The Lost Civilization of Dial-Up Bulletin Board Systems
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
I spent my childhood using an old 8088 dialing up boards / exploring our local areas bbs scene. Hell, I met my wife on a BBS originally - we were chatting later at a party and it came up and we realized we had spoken a few times before.
The BBS period reminds me of freedom, exploration, and a time when everything wasnt monetized by ultra corps. Its that memory that worries me. I sometimes wish I could go back to that time but you can never swim in the same river twice. Its moved on. We need to also.
Its a trap. One I fall into every once in a while.
In retrospect it was such a brief, intense love affair. For me it started in 1990 when I bought a modem from the back of a magazine in high school, installed it in my Tandy 1000 myself, and used every penny of pay from my job on long-distance calls. When I went to college I was the only student in the dorms who could dial into our school's Sun System and telnet to ISCABBS, so our room became a late night hang out for friends every night. I still visted ISCA for a while at my first job out of college, but it just petered out as the web became prominent.
What I would give to discover a new technology that inspired so much wonder and optimism.
At the time, it was expensive to make phone calls outside of your area code. And that was a healthy natural constraint on the community: Nearly everyone calling into a BBS was local. One of the bigger BBSs in my town even had meetups.
Other great things about BBSs: Most of them were run out of someone's home. No one was going for growth at any cost, as a VC-backed startup would. There were dozens of BBS software platforms, no single walled garden, lots of room for customization. And, of course, the ASCII art was amazing.
As the evening falls, and more and more people would turn their modems on, you were met with nothing but busy signals. You'd redial over and over, waiting, and then you'd hear the modem connecting! You were now online, and if the BBS had a time limit, the clock was ticking. You'd go through messages, play a couple rounds of door games, maybe download a new file.
After your time was up, you'd connect to some other BBS that wasn't quite as popular. But the door games weren't as fun, they didn't have as many downloads, and maybe the messageboards were dead.
It's weird now, since everyone can use Twitter (or the rest of the internet) at the same time. There's no limit to the amount of people who can download Angry Birds from the app store.
When the PlayStation Network or HN is down, I guess it's kind of a reminder of those times.
I met my best friend that day (and many other close friends).
10 years after the first meetup, I attended my best friend's wedding - he'd met his partner on the same BB. They're still together! I even lived with them for a year, after a nasty breakup with my own S/O.