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Comment by subleq | Hacker News Reader

A 1987 BBS would not ask for an email address, would it?

No it would not. And "News" on a BBS called the Underground BBS is definitely not something probable. And real name? LOL. This is dream like - superficially/vaguely resembling reality, but very off on careful inspection.

It also wouldn't talk about quantum computing, VR, and AR.

And IoT or 3D printing. Pretty much everything on that "Future of technology" list is written from the perspective of something having knowledge of the future. When impersonating someone who would write a piece from 1987, it failed at unlearning concepts that weren't known at that time. That could become an interesting experiment: can AI pretend ignorance in a credible way?

I have this sudden vision of the hipsters who've "rediscovered" vinyl and cassettes renouncing IP communication for obscure experimental BBSes hosted only on old school circuit-switched landlines.

Where better for the coming anti-Facebook backlash to be born?

No. Typically, you could send someone what was probably more properly called a private message on the main board. (I don't remember what we actually called it at the time.) In general (with some caveats), messaging on BBSs and the big commercial systems like CIS--and for that matter the email systems at companies that had them in the 80s--were largely islands that couldn't communicate with other systems.

Email as technology existed, but as I recall commonly based on UUCP with bang-type addresses. A BBS kind of assume public accessible phone based access and that was kind of orthogonal to UUCP.

First, you're right.

Second, and more important: finally, an un-obnoxious, non-political use for fact-checking.

Who's going to build crowd-sourced Snopes for ChatGPT?

I'm not sure. I do remember a friend with a Tandy 1000 and CompuServe having email back then.

I don't recall BBS systems requiring email for registration. Most of the ones I went to a few years later (early 90s) didn't require registration at all.

CompuServe was not a BBS in the typical use of the term. And anyway CompuServe did not have an SMTP gateway until a bit later, 1989. They had their own closed system with their infamous octal User IDs eg: 74661,130. BBSes with direct internet email relays were always a rarity until the 90s, when BBSes were rapidly on the decline. And much more prevalent were relay systems such as FidoNet, RelayNet and StormNet.

The easiest way to have access to email and the internet in the 80s was via a university shell account or certain larger industry and defense employers.

> their infamous octal User IDs eg: 74661,130

That was a relic of the DEC PDP-10 / TOPS-10 architecture that Compuserve was built upon.

Uh, you could email many more people on compuserve and Fidonet then than were on the Internet at all. BBSes had that kind of email long before there was any move towards the Internet.

What's uh? Compuserve had email, but it was not Internet connected nor SMTP, where did I say or imply otherwise. And a BBS in the 1980s wouldn't ask you for your "email" address.

Yes, they would and it was called email regardless of whether it was SMTP. You could enter your FIDONET address or some other similar thing when you created an account to link them.

BBSs were at their peak user numbers in the early-to-mid 1990s.

It was only after 1995 or so with the web starting to develop and, subsequently, dial-up ISPs exploding that BBSs went in to that rapid decline.

Some of the bigger BBSs that offered subscriptions became dial-up ISPs. That really only lasted until broadband became popular of course. I don't remember when the local scene we had on the BBS faded out. Presumably sometime in that second half of the nineties timeframe.

The "writing was on the wall" by 1994 in my area. A number of BBSes had already converted to dialup ISPs - so by 1994 a major influx of users were those really not interested in the scene at all. By 1995 things were precipitously in decline - there were just way too many cheap and easy ways to get Internet access and that's where everyone was going. Some of my favorite BBSes were still around even in 1999 - but it was pretty much dead at that point.

The BBS Documentary has a nice segment on this - especially poignant if you lived through it.

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