshop and started my path toward being a package designer. I was 13.

Funnily enough, the first board I ever went on was when I was 8, in 1988, and I figured out how to use my brother's TRS80-100 laptop to get online with its internal 300 baud modem. I dialed up a board that was in Alameda, according to the bbs guide I'd grabbed from the tandoori restaurant my parents took us to. I vaguely thought Alameda was part of Los Angeles (I think I thought it was Alhambra). Finally I got booted when the sysadmin got annoyed that this 300 bps thing was taking up one of his lines half the day. Meanwhile, I racked up a $50 phone bill to the bay area, which my parents were very not cool about.

It was all text. I was just looking for BASIC programs so I could figure out how to make pixels do things I wanted.

Ripco, all the way. And Greek Inn.

Just to give Jason Scott more props, the guy's archive even includes a text file I wrote, cough, 26 years ago. Jesus. At least it's on the net for posterity. His BBS documentary is a grand work and if you haven't seen his latest project, you should check it out and contribute:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/textfiles/the-jason-scot...

Wow this brings back memories (and really dates me).

I remember when I finally saved up enough lawn-cutting money to buy an AppleCat modem (for a Franklin Ace 1200) for my board "The Pirate Cove" (nothing to do with stealing software, I just thought it was a cool name)

I miss BoardWatch magazine :-)

> for my board "The Pirate Cove"

I think I remember the name... Did you run ads on magazines like Nibble?

I always looked enviously at those ads. I live in Brazil and, at that time, using the phone to get to a local BBS was bad enough - doing long-distance would be ludicrously expensive...

There was a Hayes-like dial-out device connected to ARPAC, Argentina's government-sponsored X.25 network, we could access from the Brazilian state-owned telco's own network (RENPAC), but I already said too much ;-)

The great thing about BBSs was they were really really local. Craigslist is the closest thing to it these days. For me, it was the gossip and teen angst back channel for all the in-the-know nerdy high school kids in the local calling range back in the early 90s.

It was through a BBS list I discovered on AOL or CompuServe that I learned about fascinating kinds of music (via .mod files), IRC, other ideas and philosophies, and the Internet. If my dad hadn't bought a modem for working from home, I doubt I would've survived my childhood with my sanity reasonably intact (or maybe I'd just be a boring average smart guy churning through the system, instead of a hacker entrepreneur). Props to everyone who ran a local BBS back in the day.

Oh the memories. I ran a Telegard BBS back in 1989-91 called "Circle of One". I still have it backed up though I would probably have to find some old hardware to run it on. It ran on a 20Mhz 286 at the time with 2 Meg RAM and a couple of MFM 40 Meg hard drives. Hail to the 16bit analog modem power!

Oi, just had a flashback of editing ANSI animated graphics. Your 'frame rate' depended on your modem speed.

If you still have the data backed up I suggest you mention this to Jason Scott (@textfiles on twitter) or the archive.org team as I'm sure they'd love to help you with such a project

I didn't really get into computers until after BBSes were already dead. My dad used to run a BBS, and he had a book called "Running a Perfect BBS" that I read all the way through. I thought that BBSes were the greatest thing ever, and wanted to run my own. Unfortunately, by then most of the BBS software packages were dead and no one knew how to connect to them anyway.

Dude, you just made me feel more ancient than you'll ever know.

Amazing to watch awesome but forgotten technologies come back in newer, gigantically social ways. Like:

BBSes -> Facebook (with games too!)

IM status updates -> Twitter

The big one I'm waiting for is IRC, with Google+ heading down that path. I miss live chat rooms.

And also: MUDs -> MMORPGs

Last year I found a backup of my early 90s WWIV BBS on 20-ish 3.5" disks. I thought about trying to retrieve the data, but decided it wasn't worth the effort.. so I just tossed them. This article makes me a bit sad about the decision.

Oh the good old days of downloading the latest Focke's list and wardialing everything in my area code to check out all the BBSs I didn't know about.

One of my friends found his first wife that way.

I too once ran a bbs (614 area code). But the link between the bbs scene and today's Facebook is a bit tenuous, isn't it? Makes for an attractive headline though.

The man hours I've lost playing Doom and TradeWars on MBBSes could have fueled a few startups...

Good times, good times. I ran a BBS on my Amiga in 1994 and 1995. It was one of the more appreciated BBSs in the area due being more or less the only one with focus on the so-called demo scene, always having the latest demos and intros available. Back then, a 7mhz computer with 1mb of RAM, a 30mb hard drive and a 14k4 modem performed just fine for that task.

Ahh the days of Citadel, Wolf3d shareware and quite serious modem transmitted diseases inside dodgy TSRs.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com