Definitely get a nostalgia buzz thinking about the early 1990's BBS scene. Had a very vibrant community of BBS users in my city during that time.
It is ironic and somewhat interesting that the biggest aspects of the BBS scene that most people seem to miss (the community/local culture, meeting like-minded people in real life, some of the games, ANSI art, Echomail discussions), are all things borne from the technical limitations of the time. Slow modems and high long distance charges meant most people kept to their local boards. Games had to be designed in text with only a rudimentary colour scheme (sure, there was RoboBoard, RIP, NAPLPS and other graphical protocols - none which really caught on all that much) and still be compelling. Most were limited turn based (which meant being forced to only spend a couple hours a day playing, then having to wait). "World-wide" networks like FidoNet were dog-slow by today's standards (it was a toss-up whether a message would reach its recipient faster on an FTN network or via snail-mail), so discussion threads would last for days but only have several hundred messages in them to sort through.
I remember the years and work spent to try to improve on these limitations. Galacticomm and eSoft had their huge hackish ways to get past the non-multitasking nature of DOS and the IRQ limits of PCs to allow people to run huge multi-line boards on regular PCs. We saw Planet Connect dramatically lower the cost of distributing FidoNet packets via satellite downlink (still needed telephone uplink if you were sending, though). We saw big serial breakout boards and modem boxes (Galactibox?) come out. And of course, faster modems. Up to rip-roaring 33.6kbps speeds at the peak of the BBS era.
Ultimately, the internet and the "real" operating systems that are commonplace today overcame those limitations in ways that were pretty unfathomable to most of us common BBS users and sysops of the day. Unfortunately, BBS's today really only appeal to those of us who had lived through the struggle of configuring COM ports or QWK readers (or for many of us, a tosser/scanner, door game, FOSSIL driver, or getting DESQview working just right).
I run a "modern" BBS, Xibalba. Something I find is actually quite a few "callers" visiting the board are new blood. Younger generation that never lived through or touched a BBS but usually fall into one of two camps: 1 - "I'm tired of the modern corporate Internet", 2 - I just want to learn about history.
People still login to play games (I'm writing a new one!), and chat. Downloads here and there when you have hard to find history items, etc. Certainly nothing like it's heyday, but enough to keep me happy anyway :D
Reflecting, I feel like those limitations are what forced things to be good. With the limited toolkit, you had to focus on ux in a way that's not realistic to do today. So many classic games had excellent gameplay in spite of/because of those limitations. And waiting until midnight to play your turns on all those door games. It was compelling.
Contrast to a modern social media platform where you're just perpetually bombarded by mountains of shit... because they can.
When I switched from the BBS to the modern web+newsgroups in 1998, I immediately missed the former.
The "modern" Internet is better for finding information and downloading files. Email is better for 1:1 communication. For everything else, the BBS experience was superior.
Playing door games was better than playing online games. I'm not competing with the rest of the world!
Conferences vs forums/newsgroups: At least the ones I was part of had very strict moderation policies.[1] Discussions were always civil. Spam didn't exist.
And yeah, I miss QWK readers (heavy OLX on DOS user). For a number of years I had a QuickBasic executable that would convert my (downloaded) email inbox into a QWK format. I would read and respond via OLX, and then had some mechanism to convert the responses back to text so I could upload to the mail server.
[1] You were required to use your real name. The sysops enforced this.
I'm also from this era and I miss it so much. That being said, I used to read old Phrack issues and felt like I had missed out on the "real" golden age of BBSes. Everything already felt too complicated by the 90s and too locked down.
That being said using BananaCom with ZModem and running my own BBS on Spitfire then WWIV, was peak computing for me.
BBSes is one of those last places in the internet where you still can find your tribe without algorithms and, too much crying about politics. I’m glad it’s still hard UX entry to many as we don’t need many there. Just those enough few who get it
I think that if you are 40+ which is BBS target continually, then you should know all neighborhood nerds worth knowing, internet BBSes where you don’t lose time on idiocracy is exactly that neighborhood worth virtual saving. Post code doesn’t matter that much as the right mental model to survive and thrive there.
San Jose. My wife and I have lived in the same house for 10 years and know about 80% of the neighbors in a two block radius. We also probably know 50 additional families within a square mile as a result of our kids going to public schools here. This is essentially just like how it was when I grew up in the 80s, in a rural East Coast City of about 75k.
In the area where instead of Waymo, local taxi driver who still look like me and speaks my language drives the cabs and gives me discounts when we both have last ride back home from downtown. And we talk to each other more than sue each other
Yes, I miss those days. The late 80's through mid 90's was the golden age of BBSing. The transition from BBSes to ISPs was fun, but I still miss the community aspect of BBSes.
It's crazy to think about unencrypted, direct connections, where you literally dialed the phone number of a computer in someone's house, and that phone line was occupied for the entire session.
I'm ok with losing location bias. being from a small town and only having 50 ppl in our area code that werent long distance that knew about bbss meant 80% of them were crazy, old, or had weird/obscure interests. I did make a lot of friends during that era.
Interestingly, the FediVerse has that. Not in the big nodes that you've probably heard of, like Mastodon.Social. But there are loads of smaller nodes that definitely have moderate to strong degrees of locality.
I found a bit of this with the Meshtastic/Meshcore community in my city. I haven't participated lately, but I still keep a node running at home to try to support the network in a very limited way. Fun to pop on every so often and say hello, see who has new gear, and gauge the activity levels around me.
I also keep one in my car in case of ... something.
>Unfortunately it lost one of the most compelling features of the classic BBS culture: location bias.
I was thinking about trying to recapture this with a non-internet wifi or mesh networking setup in some way.
Maybe one could abuse the captive portal feature.
It would not have the broad regional aspect unless it was a federated mesh, but it would certainly have the local bias. I don’t think there are enough techy people in my immediate vicinity to pull something like that off and have the community sustain itself, though.
> I’m glad it’s still hard UX entry to many as we don’t need many there. Just those enough few who get it
Of course, we can't forget the rampant elitism among sysops (and no, I'm not counting myself outside of that group - I was downright insufferable back in the day).
My funniest BBS story: Got in to a flame war with the cosysop of a local board after uploading some text files. IIRC it was a big text file of jokes and he didn't like some of the jokes bc they were kinda racist (hey, it was the 90s) -- its not like I wrote the dang thing but it snowballed into a big back and forth until he eventually kicked me.
Then fast forward like a few months later. I'm in compsci class at high school talking about something with this older kid. He was from a different school in the county and would drive over just for CS class because his school didn't have an AP CS program. Then one of us must have said something and it suddenly clicked and we're both simultaneously pointing at each other like "you're that jackass from the BBS!"
Just imagine nowadays the likelihood of actually running in to some Internet stranger you get in a comment war with?!?
Reminds me that I wanted to expose an old T.A.G. BBS to the web as a nostalgia project recently. Feel free to check it out, create an account, play some LORD, Trade Wars 2002, Usurper, Messages, etc. I just wanted the experience to live on as I remember it with nothing more than a modern web browser required. https://nightwatchbbs.com
I tried getting into Telnet BBSs 20 years ago, but quickly got so sucked in that I was afraid it would turn unhealthy and I stopped doing it.
Tangentially, what do people use for telnet programs today? I used to just use the telnet command line on Windows, but that's gone for very obvious security reasons. Have most BBSes moved to ssh or similar?
It works well enough on several of the Telnet BBSes listed here, although BBSes are not what I wanted the tool for, and the operating systems I use it on actually retain either their original telnet client in base or a packaged one.
That's because I tested it against a handful of the Telnet BBSes listed here when I wrote it. (-:
There are a couple of well-supported Telnet programs you could use. A common one is SyncTerm which is purpose-built for the BBS scene (also is free). Zoc is another popular one, but it is more designed as a general-purpose terminal emulator (great for SSH-ing into servers). Zoc is commercial software.
BBS story... A local BBS had an issue where one of the features would cause it to crash when activated. The sysop worked around it by changing the main menu to read:
[T] Crash BBS
and just trusted people wouldn't ever try it more than once.
Wow, there are a lot more of these online than I would have guessed. Over a thousand. Feels like it would take forever to find one with a regular active user base. My off-the-cuff guess would be that 99% of them are ghost towns, kept online by the sysops only for the nostalgia factor. (But I'd very much like to be wrong about that!)
Related: I'm (pleasantly) surprised to see the rash of BBS-related content on HN recently, as I've been working on my own (rather niche) BBS retrospective article for the past month or so.
speaking of bbs (and reading the sentiments in this thread) i just wanted to make you aware of "BBS the documentary" https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0460402/
it's been a long time since i've seen it, but from my recollection it was a pretty descent watch
It is ironic and somewhat interesting that the biggest aspects of the BBS scene that most people seem to miss (the community/local culture, meeting like-minded people in real life, some of the games, ANSI art, Echomail discussions), are all things borne from the technical limitations of the time. Slow modems and high long distance charges meant most people kept to their local boards. Games had to be designed in text with only a rudimentary colour scheme (sure, there was RoboBoard, RIP, NAPLPS and other graphical protocols - none which really caught on all that much) and still be compelling. Most were limited turn based (which meant being forced to only spend a couple hours a day playing, then having to wait). "World-wide" networks like FidoNet were dog-slow by today's standards (it was a toss-up whether a message would reach its recipient faster on an FTN network or via snail-mail), so discussion threads would last for days but only have several hundred messages in them to sort through.
I remember the years and work spent to try to improve on these limitations. Galacticomm and eSoft had their huge hackish ways to get past the non-multitasking nature of DOS and the IRQ limits of PCs to allow people to run huge multi-line boards on regular PCs. We saw Planet Connect dramatically lower the cost of distributing FidoNet packets via satellite downlink (still needed telephone uplink if you were sending, though). We saw big serial breakout boards and modem boxes (Galactibox?) come out. And of course, faster modems. Up to rip-roaring 33.6kbps speeds at the peak of the BBS era.
Ultimately, the internet and the "real" operating systems that are commonplace today overcame those limitations in ways that were pretty unfathomable to most of us common BBS users and sysops of the day. Unfortunately, BBS's today really only appeal to those of us who had lived through the struggle of configuring COM ports or QWK readers (or for many of us, a tosser/scanner, door game, FOSSIL driver, or getting DESQview working just right).
People still login to play games (I'm writing a new one!), and chat. Downloads here and there when you have hard to find history items, etc. Certainly nothing like it's heyday, but enough to keep me happy anyway :D
Contrast to a modern social media platform where you're just perpetually bombarded by mountains of shit... because they can.
The "modern" Internet is better for finding information and downloading files. Email is better for 1:1 communication. For everything else, the BBS experience was superior.
Playing door games was better than playing online games. I'm not competing with the rest of the world!
Conferences vs forums/newsgroups: At least the ones I was part of had very strict moderation policies.[1] Discussions were always civil. Spam didn't exist.
And yeah, I miss QWK readers (heavy OLX on DOS user). For a number of years I had a QuickBasic executable that would convert my (downloaded) email inbox into a QWK format. I would read and respond via OLX, and then had some mechanism to convert the responses back to text so I could upload to the mail server.
[1] You were required to use your real name. The sysops enforced this.
That being said using BananaCom with ZModem and running my own BBS on Spitfire then WWIV, was peak computing for me.
I met many local people though BBSs. It was an amazing way to find like minded geeks near you.
It's crazy to think about unencrypted, direct connections, where you literally dialed the phone number of a computer in someone's house, and that phone line was occupied for the entire session.
I also keep one in my car in case of ... something.
I was thinking about trying to recapture this with a non-internet wifi or mesh networking setup in some way.
Maybe one could abuse the captive portal feature.
It would not have the broad regional aspect unless it was a federated mesh, but it would certainly have the local bias. I don’t think there are enough techy people in my immediate vicinity to pull something like that off and have the community sustain itself, though.
Of course, we can't forget the rampant elitism among sysops (and no, I'm not counting myself outside of that group - I was downright insufferable back in the day).
My funniest BBS story: Got in to a flame war with the cosysop of a local board after uploading some text files. IIRC it was a big text file of jokes and he didn't like some of the jokes bc they were kinda racist (hey, it was the 90s) -- its not like I wrote the dang thing but it snowballed into a big back and forth until he eventually kicked me.
Then fast forward like a few months later. I'm in compsci class at high school talking about something with this older kid. He was from a different school in the county and would drive over just for CS class because his school didn't have an AP CS program. Then one of us must have said something and it suddenly clicked and we're both simultaneously pointing at each other like "you're that jackass from the BBS!"
Just imagine nowadays the likelihood of actually running in to some Internet stranger you get in a comment war with?!?
Tangentially, what do people use for telnet programs today? I used to just use the telnet command line on Windows, but that's gone for very obvious security reasons. Have most BBSes moved to ssh or similar?
- IcyTerm - SyncTERM - TERMinator - NetRunner
All support SSH. The top 3 support audio, sixel, RIP, and others as well. Even support for Amiga and C64 fonts/etc.
Enjoy!
* https://jdebp.uk/Softwares/nosh/guide/commands/nvt-client.xm...
It works well enough on several of the Telnet BBSes listed here, although BBSes are not what I wanted the tool for, and the operating systems I use it on actually retain either their original telnet client in base or a packaged one.
That's because I tested it against a handful of the Telnet BBSes listed here when I wrote it. (-:
SyncTerm: https://syncterm.bbsdev.net/ Zoc: https://www.emtec.com/zoc/index.html
But Telnet Client has not been enabled by default for a while now.
https://www.laptopmag.com/how-to/enable-and-use-telnet-on-wi...
Related: I'm (pleasantly) surprised to see the rash of BBS-related content on HN recently, as I've been working on my own (rather niche) BBS retrospective article for the past month or so.
Here's a little demo forum I've been working on. Can runs on a potato.
https://gitlab.com/here_forawhile/torumplus/-/raw/main/Torum...
it's been a long time since i've seen it, but from my recollection it was a pretty descent watch
2023 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38136404
2021 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29295689
2019 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20012977