Tracing the origins of modern Internet culture to the BBS world

Watch Jason Scott's BBS documentary to see the people who built many of the icons of the bbs world. It is 8 episodes long and is available on youtube right now. I have watched it multiple times and the depth it provides into what was going on is why I like it. I dialed into bbses for years to post messages, play games, and get patches. At the time I didn't fully grasp how wide spread the phenomenon was so when your favorite board went away it was brutal.

I see a lot of the bbs community feel in many online forums so I know it lives on.

Many BBS systems provided Internet access to newsgroups and IRC chat. Many BBS systems had become ISPs in order to survive. In the early to mid 1990's many BBS operators had invested in an ISDN Internet modem and then SLIP/PPP access on their BBS to become ISPs via rows of MODEMS.

Once the telecommunication and cable companies got into Internet access providing they bought out the ISPs to get customers.

Once DSL and Cable Modems because less expensive and people left dial-up MODEMS these BBSes hard started to die.

There still exists a part of BBS culture here: http://www.synchro.net/

An Internet based BBS system that uses Telenet.

I kept my BBS up and running until about 1996. I really couldn't understand why people liked the "web" so much because my bbs had so many more features then any website at the time. Eventually getting down to about 1 call a day and BBS's dropping like flies (from 1200 in San Diego to just a handful) I had to move on from it.

1:2230/149 (I think, anyways -- it's been a while!)