| [HN Gopher] Ask HN: What was it like to use BBS?
___________________________________________________________________
Ask HN: What was it like to use BBS?
I want to understand how the experience was what was the cost
involved what were the entry barrier for an average person to join
How similar was it to current social media networks How big the
industry around it actually become From a tech point of view what
do you think were the major breakthroughs and what made it to the
internet we see today. I have watched the documentary
www.bbsdocumentary.com , so I have some context but want some more
anecdotes if I can :)
Author : ranuzz
Score : 95 points
Date : 2021-11-07 15:29 UTC (7 hours ago)
| pimlottc wrote:
| It was almost entirely asynchronous. Most BBSes had only a single
| line, so you'd be the only one online (once you managed to get
| through). You'd read your mail, check the latest forum messages,
| maybe make some posts, play your turns in the door games, and
| then... well, nothing would happen until you hang up and let
| other people have a chance. Maybe if the sysop was around you
| could have real-time text chat (in split screen). But it was
| mostly a much more delayed gratification than using the internet
| is today.
| Jemm wrote:
| Just want to mention that amateur radio uses BBSs which are
| accessible over the radio. A different thing but with a similar
| feel.
| tibbydudeza wrote:
| It was expensive with per minute phone charging so you usually
| dialed in at night when the costs was lower - off course the rest
| of the household slept so you had exclusive use.
|
| A good modem was essential i.e US Robotics and later I discovered
| Fidonet - so forums became far more important than downloads.
| bencollier49 wrote:
| From the UK:
|
| I was about 15, in 1993, when I managed to convince my parents to
| buy me a modem. I used to use it out of hours when phone calls
| were cheaper. Nevertheless, I think I managed to rack up a PS200
| phone bill in the first month or so.
|
| Eventually I started running my own BBS, which would only become
| available at 8pm and come offline at 8am. If I remember
| correctly, I called it "The Graveyard". I had a steady stream of
| callers on the single line that it shared with the home phone. I
| would often chat to them via "Sysop Chat" whilst simultaneously
| talking to friends nearby over CB radio.
|
| When I wasn't doing that, I was calling into all sorts of odd
| places - hacker boards (one of which I was thrown off for asking
| if there was a non-colour version, "l4mer", me on my Commodore
| PC20-III) - some cyberpunk boards (including the CyberCafe in
| London), and "Ooh!", on which I remember being repeatedly
| propositioned on various insalubrious chat groups, when I wasn't
| reading posts about Babylon 5 on Fidonet. On another I learned
| about raves happening vaguely nearby.
|
| The whole thing was a wonderful, glorious chaotic mess. It felt
| like exploring a mysterious universe which was growing and
| mutating every day, full of infinite possibilities, and of course
| it was much better than what we have these days.
| jasonpeacock wrote:
| 9600baud was revolutionary compared to 2400baud, text would load
| & scroll faster than you could read it!
|
| Some sites has upload/download ratios - you could only download
| so much many files without uploading files, forcing an exchange
| rate.
|
| There was a selection of download protocols you'd choose from,
| based on what your client support and the BBS supported:
| "KERMIT", "XMODEM", "YMODEM", "ZMODEM", and "JMODEM"
|
| The better protocols supported batch, multi-file, compression,
| and resuming interrupted downloads - very important for when your
| session was interrupted by someone else in the house picking up
| the phone and trying to dial.
|
| We had a second phone line installed for the modem; I learned how
| telephone wiring worked and re-wired the our phone outlets to use
| the correct lines.
| icedchai wrote:
| 9600 baud definitely felt like a quantum leap! I remember
| upgrading from 2400 to 9600. It was _huge_.
| FjolsvithAase wrote:
| And then there was the commoners and the elites: Those who
| had USR Sportster modems and the superior USR Couriers.
| samstave wrote:
| Dont forget fucking with IRQs and DIP switches and jumpers to
| get that fancy 300 baud modem up and running so you could dial
| your best friend for a head-to-head game of Populous on your
| ever so amazingly awesome new EGA monitor! No more Cyan or
| Amber for this guy! 16 colors FTW!
|
| EDIT: And oh yeah - please insert Game Disk #2
| bink wrote:
| All this talk of IRQs and DIP switches and no one has
| mentioned N81 or E71. There was a time when you had to pay
| attention to the parity before dialing. Also, it looks like
| 8N1 and 7E1 have become the more common notation now.
| addingnumbers wrote:
| Worth mentioning since it's unimaginable to many kids today, in
| the BBS days, there was no multitasking. When you kicked off a
| download that took 40 minutes, you couldn't do anything at all
| with your computer while it was transferring. (at least for MS-
| DOS users, who were the vast majority) All you had on your
| screen was the progress meter, some statistics, and an abort
| button.
|
| One day I came across a drop-in replacement for the zmodem
| transfer executable called "super zmodem" that let you play
| ascii Tetris while a transfer was going on and _it blew my
| fricking mind_.
|
| In total I probably played more Tetris on that download screen
| than I did with my Nintendo Gameboy that only had three games.
| bink wrote:
| You couldn't do anything unless you had software like
| Desqview. That was a revolution.
| ruslan wrote:
| Many Fidonet mailers, like Binkley or T-Mail supported Hydra
| which was novel multi-streaming bidirectional serial
| protocol. You could download several files while uploading
| your outbound mail at the same time. It was very useful for
| those lucky possessed 28800 baud modems like ZyXEL Elite or
| US Robotics Courier (mid/late 90th).
| ryandrake wrote:
| Not if you used DESQview [1]. I think everyone serious about
| BBSing used DESQview to multitask in DOS. Then along came
| DESQview/X...
|
| 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DESQview
| throw0101a wrote:
| Don't forget QEMM.
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QEMM
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| Yeah DESQview was interesting but you couldn't do
| everything in it because most serious programs would need
| all the resources of the computer, or they'd interfere with
| the IRQ assignments, leading to many crashes.
|
| We're talking a time before even as much as cooperative
| multitasking of course. DESQview was multitasking programs
| that were not even meant for it.
|
| Most people I knew didn't use it for that reason. If I
| really wanted to multitask while BBS'ing I'd just grab my
| Amiga I had beside the PC (which in itself actually had a
| real pre-emptive multitasking OS in ROM!).
|
| There were a few programs that could do something else
| while a download was happening, like Telemate. It gave you
| at least a text editor and a file manager IIRC.
| jboy55 wrote:
| I did all my BBSing with my Amiga 500. I don't think I
| ever dared do too much multitasking while I was
| downloading. First, had to download to RAM:, because if
| you did something that involved disk, you could get a
| timeout. If you messed up the transfer, and you got
| disconnected, then you'd have to try and redial to get
| back on, which could take hours.
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| This is true... Disk access on Amiga was pretty crap,
| indeed. Often causing errors. And a HDD was super
| expensive so I didn't have one (just like a floppy drive
| was in the 8-bit age)
|
| To be honest I didn't do much downloading at all in those
| days.. Just didn't have the patience for it. If I did do
| it I would do so over packet radio that I could just
| leave running all night. I had a third old PC just for
| that :)
|
| Another reason that I didn't BBS much on my Amiga was
| that my modem was inside my PC on an ISA card for most of
| the time I used BBS'es. So I had to run a program on the
| PC to forward the modem data over a null-modem to the
| Amiga so either way I couldn't use the PC. So usually my
| PC was for modem use and the Amiga for other stuff.
| jboy55 wrote:
| Something else just flashed into my mind from my Amiga
| days, I believe right clicking paused the serial port.
| Depending on the protocol, it could resume, but I usually
| ran Ymodem-G, with little issues with data corruption,
| but could eek out an extra 5-10% data speed. It also
| didn't resume all that reliably, another mark against
| using Multi-tasking while downloading on the Amiga.
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| Huh I never experienced that at all.. Maybe with certain
| specific software?
|
| I did blow up my serial ports several times with
| incorrectly wired cables. Luckily the first time I put
| the controller IC in a socket so the second time around
| it was easy :P But it was pretty sensitive to stuff like
| that. I've never managed to blow up a PC serial port and
| IIRC the controller IC was the same so I guess they used
| extra buffering or something.
| thanatos519 wrote:
| I had an original IBM PC and I wrote most of my high
| school essays in Telemate's text editor. :)
| mikewarot wrote:
| Nitpick - Baud rate refers to the number of symbols sent by the
| modem per second, you can't send more than 8000 symbols per
| second through an analog phone line, as they are sampled at 8
| Khz. You can sent multiple bits per symbol, which all modems
| did. By utilizing a direct digital connection to the phone
| network, an ISP could send up to 53 kbits/second using all 8
| bits of each sample, minus a few for transitions that weren't
| allowed because of cross talk with other phone lines.
|
| Thus, the fastest modems were 8000 baud.
|
| PS: Yes, it was _amazing_ to see the text actually flow /
| smooth scroll up the screen for the first time in my life, way
| faster than I could read it when it got a US Robotics Courier
| HST modem.
| ruslan wrote:
| 57600 baud (V.92) to be precise.
| Turing_Machine wrote:
| Ah... memories of technical arguments past. :-)
|
| Some clarification for those who might not be familiar:
|
| One way to illustrate the difference is to consider
| communicating with physical signal flags, where there's a
| limit to how fast you can raise and lower the flags. The baud
| rate is how fast you can change the flag. The bit rate is how
| fast the information flows.
|
| Say you have only a black flag and a white flag, and you let
| the black flag be 1 and the white flag 0. In this case, the
| baud rate and the bit rate are the same, as each flag
| transition represents 1 bit of information.
|
| Now suppose you have also have a red flag and a green flag.
| You could let white be 00, black be 01, red be 10, and green
| be 11. The baud rate (rate of running the flags up and down
| the pole) remains the same, but the bit rate (number of bits
| encoded by a flag) has doubled.
|
| Analog modems used all kinds of tricks to encode more than
| one bit on each symbol transition. Later models sometimes
| even had built-in data compression and error correction (e.g.
| the Telebit modems, which would actually simulate things like
| ZMODEM and UUCP g protocol to the computers, while using
| their own compression/correction mechanisms on the physical
| link).
| rconti wrote:
| I think one of the biggest barriers to entry was either fighting
| over the phone line, or having a 2nd phone line. Presumably, if
| you didn't have a computer, you weren't interested in BBSing.
| Once you had a computer and the interest, yeah, the modem costs,
| and phone line costs.
|
| I was very fortunate in that we had a 2nd phone line in our
| house, so I could use it as often as I wanted. I just had to
| beg/borrow/steal for a modem. First modem was 2400bps, I later
| got a 14.4k modem for christmas a few years later (Absolute
| revolution; 6x increase in transfer speeds overnight. And of
| course, later, 28.8k, 33.6k. I never did the "56k" scam because
| they wouldn't push much past 42k anyway.
|
| You had to actually FIND BBSes by looking in a magazine or
| something that listed them. (or, less frequently, from friends).
| Most BBSes were 1-2 lines, though one I frequented had 4 lines,
| and there were a few 'huge' BBSes with a dozen lines. Some
| particularly SMALL BBSes were listed with certain hours, like
| 10pm-6am only. I never talked to a SysOp of such a small board,
| but I imagine they added a 2nd phone line sooner rather than
| later, and went dedicated, because you'd get tired of modems
| dialing your home phone "after hours" really quickly.
|
| Many boards had membership/donation models, where you got the
| 'good' content if you donated.
|
| It was pretty different from current social media because your
| community was the local BBS community, not necessarily your IRL
| friends.
| Jeema101 wrote:
| The cost was not too high: if your family already had a computer,
| you just had to buy a modem, although they were somewhat
| expensive for a kid at the time.
|
| After you had the hardware, you still needed a few more things
| though: first, you had to know of phone numbers for local BBSes.
| In my area, they were all listed in a local computer user
| newspaper that was available at the local Micro Center.
|
| Once you had the modem and phone numbers of local BBSes, you also
| needed a terminal program to actually dial in. I think I got mine
| at a local bookstore that also sold shareware software on floppy
| disks.
|
| Once you had all those things, you were ready to start. For me it
| was mostly just dialing around to local BBSes, seeing what files
| they had, playing door games (i.e. online games hosted on the
| BBS), and downloading shareware games and stuff. I didn't do a
| whole lot of interacting with other people on the BBS outside of
| games - for one, there was never any things like realtime chat
| with other users except on boards with multiple phone lines which
| were pretty rare. Also, all downloads took _forever_ , so people
| were always experimenting with new download protocols to try to
| eek out a little more speed - that was a big thing at the time.
|
| It was all very niche and not really very mainstream - mostly
| just computer nerds did it.
|
| Once internet service providers became more mainstream, BBSes
| died out, because who wants to dial into some local podunk
| bulletin board service when you could be connecting to people
| across the whole world?
| bink wrote:
| Back before Micro Center or CompUSA we actually got a BBS list
| from the local library. On the East Coast we had Focke's list.
|
| This is an interesting article from 1989 about the culture:
| https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/1989/07/28/...
| ttul wrote:
| Oh man it was so awesome and frustrating. There was a thing
| called Fidonet which was like email, but messages were stored and
| forwarded nightly to reach everyone else. It would take two or
| three days to get a reply...
| b20000 wrote:
| much cooler than the internet and a lot less bullshit and drama
| hkchad wrote:
| It was great until the operator had to jump on and tell you his
| mom needed to use the phone add if have to log out. The best part
| was you knew most of the people running them, we'd met at tech
| oriented stores like babbage's or radio shack, usually trying to
| buy some software and them giving us access to their bbs with
| everything you can imagine on it.
| icedchai wrote:
| I started BBSing in 1988 or so. I ran my own from 1992 until
| 1997-ish, when it kinda fizzled out. I wrote my own BBS software,
| after teaching myself C. I even had Internet email and a few
| newsgroups through UUCP.
|
| It was a tighter knit community: you got to know people locally,
| people you never would've met otherwise. That is something I
| really miss from the old BBS days: the local community aspect.
| dccoolgai wrote:
| Looking back on it now,I would trade almost everything about the
| modern web to have that experience back. Some anecdotes that
| stick out in my memory:
|
| It was pretty common for BBS communities to have annual picnics.
|
| Tradewars and other doors games were so much fun. I don't think
| another game experience even came close to that until World of
| Warcraft like 20 years later.
|
| It was sort of a proto-Web/pre-AOL experience,but Q-Link was
| amazing. I think not enough people realize how much that set the
| tone for everything that came after it.
| tdrdt wrote:
| It was mom screaming upstairs 'are you online again!?' because
| she could not use the phone.
| mshockwave wrote:
| Taiwan still has a really active (around 120k active users per
| day IIRC) BBS site: telnet://ptt.cc or visit the web interface
| https://term.ptt.cc
| mikewarot wrote:
| The main barrier to entry was to not be a "twit", and get along
| reasonably with everyone.
|
| It wasn't much different than here at HN, except for the
| monospaced fonts back in the days of MS-DOS, and being able to
| read the text at the same speed it came across the phone line.
| (You can read about 1200-2400 bits/second ASCII).
|
| No real graphics, no sound, just text and mostly friendly people.
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| > The main barrier to entry was to not be a "twit", and get
| along reasonably with everyone.
|
| Pretty much like the internet so :)
| davismwfl wrote:
| It was pretty awesome. The barrier to entry was a little high for
| a lot of people in the 80's as you required a decent PC, modem
| and had to pay the phone bill for long distance calls.
|
| Something people don't remember is that long distance calling was
| not free, you couldn't call other area codes or states in the US
| without paying a per minute fee. It was more on-par to
| international calling today then with mobile phone calls. Oh, and
| busy lines were not uncommon, you'd spend hours trying to dial
| into a system to get a file or post on a forum etc.
|
| I would say it is less like social media today and more like
| forums. So less Facebook/Twitter and more reddit style. Though
| BBS' were also less filtered and far less big brother IMO. Of
| course some site admins would be militant about their feelings
| and only allow certain view points but that was fine because
| there were tons of other BBS' to play on.
|
| The industry was fairly big and growing fast, one of the larger
| us BBS systems was execpc, you can find stuff on them still. They
| started as a small BBS that turned into a fairly large internet
| provider eventually. But there were tons of players, and there
| were systems like Tag BBS etc. I both hosted a BBS for a number
| of years and was a user of tons of them.
|
| Another key thing people don't think about today, disk space was
| at a premium (especially for personal computers). We used floppy
| disks for moving files a lot and hard drives were expensive so
| getting 10Mb or 40Mb drives was awesome. Putting in 3-4 hard
| drives to get yourself over 100Mb was crazy. Drive technology was
| still evolving so lots of different types with pros/cons and most
| were loud, pretty large and obnoxious.
|
| A lot of the search & compression technology we created during
| the BBS days is still in use, though in different ways now.
| Compression being pretty critical since for most long distance
| sites you paid per minute and downloading a 1Mb file over
| 9600baud was slow. Man I remember going from 1200-2400-9600-19200
| then 38400 and 115200. You felt like a damn rock star when your
| file downloads didn't take 6-8 hours and could be done in like an
| hour or so.
|
| It was definitely a lot of community and sharing. There were
| trolls then just like now, but generally I feel like back then
| they were less damaging or hurtful and more entertaining. Of
| course, there were scams on most forums just like now, but good
| BBS sites did their best to keep them at bay.
| ok123456 wrote:
| >Something people don't remember is that long distance calling
| was not free,
|
| "Local" calls weren't always free either. Each locality had
| their own set of exchanges that were considered "local" and
| beyond that it was "local-long distance." It was completely
| arbitrary. The "local-long distance" rates were often higher
| than the actual long distance since there was still something
| of a monopoly.
|
| Then in some areas they didn't have flat rate lines, where
| local calls calls were "free". There were message rate lines
| where calling different places within your locality cost a
| different number of message units per call, and only a fixed
| number of them were included with your service. It's very
| similar to cloud pricing now.
| ryandrake wrote:
| > A lot of the search & compression technology we created
| during the BBS days is still in use, though in different ways
| now. Compression being pretty critical since for most long
| distance sites you paid per minute and downloading a 1Mb file
| over 9600baud was slow. Man I remember going from
| 1200-2400-9600-19200 then 38400 and 115200. You felt like a
| damn rock star when your file downloads didn't take 6-8 hours
| and could be done in like an hour or so.
|
| I started BBSing in the late 80s, so saw the very tail end of
| 2400, but the first modem I bought was 9600, so I missed the
| big 2400-9600 change mostly. Road the wave all the way up to
| 56K. I had planned to finally start my own BBS when I moved off
| to University in 1994, since my parents wouldn't let me buy
| dedicated phone lines. Saved all my cash from working McDonalds
| and was all ready to pull the trigger on multiple V.34 56K
| USRobotics Courier modems and had the BBS (based on WWIV) all
| ready to turn on. Confirmed that the University would allow
| multiple phone lines per dorm. Got to University, and lo and
| behold! The summer before, they outfitted all dormitories with
| two 10-base-T ethernet connections to the Internet backbone.
| Mind blown. Ditched the BBS idea instantly and that was it, I
| never dialed into another BBS or ran my own.
|
| A lot of my BBS friends also instantly lost interest the moment
| they entered University and had a proper high-speed Internet
| connection.
| davismwfl wrote:
| Totally agree, I had early access to the internet through one
| of the BBS's I subscribed to, textual only of course cause
| the www didn't exist at first and then even in the early 90's
| it was still very new.
|
| But in the early to mid 90's we had a dedicated T1 trunk (at
| work) to connect us to UUNET. All fun times. Even then, I
| still used a few BBS' at home (including for home internet
| access) until say like 1995/96 when I moved solely over to
| Mindspring. Might be a little off on the year I switched but
| not by much, that is a long time ago.
| VLM wrote:
| > one of the larger us BBS systems was execpc
|
| Around 1990 they started a parallel "less serious" service
| called execpc chat, or something like that (had a few names)
| and I played online trivia on exec chat for MANY hours. For
| some strange reason I seem to remember Thursday nights. For a
| long time if you had a subscription to the "serious" execpc
| they gave away a subscription to the "fun" exec chat service.
| Eventually around '92 I got on the internet and IRC (later
| MUDs) then dozens of people because normal.
|
| Exec-PC the main service had an interesting file search system
| that used an enormous number of PCs in parallel and they called
| it hyper-search or something like that and it was ridiculously
| fast, like Google search speed.
|
| You could tell if someone was serious about BBS stuff because
| they had multiple PCs on their desk. The fancier PC for gaming
| or programming or using in general, and the lame PC that barely
| booted but could be dedicated to downloading files for an hour
| or whatever who cares. Magnetic interference between adjacent
| CRT monitors was a problem, or some company named "Black Box"
| sold monitor switchboxes so you could have as many as four
| analog VGA PCs plugged into one monitor, only one visible at a
| time of course, or a similar switch could connect one keyboard
| to multiple computers. I remember seeing an ad for my first KVM
| switch, well, KV, anyway, and that was pretty mindblowing that
| you only need one box instead of two. I had multiple PCs on my
| desk from the late 80s until about 2018, habit I guess. Many
| people also had a TV on their desk; start a download, watch TV,
| who cares how long the download takes.
| ecpottinger wrote:
| One thing to remember of message hopping. I ran a BBS in
| Oshawa, if you posted a public message to it, it was copied to
| the Whitby BBS, who in turn copied it to the BBS in Pickering,
| who in turn copied to a Toronto BBS where it was copied to
| multiple systems. In affect the public section was one big BBS
| it was just that messages would take days to relay around.
|
| I remember some silly reporter did not understand and he called
| BBSes all around North America posting the same message, and
| for the next week or so you would see repeats of his message
| all the way from California and Florida.
| jesuslop wrote:
| It was expensive in phone line charges intercity. It was slow, as
| in hollywood hacker movies where characters printed one at a time
| making funny noises. And it was a thrill. It is now hard to
| apraise how isolating is being limited to interact with people
| you physically know. You got prestige resending interesting
| content and information had to be free. Now you retweet stuff.
| You can experience it yourself, google for telnet bbs.
| https://www.pcmag.com/news/7-modern-bbses-worth-calling-toda...
| dharma1 wrote:
| It was sometimes hard to get in (unless the BBS had multiple
| phone lines, and even then the popular ones were often busy), so
| there was always a bit of anticipation waiting for that modem
| connect tone, and you'd leave it on auto redial for ages
| sometimes.
|
| Checking out what files other people had uploaded or what
| comments they had made was fun, and you could sort of have a
| real-time chat with the sysop when they were online. Downloading
| stuff took ages, sometimes overnight.
|
| Warez was a big part of it, but so was all sorts of text files
| for making various stuff, tracker music, demos etc. It was a real
| DIY culture and a lot of fun.
|
| If someone else in your household picked up the phone to make a
| call when you were online, the connection dropped (the modem used
| the main phone line). That was the worst! Luckily you could
| continue downloading where you left off usually after
| reconnecting. Many BBSs had leech ratios - you needed to upload
| stuff as well.
|
| This was late 80s/early 90s... Beyond the PC and modem cost you'd
| pay for local calls, which was pretty expensive for a bunch of 12
| year olds. International calls were out of the question
| iszomer wrote:
| Don't forget ascii and ansipr0n.
| addingnumbers wrote:
| > Many BBSs had leech ratios - you needed to upload stuff as
| well.
|
| Ashamed to admit I was unzipping my zips and re-zipping them
| with `pkzip -e0 ...` to disable the compression before
| uploading them to another BBS. It inflated my upload ratio
| several times over and the upload looked unbelievably fast
| because zmodem transfer protocol would do decent in-line
| compression on uncompressed files.
| sumthinprofound wrote:
| I recall "Anarchist's Cookbook" and phone phreaking manuals as
| ubiquitous text files found on every BBS's file section.
| dharma1 wrote:
| Haha yes that was a classic! Also bunch of demo coding and
| electronics stuff as text files.. sound cards were pretty
| expensive back then, I remember downloading DIY AdLib
| instructions/schematics and my friends dad built it for a
| fraction of the cost of a real one
| sumthinprofound wrote:
| I'm imagining everything was ASCII character art
| schematics, given the available toolset back then.
| thedougd wrote:
| Thank you, Kermit and ZModem. I remember a few legacy BBS
| didn't support the newer protocols which would let you resume
| downloads.
|
| Even better was when these were combined with an image viewer
| that would let you view an image as it downloaded. Progressive
| gif let you see it in full, but blurry and watch as detail
| filled in.
| SavantIdiot wrote:
| I cannot believe no one has mentioned "Computer Shopper" yet!
|
| It was a large-format magazine (glue-binding) with hundreds of
| pages, mostly ads in the front, and international BBS's in the
| back.
|
| The back was basically a paper version of WHOIS. Not every BBS
| listed what it did, and some were lame, but others had up to 16
| (gasp) modems. Most you just got busy signals. And porn, lots of
| CGA 4-bit porn (this was before 320x200x8 VGA). But sometimes
| there were multiplayer games where you got one turn per day.
|
| The ads were for Chinese/HongKong companies that made clone
| parts. "Clone" was the big word back then, as in PC Clone. It was
| DIY without a helmet! I bought my first 32MB MFM HDD (back when
| you had to manually enter cylinders, heads, and sectors into the
| BIOS) and a 286 mobo out of Computer Shopper (with 512KB of DRAM
| in DIP format that cost like $500). And then started calling
| random BBSes all over Europe. Learned real quick to read the
| costs on my phone bill.
|
| There were also simple services for businesses. For example, my
| first job in the 80's used Novell token-ring netware in the
| office computers, but a few lucky people had modems. I remember
| using a service called EaasySabre [sic] to buy a plane ticket for
| business travel. It connected you to a TTY terminal that looked
| just like the screens the airline counter agents used. I felt
| supremely cool booking a ticket at 2400 baud from my first
| office, despite it taking FOREVER.
| motohagiography wrote:
| Not unlike this, apparently: http://mbrserver.com/ (musician,
| master boot record built a bbs for fans)
| samstave wrote:
| NEVER SMOKE POT AND THEN CALL INTO THE PIT!
|
| Once you are 14 years old and your favorite games are THE PIT and
| TRADE WARS! on the nearest BBS which is in (408) and you live in
| (916) - and your parents pay the long distance bill... and you
| liked to smoke pot and play TRADE WARS and accidentally sell when
| you should have bought thus fucking up the galactic market-corner
| you had on wheat...
|
| But then your dad gets a $926 phone bill because you were on the
| fucking modem all day and then you get grounded for a month....
|
| Yeah - thats what BBS'ing was like...
|
| Then I setup the first CAD network with GeneriCAD and a bunch of
| Everex machines and then installed a BBS on our School EVEREX
| STep Cube server... and served warez out of Northlake Tahoe's
| first ever connection to the online world...
|
| Yeah that was fun.
| pengaru wrote:
| It was nice in that it was inherently local because local calls
| cost a nickel with unlimited duration. You almost always were
| interacting with people within your area code if not your
| immediate neighborhood.
|
| I met a bunch of people irl from BBSes and even some girlfriends,
| while being confined to an area reachable by bmx bike.
| stolenmerch wrote:
| You can try it for yourself. Download SyncTerm and connect to
| House of Lunduke BBS. I mostly logged in to my local BBS to play
| door games like Legend of the Red Dragon and The Pit. 100% of the
| money I earned from my high school job went to paying the insane
| phone bill I'd rack up calling boards all over the country
| looking for files. The best was Rusty n Edie's BBS.
|
| https://sourceforge.net/projects/syncterm/
|
| https://lunduke.locals.com/post/264191/the-house-of-lunduke-...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rusty_n_Edie%27s_BBS
| johngalt wrote:
| I was a SysOp from the twilight years of BBS. To answer your
| questions:
|
| The costs were mostly paid by the SysOps. In the form of
| additional phone lines, disk space, maintenance time etc... A
| user would have to worry about long distance charges.
|
| Re: average people. At the time, there was much more of a
| dividing line between computer people and average person. Not
| that you had to be an expert, but you did have to be an
| enthusiast. The average person would have neither the skill nor
| inclination/interest.
|
| Not very similar to social media. Closest description would be a
| combo of 4chan, HN, and sourceforge, but much more local and
| inward looking. Like comparing a small town bar vs tinder.
|
| "The BBS industry" was so small that the phrase sounds silly to
| say. Certainly there were official business bbs and larger
| players but scale was nothing compared to modern tech companies.
|
| The hardest thing to explain now is how novel participating in a
| network like this was. Prior to large scale internet access,
| computers were stand alone devices. Networks were arcane company
| owned things. Having your computer dynamically bring up what
| others were publishing was new and interesting.
| greggman3 wrote:
| Setting your computer to redial over and over hopping to get in
| Liambp wrote:
| I can bring you back a little further than BBS system. I was in
| University n Europe in the 1980s and thanks to IBM European
| Universities got free access to a European academic research
| network (EARN). We soon discovered that you could use various
| gateways to get stuff off the much more developed US academic /
| defense research network called internet called ARPANET. The most
| reliable way of communicating was to use specially constructed
| emails and the servers would send files back in ASCII encoded
| pieces also by email that you had to reconstruct to get the
| original files. It always amused me that the biggest server
| around was hosted by "White Sands Missile Base" and I downloaded
| a lot of stuff from there.
|
| It is worth noting that back in those days you couldn't just type
| an email as John@company.com. You needed to tell the mail server
| what path it needed to take to get to the recipient. We developed
| quite ingenuous ways of bouncing emails around various connected
| networks in order to get them to our intended destinations.
| randombits0 wrote:
| I was using bbs'es in the late seventies, so not quite further
| back. Still, cool story, bro. :)
| ruslan wrote:
| The mailing system your are referring to is called UUCP (Unix
| to Unix copy protocol). It can use serial link or IP as a
| transport to transmit batches of tar-gzipped emails. Binaries
| were usually uuencoded in mail body (if you are on FreeBSD,
| type: man uuencode).
| alfiedotwtf wrote:
| > what was the cost involved
|
| There was a textile with every BBS in Australia. I dialed every
| single one in my state. Later that month the bill came and it was
| over $500 (in 1990s money)... Consequently my dad threw the modem
| at the wall and it shattered into a million pieces along with my
| broken heart.
|
| > what were the entry barrier for an average person to join
|
| Some BBSes had questions to filter applicants, usually seeing how
| l33t you were.
|
| > How similar was it to current social media networks
|
| Maybe it was just me as a kid, but for me there was zero social.
| It was you and someone else's computer. On the very rare
| occasion, your session may be interrupted by the sysop who either
| wanted to talk (leading to a racing heart because you didn't want
| to be found out as a kid) or they just wanted to play Tetris with
| you.
|
| > How big the industry around it actually become
|
| This wasn't an industry, most BBSes were run by like-minded
| people who liked computers.
| Turing_Machine wrote:
| > because you didn't want to be found out as a kid
|
| Heh. I remember sitting in a friend's basement computer cave
| and watching a kid log on to his board as a new user. It did
| ask for your age (he had some nekkid pitchers in the file area,
| etc.), so it was amusing to watch the kid type in that he was
| 11, then backspace and type in 35. Nice try, but no.
|
| It wouldn't have worked anyway, as my friend always did voice
| verification of new users, and 35-year-olds named "C00L D00D"
| don't live with their mother who says they're only 11. :-)
| wott wrote:
| _> what was the cost involved_
|
| Modems were expensive, and well, computers were not cheap either.
|
| You had to pay the communications time, but well, as a final
| user, with local calls + night rate, it wasn't a big deal.
| Probably more so for sysops which had to rent an extra line and
| do the interconnect between BBSes for networks like FidoNet (but
| again, at night most of the time). It also depended on your
| country's pricing policy for lines and communications. Americans
| for example had it better than French in that respect. Each
| country developed a different subculture based on communication
| price and organisation, hardware price and so on.
|
| Still I'd say modems where the main hurdle. They were really
| expensive until 14.4k became popular and cheap knock off
| appeared.
|
| _> what were the entry barrier for an average person to join_
|
| First, you had to be into computers. It was mostly before the
| family computer explosion.
|
| Then you had to hear about BBSes and buy yourself a modem that
| you would basically only use for that purpose, just to try and
| dive in an unknown world.
|
| Also, in France we had the Minitel, which was provided for free,
| so on one hand that piece of hardware was given, available in
| most households and gave access to a variety of services, and on
| the other hand you had to buy an expensive modem for ???. Hard
| sell for a long time. So when the BBS scene finally kind of took
| off, it was very late, almost already time for it to shutdown
| because Internet (web, Usenet) was taking over.
|
| _> How similar was it to current social media networks_
|
| Not much :-)
|
| Personally, I was more into FidoNet than pure local BBS (over
| here a BBS would only have a small number of users); FidoNet was
| pretty much like Usenet, a collection of thematic discussion
| forums anyway.
|
| It also meant I didn't often connect to the BBS graphic/terminal
| interface. My 'mail' program (Terminate) would simply connect to
| the BBS, and automatically send my messages and retrieve the
| conferences content that had arrived since my last connection.
|
| https://dedicatoafidonet.altervista.org/wp-content/uploads/2...
|
| https://dedicatoafidonet.altervista.org/wp-content/uploads/2...
|
| _> How big the industry around it actually become_
|
| There was no such thing over here; perhaps it was a thing in the
| USA.
| randombits0 wrote:
| Part of the fun was tinkering the tech of the time. Running a
| multinode bbs was the ultimate achievement! Multitasking DOS bbs
| software was a significant challenge. The most reliable I saw was
| OS/2 but folks used stuff like DesqView, PC-MOS, or mostly a
| separate PC for every node.
|
| Then there was inter-bbs communication, FIDO net and the like.
| You could send email across networks! Store-and-forward, slow,
| unreliable, but it worked, mostly.
|
| I used a pirated ROM to make my USR HST modem a Dual-Standard.
| 14.4 kbps over a phone line! I was a hog in slop!
| rolph wrote:
| some central pieces to the day:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_terminal#Dumb_termina...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acoustic_coupler
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_Line_Internet_Protocol
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doors_(computing)
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBS_door
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whiz_Kids_(TV_series)
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phreaking
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phreaking_box
| lynn_harold wrote:
| I used to run a BBS called "The Off Hour Rockers", was originally
| formed as the Jersey Shore BBS. It had 3 19.2k USRobotics modems
| for the dial-in lines plus a local node. It ran on PCBoard
| software. I think at its peak I had over 400 members, most were
| pretty active. There were many "rooms" and a large file download
| area. I used to host "nerd parties" where people would come over
| with their floppies to copy or contribute software to the
| download areas. This was all before other online services like
| Prodigy or AOL came into being. The main server was a home-build
| from parts, the dial-in nodes were AT&T 6300+ PCs, and were all
| originally interconnected using LANtastic, then converted to
| Token Ring. It was a lot of fun, we met some awesome people!
| tluyben2 wrote:
| I ran a BBS when I was 9-14 years old and because I did I got
| sysop(root) rights on lot of the other BBSs. I ran it when my
| parents were asleep so I often was awake swapping disks etc and
| downloading from other systems during the day when my parents
| were at work. I had to pay the costs out of my pocket; this was
| first paid with money from strawberry picking and a little later
| from educational software which sold to most grade and high
| schools in the Netherlands.
|
| The ratios were never there for me as I ran my own bbs and I also
| helped others mod their bbs software (the Pascal ones) which they
| rewarded with root rights to their systems.
| tptacek wrote:
| I got my start on BBSs and made most of the friends I started my
| career with on "H/P/A/V" boards; I ran a relatively popular board
| for several years. I'm a late-period BBS'er; 80s BBS kids might
| have different experiences.
|
| Most of the barrier to entry was finding the boards in the first
| place. They weren't directly connected to each other, there was
| no search engine you could ask for phone numbers of every BBS.
| Generally, the good BBS's that were "advertised" in ZIP file
| archives or whatever were invite-only, and the rest of the
| advertised boards weren't worth spending time on; the sweet spot
| were the good boards that didn't do a lot of outreach, where you
| could reasonably expect to apply and get in.
|
| Expenses were low, even (or maybe especially) to run a board; a
| modem and an extra phone line.
|
| The first thing you'd notice coming back to boards after using
| things like Reddit and HN would be the busy signals; you'd spend
| a lot of time telling your terminal program to poll a BBS phone
| number waiting for your chance to get in (obviously this was made
| worse by the fact that those lines were usually tied up with
| someone downloading some huge series of files).
|
| Most BBSs had only one or two phone lines. You'd live-chat
| people, but the most typical way that'd happen would be you
| talking to the sysop; they were mostly 1:1 conversations. For
| someone getting into the "hacking" scene at the time, the huge
| amazing win of finding an Internet connection (usually through
| university dialup, less commonly through X.25; dial-up ISPs were
| not yet common) was that IRC was a _group chat_.
|
| BBS's that specialized in file downloads had upload/download
| ratios, and there was a weird cat-and-mouse of people uploading
| garbage files to fix their ratios.
|
| Some BBS's were linked with a protocol called FidoNet (there was
| also a FidoNet net called FidoNet). FidoNet was a little like
| NNTP and replicated message board posts across multiple BBSs. The
| win with FidoNet was that you could dial a local BBS and talk to
| people around the country, because the BBS's were taking on the
| long-distance call burden. I remember the big deal about getting
| FidoNet connections was that the software to do it was a
| nightmare (since these are all modem connections, each attempt
| with a configuration took a couple minutes, and required
| participation from the other end of the connection --- or, more
| typically, the other end would be automated, would try your board
| a couple times, and then give up for the day).
|
| I'd say the experience of posting on BBS message boards was
| pretty similar to that of posting on Usenet or on a subreddit,
| just usually with a more close-knit community of people. The
| BBS's in my town would throw parties. Several BBS operators went
| on to start dial-up ISPs.
| jonnycomputer wrote:
| I remember that the BBS I used to log into had some rogue arena
| game. So used to log in for the games, and the dirty jokes and
| pics. It was fun. So very new. Mysterious.
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| You needed to be very patient... Not only for the slow download
| speeds but the limited access lines on the popular boards. The
| one I frequented most had like 8 or so. This was a lot in those
| days. So a lot of time was spent redialling until you got a
| carrier tone...
|
| This also answers your question about the 'industry'. There
| wasn't much of one, as most BBSes were kept small by the capacity
| of dialup lines. That BBS with the 8 lines was in a friends'
| garage and every time he needed a new line the whole street
| needed to be dug up. This kept advancement slow. There was no big
| industry, at least not in the Netherlands. There were some big
| networks like CompuServe which were a bit like a mini internet,
| but in my country we eschewed them because they were super
| expensive. Most BBS'es didn't charge anything, or a cheap yearly
| membership for some extra hours or something. It was much more of
| a hobby thing than an industry.
|
| Cost was ok for local BBSes. Just the cost of a local call. When
| I started the cost was 16c per _call_ , but this was dropped soon
| when modems took off, for obvious reasons. It became 16c per 10
| minutes which was still not so bad. My parents (I was in school)
| could afford it. A bigger issue was my hoarding off the phone
| line.
|
| Because the BBSes had limited dialup lines, there was also a
| usage limit per day. So around midnight it was extra busy when
| people wanted to use up yesterday's allowance or take advantage
| of it renewing at midnight.
|
| In terms of downloading I didn't do that much. It was too slow
| and expensive, and boring. During a download you couldn't do
| anything else with the computer. I mainly spent my time chatting.
| Of course files were much smaller in those days but downloading
| was still a boring hobby. The sneakernet was often faster!!
|
| I did download a bit over packet radio (using the 27MC band with
| modems). It was ridiculously slow (media speed was 1200 baud but
| there was a lot of contention and interference needing a lot of
| retransmission so the effective throughput was a lot lower) but I
| would just leave it on overnight. Still, the sneakernet was much
| quicker. It would take all night to download 1.5MB from a friend
| 5km away. Just walking over there with a floppy was a lot quicker
| :)
|
| There were also mail/group mail networks like Fidonet, where you
| could batch all your mails and upload them quickly. which was
| more efficient.
| wheels wrote:
| I got into BBSes around 1992, and started running one around 1994
| (when I was 14). I was living in a medium sized town (150k) in
| Texas, and our city had around 20 boards.
|
| The main costs were a computer ($2000-ish, $3700 in 2021
| dollars), and a decent modem ($200-ish, again, $370-ish in 2021
| dollars), which wouldn't stay decent for long. In the around 4
| years I was doing BBSes, I spent something like the equivalent of
| $700 2021 dollars on modems alone. (I supported all of this with
| my juvenile lawn mowing business, where I mowed several of the
| neighbors lawns.) After a few months of serious BBSing (and
| before I started hosting my own), I convinced my parents to let
| me get my own phone line, which was around $15/month, which I
| also paid for.
|
| Compared to being online today, virtually everyone was local. I
| wasn't aware of anyone else on the boards being from
| significantly out of town.
|
| Comparing it to today's internet doesn't really seem possible.
| There are some structural similarities, but the scale is so
| radically different that the comparisons break down. It'd be like
| trying to describe the social lives of someone in a town of 200
| in terms of the social dynamics of New York City. Except that
| that's still off by several orders of magnitude.
|
| A lot of these boards had a few dozen regular users. That was it.
| In larger cities some had hundreds or thousands, but really you'd
| recognize the handles of all regular users.
|
| There were also meetups in town, which I only went to once since
| I felt kind of out of place for being a young teen. Most of the
| folks were either university students or adults, almost all men,
| and it kind of blew my cover to be a 14-year-old sysop.
|
| Some boards used a lot of inter-board forums (FIDOnet), but most
| of the ones I was on didn't. There it was funny because usually
| they'd all exchange messages in the middle of the night through a
| network of long-distance calls. But because of that, messages
| weren't real-time -- they usually took a day to arrive. My board
| was a FIDOnet node, but almost nobody used it on my board
| (including me).
|
| But also, a lot of the content wasn't about chatting or forums. A
| lot of it was multiplayer games. Honestly, that's mainly what I
| did. Legend of the Red Dragon was the big game in those days. A
| lot of it was also about software... for better or worse, almost
| every board had a "FaF" (friends and family) section where the
| cracked stuff was, and if you were friends with the sysop, you'd
| have access to it. That was how I got access to some of the first
| compilers I'd ever used (which in those days were pretty
| expensive -- usually several hundred dollars).
|
| The tech ... very little of it seems to have made it over to the
| web. God, we had vector graphics (RIPscript) already in those
| days. In comparison, early HTML and Gopher felt pretty backward.
| They just had access to a lot more info.
| logosmonkey wrote:
| Come to think of it I think the faf section was where I got my
| first compiler as well
| MandieD wrote:
| I'm your age, and those were my primary BBS days, but as the
| nearest town with 150k people (Waco) was in my area code but
| outside our local calling area, pretty sure I didn't call your
| board - the hell I caught the time I dialed up CompuServe made
| me cautious.
|
| Magic moment for me: my high school history teacher telling me
| about TENet (Texas Educators' Network) and pointing out that my
| mom was entitled to that $5/yr Unix shell account with a local
| dial-up as a public school teacher.
|
| Thank you, Mr. Horner.
| wheels wrote:
| While I did later briefly live in Waco, those were after my
| BBS days. I was running the board in Beaumont (called Pilot's
| Hanger).
|
| I was aware of TENET in those days, but the Unix shell was
| still a couple years away from my radar. A lot of the boards
| were run on OS/2 (since it could run Windows apps, and had
| much better multitasking than Windows 3.11) or Amiga back
| then.
| MandieD wrote:
| Huh. Didn't know that about OS/2's popularity among sysops.
| One of Temple's BBSes (Waverley Park) presented what I now
| think was a Unix shell, or at least supposed to look like
| one, but I can't imagine they were actually running Linux
| (ca. 1993)
|
| TENet was the beginning of the end of my BBS days, with its
| real email and fancy WWW browser - lynx.
|
| Full circle: being the old lady on the team talking about
| the digital American wild west of the 90s with BBSes (the
| saloons) and town ISPs (the general stores) to young German
| colleagues who have known nothing other than gradually
| increasing Telekom DSL speeds. (Texpats in Germany,
| represent!)
| ruslan wrote:
| OS/2 was sort of a must those days for PC geeks. Like
| Linux today, or even like FreeBSD.
| ruslan wrote:
| I used to run an 8-line BBS (Fidonet mail hub) on a single
| 486DX2-66 machine with 8MB of RAM under OS/2 2.11 back in
| 1993-97. I often played games or used C compiler at same
| time. This same machine also was a local LAN server
| (running IBM LAN Manager), serving files to tens of other
| machines on 10Base2 coax ethernet in the office. Somewhere
| about 1996 we got a leased line internet connected directly
| to this same box over a serial line, the machine became an
| IP router and a remote access server allowing premium BBS
| users to run PPP/SLIP connections. That's how I got
| involved into ISP business. :-)
| slv77 wrote:
| Accessing a BBS required some level of understanding of computers
| and telecom gear which tended to filter out a good segment of the
| population. In the US local phone calls we're unmetered but lines
| were expensive so most BBS's in the US were a single computer
| hooked up to one (or two!) phone lines and most access was local.
|
| Getting access required knowing the phone numbers, protocols and
| software required to access the BBS and was mostly through word
| of mouth. Generally if you could get access you must have some
| connection to existing users and so you were in. Most had time
| limits so that you couldn't tie up the line all day.
|
| Some communities that has special access to computers or telecom
| gear tended to be larger. ISCABBS, for example, was a fairly
| large BBS because of the access to TTY terminals and donated
| computing power (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISCABBS)
| Brian_K_White wrote:
| Somehow this just smells like a homework assignment, or possibly
| article research.
|
| However I'll toss in a couple things I haven't seen mentioned
| yet.
|
| * Offline mail readers. QWK or BlueWave, there might have been
| others.
|
| The standard way to use a bbs was to start your serial comm
| program like a pirate copy of procomm plus, use it to dial in to
| a board, and interact with the bbs for a while. Navigate menus to
| download files, read messages in subs (forums), write messages in
| subs, play games. Then disconnect.
|
| If a given board had qwk module installed, you could do almost
| everything offline, and all you connected for was to download and
| upload a single zip file called a packet containing every message
| that was new since last time.
|
| I don't remember but I think it could do files too. Like you'd
| get the file list once, and I guess get file list updates with
| each new packet.
|
| You read the messages (both private mail and forum posts and I
| think even some games turns) while offline. Write your responses
| and new messages offline. Select files to be downloaded from the
| list or uploaded from your machine.
|
| The offline reader program creates a packet containing everything
| you are going to upload. Messages you wrote and files you're
| uploading.
|
| Then you dial in to the board and you're only connected for the
| bare physically minimum necessary time for the computer to
| download the new packet from the board and upload the new packet
| from you. No navigating menus, it goes as fast as the computer
| can go, and if you don't have files in there, then the packet is
| small because plain text compresses a lot. And so you were only
| on the phone for vastly shorter time.
|
| I don't remember but I think the offline reader could dial the
| bbs itself, which skips navigating aany menus on the bbs at human
| speed. But I might have forgotten. Maybe you manually navigated
| to a menu choice in the bbs to download and upload the qwk
| packets manually. Or maybe both are true like the manual option
| was available even though you shouldn't need it usually.
|
| I remember I used BlueWave which had some enhancements over
| standard qwk, though it was qwk compatible, so if a board only
| had a standard qwk door (oh yeah, apps on bbs's were called
| doors), BW could still use it.
|
| * That was another element of life, a variety of standards. like
| qwk vs bluewave, arc vs zip vs arj, 100 different bbs host
| softwares, several worldwide networks like fidonet (fidonet was
| just the biggest because it wasn't tied to a particular bbs host
| software, but there were for instance WWIV had it's own network
| of WWIV boards that called each other just like fidonet, and a
| wwiv board could also be on fidonet too of course).
|
| Almost everything you did involved knowing enough about it to
| deal with these different systems and standards. Does your
| terminal support Ansi? Does your modem support MNP-5 (error
| correction and compression, they didn't at first) Does the other
| guy's modem that you're calling? Does the board have a qwk
| module? Does it allow files or just messages? Some boards even
| had special client software that let the bbs be graphical instead
| of text. Does your computer have the hardware necessary to run
| that? Do you have a cga card? or just herculese? or ega? or tandy
| graphics? does the software support any of those? Which of the 25
| different kinds of sound card do you have, and does this game
| support the one you have? Does this text file have dos or mac or
| unix line-endings? Some multiple standards at least shook out to
| one 99% standard by the late 80s. Eventually all files were
| compressed with pkzip, all modems had v.42, all boards and comm
| programs supported zmodem for file transfers, all boards and
| clients supported pc ansi terminal emulation, all boards used 8n1
| serial params. But for some years those were all up in the air.
|
| * Post signatures. These would often get elaborate. There were
| programs that pasted a quote or a joke to the end of every post
| you wrote as part of the signature. Many peolple designed huge
| elaborate flaboyant ascii and ansi art for their signatures.
|
| One of those random joke inserts was one I ended up remembering
| forever:
|
| REAL programmers use "COPY CON FILE.EXE"
|
| Today's version of that would be:
|
| REAL programmers use ">file"
|
| * Product tribes. That "real programmers" joke was partly about
| how people would judge each other for the products they used.
| Delphi comes out and makes programming pretty easy. Real
| programmers use turbo c. (I might have the timelines on those
| wrong but it's the idea not the details). Bluewave is better than
| QWK. Telegard is better than WWIV, Deskqview is better than
| msdos, 4dos is better than msdos, drdos is bdtter than msdos,
| os/2 is better than windows, arj is better than zip, ... This is
| more about the times than BBS's strictly, and somewhat still
| exists and probably always will, you filthy green bubble serf. ;)
| kleer001 wrote:
| Good catch. I bet you're right.
|
| I'm a big fan of "Do your own damn homework."
|
| OP can do their own research. That said it seems like there's
| plenty of peeps here happy to tell their stories.
| Brian_K_White wrote:
| I ended up revising the post to add some actual answer as
| well. It's not a bad thing to ask about and document this
| era.
|
| If it's homework or article research, I think it's
| inconsiderate not to say so.
|
| If I'm going to spend the next 30 minutes writing about
| something, it matters if I'm doing it for you personally, you
| and a community of people with related interests we're all
| members of like a mail list, or for your job.
|
| If it's for work or school, you should disclose that, and if
| you think that will produce fewer responses, that does not
| justify collecting more and better responses through false
| pretense.
| kstrauser wrote:
| This seems like valid research: asking a bunch of people who
| lived it for first-hand experience.
| wott wrote:
| > However I'll toss in a couple things I haven't seen mentioned
| yet. > * Offline mail readers. QWK or BlueWave, there might
| have been others.
|
| I did succinctly, just a couple of minutes before you did :-)
|
| You are right nobody else had mentioned it yet at that point.
| Perhaps that's because Americans were more concerned about the
| BBS itself and purely local usage on BBSes with a large number
| of users, and less interested into FidoNet (or similar
| networks). Or a difference in eras.
| Overtonwindow wrote:
| Thank YOU for posting about the documentary, I had no idea it
| existed! I love it! My story about the BBS was that I just
| happened to be paying attention at the right time, and the right
| moment, which for an ADHD kid in the 80s was pretty damn amazing.
|
| On December 26, 1993, the PBS TV show Ghostwriter aired an
| episode entitled "Who is Max Mouse?" - which also starred Samuel
| L. Jackson.
|
| In that episode, a kid explains that his computer can use a modem
| to connect to their school's bulletin board system. Max Mouse was
| a hacker that was suddenly causing trouble on their BBS!
|
| Very shortly after that, as I was sitting in 7th grade
| literature, an announcement was made by our student news team via
| the in-classroom television; by the way, having a full time
| television _in the classroom_ was still new at the time.
|
| Students were invited to call the school's bulletin board system
| with their computer, and a phone number was provided. I scribbled
| it down on notepaper. Since I had just seen Ghostwriter on this
| very thing, I knew precisely what that meant. My father setup the
| monochrome 286 and we dialed in at a screaming 2400 bits per
| second.
|
| It was all orange, it was slow, but it was absolute magic. I
| became obsessed with Usurper and other "Door Games." From there I
| used BBS's for many years until AOL, then Netcom, and the broader
| high speed web.
|
| One more thing: If there's a guy in India named Anish Nanda who
| posted to FIDONET about visiting America in the 90s, and wanted
| recommendations... You were the very first international message
| I responded to and I have never forgotten it.
| jbullock35 wrote:
| Possibly of interest to OP:
| https://archive.org/details/boardwatchmagazine.
| ranuzz wrote:
| cool thanks ! they did mention this publication in the
| documentary. thanks for the link.
| contingencies wrote:
| Cost was minimal if you dialed local boards in places where that
| was cheap/untimed. Expensive if long distance: but people used
| tricks like corporate PBXs and calling cards and blue boxes to
| reduce those expenses. That stuff was mostly 1980s. By the mid
| 1990s the developed world had largely shifted to digital
| telephone exchanges (Ericsson AXE) and the box tricks were
| relegated to the very obscure parts of the developing world, much
| of which skipped copper (and the problem of copper theft) and
| went straight to mobile.
|
| If you had a computer and a modem, other entry barriers were
| minimal. Most boards required only the number and you could call
| in. Cool warez boards required invites and had passwords.
| Generally IIRC they would agree to a carrier at any speed so you
| would in practice be able to talk to them on old hardware, maybe
| down to 2400bps.
|
| The experience was more like a secret group of friends than a
| public social media network. It was generally local-ish, but not
| hyper-local, so you perhaps still had a chance to meet people
| IRL/AFK if desired. First, the sysop would be responsible for
| creating an environment in which people actually wanted to
| communicate. This would occur through selection of content,
| community and policy. Policies might be how long you could stay
| online per day, that sort of thing. Recall that each board had a
| limited number of lines and each required a telephone line
| monthly payment plus a modem plus a spare serial port. There were
| these ungodly serial ("COM port") expander cards with chains of
| tens of plugs... forget what they were called. If your friend
| came on the board you could ask to chat to them kind of like the
| unix 'talk' command. The codebases were fairly heterogeneous
| however, many sysops implemented or modified their own codebases.
| Probably a lot of them had buffer overflows.
|
| As you were your own entertainment and your experience somehow
| timed, perhaps interactions tended toward an more open
| intellectualism missing from general society. The sort of thing
| HN sort-of-kind-of-has but not really. If HN were a BBS, it'd be
| effectively anonymous, effectively unsearchable (the search
| experience used to be a lot like manually trawling through a
| library card-file), and all the good articles would be
| downloadable with ASCII art and group greets. In the early
| popular internet era I remember l0pht ran a BBS for a bit but
| AFAIK it never really took off.
|
| Can't comment on what the industry size was, I guess there were
| tens of thousands of boards and it was really an offshoot of
| 1980s computing culture where kids were reaching out to connect
| with others in an ever-growing subculture that was powerfully
| disjunct from the rest of society and thus liberating. Years
| later I found out I had a distant relative who was lesbian and
| ran a board for queers at this time, I guess much like the
| internet today a lot of people flocked to BBSs who felt
| marginalized by the rest of society.
|
| Tech-wise, this was the era of UUCP/FidoNet, warez and batch-
| transfers. The initial popular commodification of digital
| information and software. The initial popularization of node-
| based addressing schemes. It was laying the groundwork for the
| popularization of the internet, in cultural terms, technical
| terms and communications infrastructure terms.
|
| What made it to the internet? Initially, everything. Everyone
| online came from BBSs in the early days. But now .. it's hard to
| point to anything in particular. Maybe open source, a sort of
| seeping and perverted globalism of consumption (whereas then we
| had an excited and optimistic utopian global village) - basically
| the biggest change is everything - here included - is now
| commercial. It's a sad testament to human character, despite
| ever-crashing costs.
|
| PS. I wrote a history of the modem at the end of a thread the
| other day, consequently nobody read it, but this thread's readers
| may enjoy: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29052827
| tyingq wrote:
| If you lived somewhere rural, long distance charges were very
| limiting. Even a call to the next town could be a lot of money.
| So you would spend a fair amount of time figuring out ways around
| that. Open PBX's that would let you transfer to a dial-out, or
| dragging your computer to a library that had some unprotected
| RJ11/12 jacks, etc.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| you could also just read some of the comments about documentary:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9521867
|
| or some other anecdotes here
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19198173
| lvs wrote:
| Not sure if it's been mentioned in here yet, but the biggest
| annoyance was Mom picking up the phone to make a call and
| disconnecting you. It was rare to have more than one or two phone
| lines in the average household, so being online competed with
| voice calls. The bigger the household, the more annoying this
| resource constraint became.
| squarefoot wrote:
| I got my feet wet in the BBS world during the mid/late 80s, when
| I bought a Commodore-branded model 6499 modem for my C64.
| Unfortunately it allowed only 1200/75 bps and 300/300 bps links,
| but all services I could try it on were either payware or of no
| use to me, also there still were no interesting private BBSes
| around, so I put it in a drawer and eventually sold it to someone
| else. A few years later (early 90s) the experience has been much
| better with my Amiga 500 and JR-Comm and later Terminus programs,
| 2400, then 9600 and 14.400bps, and of course Zmodem. The number
| of local BBSes in the meantime had grown significantly, and
| Fidonet was a thing. I met lots of interesting people online,
| arranged pizza and copy parties at our homes (back then we didn't
| even have a copyright law), some of them became also my
| colleagues and am still friends with them after all those years.
| Unfortunately the cost wasn't trivial: hardware aside, just a few
| years back we still had flat local landline calls, so for example
| 4 hours spent chatting or transferring files on a BBS would cost
| about nothing, but as soon as it became clear that an army of
| people was getting ready to spend hours online every night, the
| then only national phone company decided to introduce timed fees.
| I still recall my parents screams about my phone expenses, and
| luckily I had no girlfriend back then (of course, I'd say)
| otherwise they would probably have killed me:).
|
| The difference with today's social networks? Here's one:
| _Latency!_ Back then there was no such thing as flaming someone
| and expecting a reply within 5 minutes; most BBSes had a just few
| phone lines, sometimes only one, so that the recipient should
| find a free line to connect, download his messages, read them
| offline, then upload the replies, or doing all online with other
| delays. On Fidonet it was even worse, of course, its nature
| allowed people on different BBSes (nodes) to communicate, but the
| price to pay was waiting for all those nodes to link each other
| at night to exchange posts, which meant that your post sometimes
| could need 2 or 3 hops (=~days) before reaching the destination,
| especially if between different continents; same with the reply.
| That would surely not discourage epic flames, but one had to be
| really really motivated to continue in such a way.
| karaterobot wrote:
| I used BBSs from around age 13 to around age 18, and ran my own
| for about 4 years. It's hard to disentangle my feelings about
| those platforms from just the feeling of being that age: that's
| where I hung out with my friends, where I met my first
| girlfriend, and it was the context in which I learned both
| programming and design.
|
| One thing I'll say is that talking about how slow the connections
| were, and how little disk space there was to work with, and how
| only one person could use the system at a time is missing the
| point: those things sound constraining _now_ , but at the time
| they made complete sense. They were the state of the art. There
| were certainly times I wished my xmodem transfer would go faster,
| but I think the same thing today when I'm buffering a YouTube
| video. The state of the art always feels great at the time, and
| old-fashioned just a few years later.
|
| Anyway, the experience of using BBS' at the time was a lot like
| checking Hackernews for new content. You'd log in, look at the
| forums, see if anyone had posted anything new, and then log off.
| You could play door games, but a lot of them could only be played
| once a day.
|
| Another thing about the experience was that you were always aware
| that you were on the sysop's computer, and he may have been
| watching everything you did. They could be looking at your
| screen, watching you type a message in a forum. Sometimes, you'd
| try to log in late at night, or early in the morning, when you
| knew the guy was asleep. Nowadays, that sounds crazy to me: I'd
| never use a website where I knew someone was watching everything
| I did. Not tracking aggregate metrics, but literally watching
| every keystroke as it happened, and seeing everything I saw at
| the same time.
|
| From my perspective, one of the biggest technological advances
| was ZModem, a transfer protocol that let you restart failed
| transfers. Prior to that, transferring something large (say, the
| game DOOM) took hours, and if anything happened that disrupted
| the transfer, you had to restart. That happened all the time:
| someone picked up the phone, or there was just a bad analog
| signal.
|
| In the case of DOOM, I think it actually took me 2 weeks to
| successfully download the shareware version.
|
| Another big one was FIDOnet, which was a gateway between BBS
| forums and Usenet: it let you read usenet forums, and post on
| them too. I distinctly remember one day there were a bunch of new
| message boards on a BBS I frequented, with a whole set of new
| members that all had @ symbols in their usernames. It was so
| weird. That was the first time I'd ever seen an email address.
| That morning sort of marked the beginning of when the BBS world
| switched over to the internet world, for me.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| _A look at my BBS software from '93_
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14147583
| lubujackson wrote:
| Anyone wanting to relive some of the vibe of the BBS era should
| try out this free indie game, Digital: A Love Story:
| https://scoutshonour.com/digital/
|
| I've forgotten more than I remember, but the constraints are all
| important to how the experience was: fixed width screens, chunky
| graphics, async communication, locked phone lines, whiffs of the
| larger Internet coming.
|
| The biggest unique aspect was the geographical focus. Phone calls
| out of your area code used to be EXPENSIVE, so most people only
| ever called nearby BBSes. This provided psuedo-anonymity that
| could be bridged with in-person meetups.
|
| It was an amazing space to experiment with identity, especially
| growing up in a small town, pre-Internet.
| nostrademons wrote:
| You first would buy a modem for maybe $100, which was a little
| box you plugged into the serial port of your computer on one end,
| and a phone jack on the other end. Then you'd plug the modem into
| your home telephone system. Home PCs didn't typically come with
| an Ethernet port in those days, and wi-fi wouldn't be a thing for
| another decade or so. The modem usually came with a floppy disk
| containing software to use it, which typically looked like a
| terminal window, sometimes with additional menus to simplify
| things like dialing and file transfers.
|
| Then you needed to find the phone number of a local BBS. There
| was no Internet at the time, so typically you'd get this through
| going to computer trade shows, or asking around, or occasionally
| computer books & magazines had local directories. You'd dial up
| this number and connect to the BBS. This tied up your phone line
| and their phone line, so people who were seriously involved in
| the BBS scene usually bought another phone line (about
| $30/month). Modems had a distinctive screech that you'd learn to
| love, which is apparently now on YouTube.
|
| The actual interface was almost pure text, and had features like
| forums, file transfer, and occasionally chat. Basically you'd
| leave messages for people who'd dial in after you, and exchange
| files. In general, there was no real-time communication, and the
| scale was much smaller than today's worldwide social networks
| (typically each BBS might have a few dozen to a few thousand
| users, so like HN for the first month or two of its existence).
| Everything was slower-paced than today's Internet; you had to
| actually delay gratification and check back tomorrow rather than
| seeing if you got a response in 5 minutes.
|
| The hardware also was slower. On a 2400 baud modem, if you were a
| fast reader you could _read the text as it came over the phone
| line_ (2400 baud is only 300 characters /sec, which is like 50
| words/sec, and much of that was formatting boilerplate you could
| skim over). None of this graphics or video stuff. I remember
| downloading my first MP3; it took 2 hours to download, and every
| time the connection dropped (like, for example, if a family
| member picked up the phone) I'd have to start over again. I think
| it actually took like a week of wall time, and then I found my
| computer wasn't fast enough to play it back in real time, so I
| needed to decompress it, which required buying a new hard drive
| so I could fit the 40MB decompressed that a 4-minute MP3 expands
| to.
|
| The industry was tiny by today's social networking standards. It
| was a hobby for most of the players involved, not something you
| could really make money off of. Really it's the telecoms that
| made the money, off all the people buying second lines.
|
| The biggest lasting breakthrough was that it showed
| communications and networking could be a major use-case for PCs,
| which paved the way for the Internet and WWW a few years later.
| sumthinprofound wrote:
| As a user my only cost involved was purchasing a 1200baud modem
| for my C64 I was around 13 at the time. Shortly after that I got
| a dedicated phone line to not tie up the house phone. I don't
| recall what terminal emulation software I used but I believe that
| was free. Biggest problem was a lot of the BBSs were single phone
| line setups so you would get a busy signal trying to dial in if
| someone else was online.
|
| A few years later I setup my own bbs running Color64 bbs software
| (upgraded hardware to a 2400 baud hayes modem and 20meg hard
| drive to facilitate file exchanges).
|
| The experience was nothing like social networks today. Some BBSs
| had multiple phone lines and supported concurrent users which
| gave you the ability to chat someone on a limited basis with
| whoever else was signed in but it was, for me, more file sharing
| than community focused.
| qbasic_forever wrote:
| It was like Discord servers today but slower, ASCII/ANSI art
| instead of images, and less real-time chat (although fancy BBS's
| with multiple telephone lines did have chat rooms).
| ajay-b wrote:
| OMG this documentary is awesome! I had no idea, thank you.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Expensive enough that I only managed to use the BBS on our local
| district during a Summer job, as the call rates where too much
| for our household.
|
| There was a single one with 5 lines, and required regional call
| rates.
| allenleein wrote:
| In Taiwan, one of the most popular social network is still a
| public BBS.
|
| Honestly, the cyber life without any algo is fantastic!
| allenleein wrote:
| Link: https://term.ptt.cc/
| VLM wrote:
| My dad got a 300 baud modem in '84. I believe that was hand-me
| down for me by '86 when he got a 1200 autodialing modem? I wasted
| a lot of time on Compuserv on his computer. Either way I started
| mid 80s. I got serious and invested my own money around 1990 I
| think I paid full list price for a V.32 standard 9600 baud modem
| around 1990. Modem protocol wars were expensive and I don't miss
| them, as I recall v.32 lost a battle and I essentially had a very
| expensive 2400 baud modem by the time of the V.32bis 14.4K around
| 1992 or so.
|
| Cost: This was an era of fast hardware obsolescence. So for two
| (maybe three?) decades the top of the line fastest thing you can
| buy was around $600 today and "it got the job done two years ago
| at a quarter the speed" is literally free at a ham radio swapmeet
| or hand me down from relative, etc. You did become an absolute
| expert on long distance billing, and the difference between
| unmetered LATA calls and metered out of LATA calls, and billing
| rates vary by time, and strange deregulated long distance cards,
| etc. Obviously if you lived at the level of "hand me down modem"
| it was important to call the unmetered free locals and if you
| dropped $600 on a newer modem every year you probably didn't care
| about LD charges, heck those rich guys probably called
| international bbses sometimes...
|
| Joe6Pack: Average people did not participate. So limited
| politics, no propaganda, no censoring, etc. Even Compuserv or AOL
| users were pretty high tech compared to average TV couch potato.
| There was a problem finding your FIRST BBS in a magazine or a
| sign at a Radio Shack store or a friend at school or something.
| Then every BBS you logged into and every file you downloaded
| usually had some tag lines for "BBSes we're friends with" and you
| could branch out. And much like ham radio lists of VHF radio
| repeaters, there were vast lists of BBSes, some of the listings
| were even current and valid. BBSes came and went. You leave for
| Basic Training in the military for a summer, come back, and a
| third the local BBSes are gone LOL, but in the good old days it
| seemed two sprung up for every one that closed. I'd say at peak
| there were like 10 BBSes per million population, so about 50
| where I lived were toll free calling, and maybe 5% of people were
| also sysops of their own board, so like a thousand BBS users per
| million people? Makes hobbies like Ham Radio look practically
| universal in comparison, maybe 25 to 100 hams for every BBS user
| in the late 80s? I mean a popular BBS might have an active users
| list of 30 people and an active two meter "fun net" on ham radio
| might have 80-100 check-ins nightly, so when ham radio is a
| multiple of popularity you know there's not many BBS folks in the
| area.
|
| Similar to social media: Well it was interesting at the BBS level
| that everyone knew who was online by being friend of friend and
| advertise on each other's boards and download the latest local
| BBS list and all that. So you tended to use the BBS where your
| friends were, or your friends became your fellow BBS users. So
| now there's Farmville, then there was TW2002. I will say the
| people who pushed the CGI interface for web servers seem heavily
| influenced by the people who wrote door games back in the 80s,
| some conceptual continuity if not literally the same human
| programmers LOL.
|
| Industry size: Well, its like asking how big the knitting
| industry is. There's a boat load of people doing it but not
| monetizing every knot and stitch. Someone was paying a lot of
| money for those new $600 modems that were technologically
| obsolete every two years. Someone was paying a lot of money for
| magazine ads to sell those $600 modems. Someone was paying
| $30/month to the local bell operating company to get a second
| line to their house to host all those BBSes. Someone was paying a
| lot of money for large hard drives to hold warez and even legit
| files on their BBS. On the other hand not much money changed
| hands for direct use outside big nationwide services like
| prodigy/compuserv/aol, almost all boards were free and labor of
| love/hobby for the sysop.
|
| Tech breakthrus: Someone had to pay for the development of fast
| modems and big hard drives, and I'd say that's the BBS folks.
|
| BBS documentary: Pretty accurate, having been there for most of
| it. Note he had to edit down to fit a video time span.
| h2odragon wrote:
| I couldn't afford a modem, so when an opportunity arose to grab a
| (then top of the line, newest on the market) Hayes 2400 baud ISA
| card off an unguarded shelf i had to. Them folks shoulda been
| less dismissive of a goofy teen asking for a job, anyway.
| Wikipedia says "Hayes introduced its v.22bis Smartmodem 2400 at
| US$549 in 1985" and it wasn't long after that.
|
| The phone bills of $0.05/minute and up (and up and up!) were
| insupportable quickly on my previous budget so some neighbors
| donated phone lines occasionally; after a few months I'd learned
| enough and networked enough to get consulting jobs that paid for
| my phone bills.
|
| One of the things I loved was seeing the wide variety of people
| talking to each other without regard for "who they are" vs "what
| are they saying". Getting people out of their bubbles. I liked to
| help people start "affinity" group BBS systems then link them to
| wider nets and watch them bloom.
| ranuzz wrote:
| sounds like a huge investment and then recurring expenses. At
| least if didn't have any ads (I am assuming :D)
| junon wrote:
| Not specifically BBSes as those predate me by a few years, but
| parents on the phone getting deafened when I unknowingly connect
| to the internet via dial-up is along the same lines.
|
| Lots of screaming from other rooms "HEY I'M ON THE PHONE".
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Keith F. Lynch wrote up some interesting history of the net from
| his perspective:
|
| http://keithlynch.net/history.net.html
|
| MIT AI Lab Tourist Policy
|
| https://donhopkins.medium.com/mit-ai-lab-tourist-policy-f73b...
|
| I posted this earlier:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15080221
|
| "The MIT machines were a nerd magnet for kids who had access to
| the ARPANET,"
|
| Zork is how and why I got on the ARPANET as a nerdy kid. And I
| wasn't even a Russian Spy! [1]
|
| Connecting to the ARPANET and getting an account on DM was an
| adventure in itself, almost like the beginning of the game
| itself.
|
| At the time there were no passwords or anything but security
| through obscurity on the ARPANET TIPs. And the MIT-AI Lab was
| kind enough to hand out free after-work-hours "TURIST Accounts"
| [2] to anyone who asked nicely with the right magic words.
|
| Some dude named Bruce who had a BBS (Bruce's NorthStar Horizon in
| Northern Virginia) told me how to do it step by step:
|
| 1) After 8PM EST, dial up the NBS TIP at (301) 948 3850 [3] at
| 300 baud, typed "E" to get the banner, then "@L 134" to connect
| to AI. (NCP host ids were only 8 bits, before TCP/IP's vast 32
| bit address space!)
|
| 2) Make up an account name (I chose A2DEH).
|
| 3) Try to log in with that name, like ":LOGIN A2DEH".
|
| 4) If it asks for a password, somebody already has that account.
| In that case, think of another name and try again. (RMS's
| password was famously "RMS", after they forced everyone to use a
| password over his objections).
|
| 5) If it doesn't recognize your user name, it asks "Do you want
| to apply for an account?" Answer YES. When it asks "Why do you
| want to use the MIT-AI Lab's PDP-10?" answer "Learning LISP."
| (Which, as it turns out, is a long incremental process pursued
| over a lifetime, since there are so many implementations of LISP
| on the inside with names like MDL and JavaScript on the outside.)
|
| 6) When the account is approved, now all ITS systems know about
| you (ITS had network file and account sharing long before NFS and
| YP), and although you still can't log into DM directly, you could
| log into AI to learn LISP (and EMACS).
|
| 7) The MIT-AI Lab staff would kindly and patiently go out of
| their way to help you learn LISP and EMACS. (Many thanks to KMP
| for writing TEACH-LISP and answering my clueless tasteless
| questions like "how to you set the value of a variable?").
|
| 8) To play Zork, dial up the TIP after 8PM and connect to DM with
| "@L 70".
|
| 9) Log in as "URANUS" with password "RINGS".
|
| 10) So as not to look suspicious (3 kids from all over the
| country [4] logged in as URANUS, URANU0, URANU1 at the same time
| all playing Zork or watching each other play), change your user
| name to your own with ":CHUNAME A2DEH".
|
| 11) Only two people could play ZORK at once, so hang out chatting
| with other people waiting to play ZORK, or spying (in a socially
| acceptable manner) on whoever's playing ZORK via ":OS PDL" (for
| "Output Spy Paul David Lebling"), or snooping around trying to
| find the Zork source code [5], which was well hidden.
|
| 12) There was no file security, so you could snoop around Marvin
| Minsky's home directory and hurt your brain trying to understand
| what appears to be line noise, but is actually the Universal
| Turing Machine he implemented in TECO. [6]
|
| 13) When somebody from USER-ACCOUNTS sends you a "nice private
| message" telling your they know what you're up to with ZORK, and
| that you should really learn LISP like you said you would because
| it's such a great language, instead of demanding you commit
| "seppuku" and "dumping you off the net and be done with it", you
| simply start learning LISP instead of acting like an entitled
| dick [7] by whining about how the people who gave you a free
| account that you bragged about in BYTE magazine are a bunch of
| communists and threatening to get some Proxmire type to start
| inquiring into its operations by seeing if your "Pentagon friends
| can upset them. Or perhaps some reporter friends. Or both., Or
| even the House Armed Services Committee."
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVth6T3gMa0
|
| [2] http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/text/tourist-policy.html
|
| [3] https://www.saildart.org/TIPS[P,DOC]3
|
| [4] https://archive.org/details/getlamp-rgriffiths
|
| [5] https://github.com/itafroma/zork-mdl
|
| [6] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13514918
|
| [7] http://www.stormtiger.org/bob/humor/pournell/story.html
| jasode wrote:
| _> what was the cost involved_
|
| For BBS system operator (sysop), he typically bought a high-end
| modem like US Robotics for $500 to $1000. A dedicated computer
| with expensive harddrives. Some paid for commercial BBS software
| such as PCBoard. There were monthly costs for dedicated phone
| landlines.
|
| For most users, they just bought a modem and re-used their
| existing voice landline.
|
| _> How similar was it to current social media networks_
|
| In terms of participation, the dial-up BBS scene seems somewhat
| analagous to today's Mastodon instances that are run by
| altruistic admins who foot the costs themselves. BBSs typically
| had 1 or 2 phone lines which means only 1 or 2 people could be
| "logged in" at a time. Some BBS had discussion forums but unlike
| Mastodon, each bulletin board run by a homeowner was very
| local/regional because _extra charges for long-distance phone
| calls_ was still a thing. So 99% of the regular users of a
| particular BBS would be in the same area code.
|
| There were some commercial BBSs with multiple phone lines that
| had paid memberships. The attraction there was larger harddrives
| with more things to download (shareware, etc).
|
| _> How big the industry around it actually become_
|
| The BBS community was very small because it was mostly computer
| enthusiasts. A very niche communications platform like CB radio
| for truckers or ham radio. The dialup modem service that
| attracted more _non-computer folks_ was AOL.
| Turing_Machine wrote:
| > So 99% of the regular users of a particular BBS would be in
| the same area code.
|
| One side effect of that was that it was pretty common for the
| users of a particular board to get together for pizza, a nerd-
| oriented movie, or occasionally even a camping trip (this was
| called a "GT" in this area... I don't know how widespread that
| term was).
| ecpottinger wrote:
| I used to run a sysop group, once a month most to the BBS
| operators in my area meet at my house. Amazing who shows up
| when you offer free pop and chips?
| Turing_Machine wrote:
| I'm still friends with several people I met that way, 30 or
| more years ago.
| [deleted]
| LarryMade2 wrote:
| I want to understand how the experience was (this is "user
| experience" Sysop experience is different.
|
| > what was the cost involved For users the cost of a computer,
| modem, terminal software, phone line, and any applicable long
| distance. Maybe BBS subscription fee if it was some pay to use
| BBS.
|
| > what were the entry barrier for an average person to join
|
| Cost of a modem (before the VIC MODEM modems cost several hundred
| dollars, after that prices started dropping, but it was still as
| significant cost.
|
| Long Distance charges - unless you were in a larger area with
| local and good BBSs you were calling long-distance to connect.
|
| If living with others with one phone, you would battle for tying
| up the phone to call BBSs, so you would probably do it late at
| night like friday and saturday (not school nights)
|
| >How similar was it to current social media networks
|
| Think of internet usenet message groups or on-line forums for BBS
| message boards, email, and some downloading of programs and on-
| line games. Very few board were multi-line where there was more
| than one user so not much chatting, except with the Sysop
| occasionally.
|
| > How big the industry around it actually become
|
| Pretty big, at the high end there were mini-online entertainment
| services, with fancy multi-line chat boards offering paid
| content. some businesses had on-line ordering/support BBSs, as
| well as portals for say government clients to submit data, etc.
| News agency portals, etc.
|
| From a tech point of view what do you think were the major
| breakthroughs and what made it to the internet we see today.
|
| Electronic File Transfer (upload/download), Email, message
| boards, multi-BBS network data transfer (aka FidoNet), terminal
| graphics.
|
| > I have watched the documentary www.bbsdocumentary.com , so I
| have some context but want some more anecdotes if I can :)
|
| The hard part if you weren't a kid pre-internet, you dont know
| how compressed your world was. Back then communication was
| usually occasional phone with friends, face to face meetings
| (usually limited to your community's social group/neighbourhood),
| reading a lot of magazines, going to the library for information,
| lots of mail (catalogs by mail, order by mail) TV catered more to
| families and local grocery/clothing/appliances.
|
| BBSs let you expand your reach for interesting/provocative
| information (see textfiles.com), a big part for me was
| communicating with other like minded computer geeks (not only
| nearby but in other cities or even across the US or even world -
| as a BBS sysop I had a few international callers no idea how much
| their phone bills were). There were also some less technically
| minded lonely people able to get on-line looking for connection
| (on-line pen pal, etc.)
|
| That's my perspective,
| loo wrote:
| The music on that documentary tripped me the fuck out. Amazing
| series.
| MandieD wrote:
| A nerdy girl fighting with her much more socially-adept little
| brother over use of the phone line their parents gave them for
| Christmas, typing AT commands into XModem on the TRS-80 her uncle
| gave her after he moved on to PCs, using a 300 baud modem that
| did plug into the telephone line (not an acoustic), but required
| listening to the carrier tone and hitting the red Connect button
| at just the right moment... to play Legend Of the Red Dragon and
| download the Anarchists' Cookbook and see if someone responded to
| a message you posted on FIDONet a few days ago
| jasonjayr wrote:
| Were you lucky enough to have the RIPScript Graphics enhanced
| version of LoRD ? :)
| MandieD wrote:
| RIPScript was the bane of my existence as a Trash-80 BBS user
| - a screen full of slowly-unfurling rubbish from which I had
| to pick out the actual text.
|
| (I never called my Model 4 a "Trash-80" at the time - her
| name was Trissy, and she was decorated with a tasteful
| assortment of glittery flower stickers.)
| IronWolve wrote:
| Being a kid and not knowing it cost so much to dial long
| distance, my first 600 dollar phone bill, my parents wanted to
| kill me. Had to limit my hours late at night so people wouldn't
| pick up the phone and ruin my connection. 300 baud fun times,
| upgraded to 1200 as fast as I could.
|
| I remember when multi chunk compressed files and zmodem came out
| (it had resume), it was an amazing step forward.
|
| Ran one of the first bbs's in my area that had a 2400 baud on my
| commodore 128D, and 80 column Terminal, WOOT!. (One of my bbs
| friends started Steel Belted Radius on his amiga, and he wrote a
| bbs, so I learned a bit from him.)
|
| Town paper started a multiline bbs that had chat, met other
| people in my area.
|
| I had my first internet email via fidonet on WWIV bbs'es.
|
| Started migrating from BBS to tcp/ip via slirp on a education
| isp, that taught me unix, tcp networking, sockets, etc.
|
| Got an Amiga and learned quite a bit about systems and amiga
| unix.
|
| Then I started working at BBS's that started converting bbs's to
| isps with dial up modem banks with livingston portmaster. Learned
| much at that boot strap startup.
|
| Then I migrated into telecom for my corporate career as a
| sysadmin/engineer/it work.
|
| Good times.
|
| One funny thing I did was create an Ansi sequence, that looked
| like the Sysop (BBS operator) entered chat, yelled at you and
| banned you. It was a nice prank. Good ole +++, lol. Lots of
| people inserted Ansi graphics and tricks in posts, for amusement.
| chondl wrote:
| Mostly was on BBS between the ages of 12 and 15, starting with a
| giant 300 baud modem on a card in our Apple ][2. Most of the
| systems were forums and 300 baud wasn't bad for reading text. Way
| too slow for warez, so mostly exchanged floppies for games.
|
| When everyone got on the Internet a few years later my younger
| sister didn't think it was a big deal since she had seen me
| reading forums and trading email for years.
| CottonMcKnight wrote:
| I cut my teeth learning to program by writing a script to play my
| Tele-Arena (MajorBBS MUD) character while I was at school.
|
| It took advantage of a simple game exploit: in TA, your character
| gained experience simply by attacking; darts, a throwing weapon,
| did almost no damage but any class could use them; thrown darts
| would land on the ground at your feet so you could pick them up
| and reuse them, even if you threw them at a mob in a different
| room; the Sorceress in the tower was programmed to never leave
| her room, so she wouldn't chase you if you threw a dart at her
| from the next room over.
|
| So I wrote a script to stand one room away, throwing darts at the
| Sorceress all day, drinking when I was thirsty, eating when I was
| hungry, and going back to town when I ran out of food or water to
| buy some more.
| shortformblog wrote:
| As a teenager, I got so into BBSes at one point that I started
| calling the long-distance ones just to see what was out there. I
| didn't know what I was doing to some degree. One month I ended up
| generating a bill of something like $300--not exactly a fun thing
| to explain to a parent.
|
| Soon after that happened, we signed up for a traditional ISP with
| unlimited hours.
| maximilianburke wrote:
| I thought it was fantastic. Some BBSs were fairly typical clones
| of base-software-with-messages-and-files, but many were
| different. Effort put into art in the menus, the selection of
| games, the content offered. It felt a lot more like a community.
| No overarching systems watching your browsing habits, no
| advertising content.
|
| The feeling of creating a space for people to come and enjoy I
| think is thoroughly missing from todays social media.
| tmsh wrote:
| At the time the experience was "first class" [1] ;)
|
| I was lucky enough to be a middle schooler when BMUG [2] was
| going strong. And even attended a few of the Thursday night meet
| ups they had. I remember one person talking about "encryption"
| for the first time for me. And how they were thinking about maybe
| one day computers would need to find more "entropy." E.g., use
| the random variations in the hardware to seed/salt communication.
| That was a 'hmm, interesting' experience for me that drew me more
| towards technology.
|
| I also remember getting access to BBSes via friends of friends
| that specialized in 'software'. And having handles / trying to
| come up with badass handles. And other mischievous things.
|
| But it was fun - and with Macintosh software - freeware,
| shareware, etc., I variously remember different BMUG catalogs -
| with CDs full of shareware in the backs of paperback books per
| year or per season, etc. Funny how things have changed and yet
| the most advanced stuff that was going on then is more or less
| what's just normal now (higher quality videos, bandwidth, etc.).
| People have been chatting and posting online for a minute.
|
| UPDATE. These icons are a throwback:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FirstClass#/media/File:FirstCl...
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FirstClass
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_Macintosh_Users_Group
| ridiculous_fish wrote:
| BMUG was a special place. I still have most of their
| newsletters, each on the order of ~400 pages. Here's a
| representative article:
|
| https://twitter.com/ridiculous_fish/status/13078734651148492...
| im_down_w_otp wrote:
| FirstClass was amazing. I saw this thread and immediately
| searched in it to make sure someone referenced this incredible
| piece of software.
| comatose_kid wrote:
| The coolest thing about bbsing in the 80s was a side effect of
| running the over phone lines: because long distance charges were
| expensive, you ended up dialing local bbses and organizing
| meetups with other local users. That was fun and feels like
| something important that is lost with current social networks
| jjav wrote:
| The big deal about cost was that in the 80s phone calls were
| charged by the minute for anything beyond a very small local
| areas (even across town might be per-minute, for some towns).
|
| So unless you happened to have a BBS within a local dialing
| range, it became very expensive very fast due to phone company
| bill. For me at the time there was only one BBS within "local
| long distance" range (IIRC about 25c/minute) but it didn't have
| much content. Every interesting BBS I read about was over $1/min
| long distance charges away.
|
| This kept me out of the BBS scene through all of the 80s. By the
| late 80s I got real Internet access through university, so didn't
| pay attention to BBSs after that. I did briefly play with BBS in
| the mid 90s when I was living in an area where I could call into
| several ones for free, but by then it was the decline of the era
| anyway.
| logosmonkey wrote:
| It was pretty amazing. I think my first BBS experience was around
| the time I was 13 so it would have been 93ish. I actually don't
| remember how I first got the phone number for the BBS - that was
| the biggest barrier probably, to first get into a BBS you had to
| to know their phone number. Once you got logged into your first
| one they usually had a directory of other BBSs that you could
| check out. Anyway, that first BBS was probably my favorite, it
| was called USA BBS and was located somewhere in Central Arkansas,
| can't remember the exact location but it was an 800 number so I
| never got charged for using it, otherwise my parents would have
| killed me! I think they had around 8 lines so that's the total
| number of folks who could be on at one time and who might be in
| the general chat. I would usually hang out in chat for a few
| hours and people would log on and off throughout that time and
| stop in to chat. It was a wonderful experience for me, I met a
| lot of friends on that board. When the web started becoming a
| thing the BBS got a gateway to provide www access so it provided
| my first experience with websites too. It had a upload and
| download section as well and provided a lot of music, pictures
| and apps. I think some of the docs there gave me exposure to what
| Unix was and subsequently led me to buy my first 10 disc Linux
| set with early Slackware and Debian. I ran my own little BBS for
| a bit too so my friends and I could play tradewars and falcons
| eye. I always had to remember to turn the ringers in my parents
| room off before they went to bed otherwise if my dad got woken up
| he'd go mental.
| evanelias wrote:
| The BBS scene wasn't completely homogeneous. In terms of absolute
| numbers, a majority of boards were hobbyist systems: single phone
| line, free to use (but limited time per day per user), often a
| teenager sysop, heavily customized menus and ANSI graphics,
| curated selection of games and files.
|
| Some of these hobbyist systems were underground "HPAVC" boards,
| focusing on pirated software and viruses and the like, usually
| invite-only, and everyone using pseudonyms. Others were clean
| systems, sometimes requiring real names, usually an adult SysOp.
| Most hobby systems were somewhere in between the two, at least in
| my area.
|
| But there were also larger systems with 10-50+ phone lines,
| running more expensive software (usually MajorBBS/Worldgroup,
| costing several thousand dollars). These were usually pay-to-use.
| Sometimes membership also included dial-up internet access; as
| the BBS scene waned, some of these transitioned to become
| regional ISPs.
|
| Most boards had local message subs, meaning different discussion
| topic areas you could post in. Some boards also participated in
| message networks, such as FidoNet, where you could converse with
| people across the country or globe -- it just took a day or more
| for your message to reach all BBSes in the network.
|
| It wasn't a utopia. There were still trolls and ignorant people.
| I suppose the difference in the dial-up days was that those
| trolls tended to live in the same region as you, which arguably
| isn't an improvement.
|
| At its peak, in relative terms there was definitely a bit of a
| real industry built up around the BBS scene: a few small to
| medium sized companies, several hundred independent developers of
| BBS software and games, publications such as BoardWatch, industry
| conferences such as ONE BBS CON, etc. Compared to the modern
| software industry, it was absolutely tiny; but the software and
| computing landscape as a whole was _much_ smaller then.
|
| I started using dial-up BBSes in 1993 (Philly area), and later
| developed a couple BBS games from 1999-2003 -- by which point
| most boards had moved to telnet, allowing them to have many
| concurrent users instead of being limited to physical phone
| lines. My games took advantage of this by being highly multi-
| player, and one of those games became relatively popular for that
| time period, running on several hundred boards at its peak.
| Developing BBS games was an interesting experience, definitely a
| mix of positive and negative though.
| perardi wrote:
| Ah, memories.
|
| I got on a BBS through a local university (Bradley University) in
| 1994 on my first computer: a Performa 630CD, with a Global
| Village 14 Kbps modem.
|
| If I recall, and I barely do, because I was in 4th grade, I got
| into it via a "gifted child" _(ugh)_ outreach from the
| university. We got a floppy disk with ZTerm, a number to dial
| into, and a default password. That I somehow still remember.
|
| What did I do on there? I really don't remember much, besides it
| had what I seem to recall as a web portal. In my memory, it had a
| predefined set of websites you could pull up, and it would scrape
| the HTML and return text and links. _(Now that I type that, maybe
| it was just Lynx running on their server, but I swear there were
| more hoops to go through.)_
|
| It felt like the future at the time, though it didn't last long.
| We briefly joined Apple's eWorld+, which very quickly went away,
| and then we were on to AOL. From a CD. Probably shrink-wrapped
| Macworld Magazine.
|
| I feel very old now.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EWorld
| djbusby wrote:
| I had a friend in Castro Valley, his dad got them setup with like
| five lines! One was always connect to some system at UCB. So I
| had to dial into Josh's system to connect to Berkeley, to connect
| to these things called newsgroups.
|
| Oh, and it took _for-ev-er_ to download Leisure Suit Larry. My
| first disappointing multi-day download attempt.
| TigeriusKirk wrote:
| For me it was mostly a social experience. It was all about
| posting on the forums, which were largely just about chatting at
| the time. There were some specific focused topics, but most were
| general and were people meeting people.
|
| Because of long distance phone charges, the vast majority of
| people on a given board were local to that board. In my city we
| had regular parties and meetups, so online friends frequently
| became real life friends.
|
| I'm currently working on a project with a friend I made in the
| early 80s on a bbs, so those connections could definitely last.
| Come to think of it, another of my current projects is a direct
| result of another connection from that era.
|
| One thing I don't see mentioned muc was that there was a lot of
| sex-driven bbs's. Maybe that was just my region. But many of the
| adults were swingers and/or bdsm aficionados. They'd be at the
| parties, but us teenagers were doing our own things and mostly
| didn't care what the olds were up to. It was definitely there,
| though.
| CUViper wrote:
| I had the pleasure of living with one -- my dad ran The Bailey
| Information Exchange in Colorado. We had a satellite feed and a
| few lines for folks to dial into. I would get on a local terminal
| to play Legend of the Red Dragon and TradeWars, and then see what
| new shareware games I could copy to floppies to sneakernet back
| to my own computer (hand-me-down from BBS upgrades).
| thesuperbigfrog wrote:
| You can think of a BBS as a single web site that only one (or
| maybe a few) users can use at a time.
|
| It is really slow, with a text user interface or menu driven
| interface.
|
| It might have a forum or text-only email that does not get
| updated very fast.
|
| There are some files that you can download, but not very many
| (maybe a hundred), but it takes several minutes to download one
| file. You can upload files you want to share, but that takes
| several minutes per file as well.
|
| There are some multiuser games, but in most cases only one or two
| users are playing at a time. One of my favorite was Trade Wars
| 2002: http://wiki.classictw.com/index.php?title=Jumpgate
|
| It was not at all similiar to today's web and social media
| because each BBS was local (who had the money to call long
| distance for far away BBSes?), and it was so much slower than
| today's Internet speeds.
|
| Seriously, BBSes over a 2400 baud or 9600 baud modem were so much
| slower than the data speeds that most cell networks offer today.
|
| Another big factor was that calling BBSes used a phone line. If
| your family had a single phone line, it was in use when using the
| modem. No one could make or receive phone calls when you were
| online. This meant that serious BBS users and sysops running
| BBSes had multiple phone lines. Those who couldn't afford
| multiple phone lines were calling late at night when no one else
| was using the phone.
| 13of40 wrote:
| > It was not at all similiar to today's web and social media
| because each BBS was local...
|
| This is an important distinction, because depending on the size
| of your town and how social you were, there was a good chance
| you might meet these people in real life. Imagine if everyone
| in this thread actually went out for a beer or played disc golf
| with each other every once in a while.
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| Indeed, we often had meetups. This really made it much more
| fun.
|
| On the packet radio side it was even more fun because you
| could see all the packets flying through the air and you
| could 'eavesdrop' on other people's conversations. Which
| sounds worse than it is - on the CB it was already a given
| that conversations were public so everyone was already used
| to that. And it didn't require any wizardry, pretty much
| every program showed a running log of the packets received.
| We're talking 1200 baud so you could actually follow it.
| People would often send stuff by broadcast too (usually many
| times because of the high packet loss and the chance of
| people missing it).
|
| In fact this really helped my early grasp of network tuning,
| messing with window and repeat timers to improve performance.
| Because it was all going in slow-motion you could really see
| the effects.
| logosmonkey wrote:
| Yeah, I ended up meeting a bunch of the regulars on my local
| BBS.
| whartung wrote:
| > It is really slow, with a text user interface or menu driven
| interface.
|
| It should be stressed that "really slow" is relative. 1200 baud
| for text, specifically scrolling text, is really usable. You
| feel it much more if you're constantly repainting a screen
| (because now you're sending 2K of text over at 120 cps).
|
| But scrolling simple prompts, simple menus, text messages are
| all fine at 1200 baud. That's faster than reading speed for
| most people. Systems were kept terse due to slower rates, but
| when it came down to actually "using" the systems, folks
| weren't typically shouting at their machines to go faster.
|
| When BBSs became more focused on software than messaging, speed
| became a much bigger issue.
| thesuperbigfrog wrote:
| >> but when it came down to actually "using" the systems,
| folks weren't typically shouting at their machines to go
| faster.
|
| Did you ever download or upload files?
|
| >> scrolling simple prompts, simple menus, text messages are
| all fine at 1200 baud.
|
| Yes, on a 80 column text screen, there was only so much you
| could see at a time. People who have only seen web pages with
| inline images at high resolution that load instantly would
| probably see 1200 baud as slow.
| laumars wrote:
| You are arguing the exact same points the GP made but using
| selective quoting to make it sound like a rebuttal.
| jasonjayr wrote:
| Really slow -- as in waiting for the messaging system to
| search/display the list of all waiting messages, being loaded
| over a slow IDE hard drive with limited memory ....
|
| But yea. Once you got to 1200 baud; the phone line could
| fling text at you just beyond normal reading speed; if all it
| was doing is sending that. Add in a lot of ANSI or terminal
| escape codes, and it can feel a bit sluggish till 56kbps
| bitwize wrote:
| Emacs still has aggressive terminal optimization code in it
| that calculates the smallest set of terminal commands
| necessary to repaint a screen in one state, into the
| desired state. So Emacs may still be usable -- not ideal
| but usable -- at 1200 baud.
|
| Something similar exists for vi, but I don't know if Vim
| has it.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| ITS Emacs (the original TECO verision) using the SUPDUP
| display protocol supported "line saving", so it could
| tell your terminal to stash a line in memory before
| overwriting it, so later it could almost instantly
| redisplay that line when you scrolled back to it. That
| was really great at 300 baud. 1200 baud too, of course.
| But modems used to cost about a dollar a baud.
|
| https://github.com/PDP-10/supdup/blob/master/supdup.mss#L
| 635
|
| I posted this earlier about the Gosling Emacs screen
| redisplay algorithm. That was the code that RMS rewrote.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26114104
|
| To be fair, RMS a right to fuss and complain, because
| UniPress did kind of pull the rug out from under him. The
| display update optimization code that Gosling wrote was
| pretty ugly but amazingly brilliant dynamic programming
| stuff, and it had a skull-and-crossbones warning in the
| comments.
|
| RMS originally used the display update code from Gosling
| Emacs, but then rewrote it all from scratch for later
| versions of Gnu Emacs, after UniPress threatened him not
| to use it. As modems and networks became faster, and
| people started using window systems instead of terminals,
| having an "Ultra-hot screen management package" became
| less important. But it's a really cool algorithm, a great
| example of dynamic programming, and Gosling even
| published a paper about it!
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22849522
|
| James Gosling's Emacs screen redisplay algorithm also
| used similar "dynamic programming techniques" to compute
| the minimal cost path through a cost matrix of string
| edit operations (the costs depended i.e. on the number of
| characters to draw, length of the escape codes to
| insert/delete lines/characters, padding for slow
| terminals, etc).
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gosling_Emacs
|
| >Gosling Emacs was especially noteworthy because of the
| effective redisplay code, which used a dynamic
| programming technique to solve the classical string-to-
| string correction problem. The algorithm was quite
| sophisticated; that section of the source was headed by a
| skull-and-crossbones in ASCII art, warning any would-be
| improver that even if they thought they understood how
| the display code worked, they probably did not.
|
| https://donhopkins.com/home/archive/emacs/skull-and-
| crossbon...
|
| Trivia: That "Skull and Crossbones" ASCII art is
| originally from Brian Reid's Scribe program, and is not
| copyrighted.
|
| https://donhopkins.com/home/archive/emacs/mw/display.c
| /* 1 2 3 4 .... Each Mij represents
| the minumum cost of +---+---+---+---+-----
| rearranging the first i lines to map onto 1 |
| | | | | the first j lines (the j
| direction +---+---+---+---+-----
| represents the desired contents of a line, 2
| | | \| ^ | | i the current contents).
| The algorithm +---+---\-|-+---+-----
| used is a dynamic programming one, where 3 |
| | <-+Mij| | M[i,j] = min( M[i-1,j],
| +---+---+---+---+-----
| M[i,j-1]+redraw cost for j,2 4 | | | |
| | M[i-1,j-1]+the cost of
| +---+---+---+---+----- converting
| line i to line j); . | | | | |
| Line i can be converted to line j by either .
| just drawing j, or if they match, by moving .
| line i to line j (with insert/delete line) */
|
| https://donhopkins.com/home/documents/EmacsRedisplayAlgor
| ith...
|
| https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1159890.806463
|
| A redisplay algorithm, by James Gosling.
|
| Abstract
|
| This paper presents an algorithm for updating the image
| displayed on a conventional video terminal. It assumes
| that the terminal is capable of doing the usual
| insert/delete line and insert/delete character
| operations. It takes as input a description of the image
| currently on the screen and a description of the new
| image desired and produces a series of operations to do
| the desired transformation in a near-optimal manner. The
| algorithm is interesting because it applies results from
| the theoretical string-to-string correction problem (a
| generalization of the problem of finding a longest common
| subsequence), to a problem that is usually approached
| with crude ad-hoc techniques.
|
| [...]
|
| 6. Conclusion
|
| The redisplay algorithm described in this paper is used
| in an Emacs-like editor for Unix and a structure editor.
| It's performance has been quite good: to redraw
| everything on the screen (when everything has changed)
| takes about 0.12 seconds CPU time on a VAX 11/780 running
| Unix. Using the standard file typing program, about 0.025
| seconds of CPU time are needed to type one screenful of
| text. Emacs averages about 0.004 CPU seconds per
| keystroke (with one call on the redisplay per keystroke).
|
| Although in the interests of efficency we have stripped
| down algorithm 5 to algorithm 6 the result is still an
| algorithm which has a firm theoretical basis and which is
| superior to the usual ad-hoc approach.
|
| More info:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22850973
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| Uhmmm try running your terminal at 9600 baud, and see how
| quickly you get bored with it :) And that's 4 times as fast.
|
| I did this for a while recently because I needed to access
| something over a serial port and it was not fun. 1200 is
| really slow.
| ericbarrett wrote:
| This slow speed is one of the reasons the curses library
| and its descendants try to only repaint small sections of
| the screen using escape codes to move the cursor.
| Ironically it's also quite helpful with some modern
| terminals that are very heavyweight on graphical (pixel)
| redraws.
|
| E.g. I can refresh a TUI app using MacOS Terminal.app 30x a
| second using ncurses; but a naive wipe/redraw at that rate
| produces visible flickering and artifacts.
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| That's true, though it really surprised me how slow it
| felt.
|
| In the end I pumped the terminal speed up to 115k2 and it
| _still_ felt very slow. Especially quickly paging through
| logfiles with 'less'. I remember spending part of my
| college days on green screen 9600 baud terminals (before
| they bought enough X terminals for everyone) and they
| felt snappy back in the day. And there was already a lot
| of TUI stuff going on back then. And in those days I
| didn't even know about gnu screen (or today's tmux) yet!
|
| I think I've just gotten spoilt with today's computer
| performance.
| dusted wrote:
| 1200 is not too bad on a bbs, I'm often doing that on my
| c64. 300 is slow!
|
| I used 9600 setting up an rs/6000 last week, and it was
| fast enough that I didn't notice.
|
| I live in a weird alternate universe.
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| Not that weird, I still have a bunch of SPARC Netras with
| serial ports only (no video) and several HP-UX boxes <3
|
| I love that old stuff, and figuring out how to use their
| boot managers etc. On the Netras the configuration is
| actually stored on a smart card. Very cool.
| VLM wrote:
| I would also toss out the concept that what moderns call
| "speed" is actually latency.
|
| Latency of even a 300 baud modem is essentially instant, in
| some cases faster than modern heavily buffered cable modem
| services. Hit enter and it starts responding instantly.
|
| People are used to a second or so latency on modern web
| pages, when shopping on amazon or whatever. Then they see a
| 300 baud modem vs a 30 megabit cable modem and think if "hit
| a key see response" takes a second at 30 megabits/sec then at
| 300 bits/sec 100K times slower, it must be "hit a key see
| response 100K seconds later" LOL no nothing like that at all.
|
| UIs were generally lower latency aka "faster" back in the old
| days than they are now.
| User23 wrote:
| > Another big factor was that calling BBSes used a phone line.
| If your family had a single phone line, it was in use when
| using the modem. No one could make or receive phone calls when
| you were online. This meant that serious BBS users and sysops
| running BBSes had multiple phone lines. Those who couldn't
| afford multiple phone lines were calling late at night when no
| one else was using the phone.
|
| My brother would pick up the phone and yell into it to knock me
| offline.
|
| BBSes were the gateway drug to MUDs for me. And even at 1200
| baud a DIKUMUD was plenty playable.
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| > My brother would pick up the phone and yell into it to
| knock me offline.
|
| Yup this is why I rerouted the phone line through my room and
| had it hooked up to a switch :P
| blihp wrote:
| I'm going to answer mainly from the perspective of the 1980's
| since that was really the 'golden era' of the BBS, IMO. The
| 1990's was more the era of the commercial services (CompuServe,
| AOL etc. Many of these existed in the 80's but were too
| expensive/niche for most users) which transitioned to Internet
| gateways by the mid-90's pretty much killing off the
| BBS/proprietary use cases.
|
| _How was the experience?_
|
| Slow. Take the baud rate and divide by 10 to get the characters
| per second. In the 80's you typically had a 1200 or 2400 baud
| modem so 120-240 characters per second. PCs were mostly text-
| based (as was the BBS you dialed into) and had anywhere from
| 40x20-ish (on 8-bit PCs that could connect to a TV) to 80x25
| displays (connected to a 'real' monitor, might require an upgrade
| on some 8-bit systems) so on a monitor you were looking at no
| more than 3 lines of text per second. You could just about keep
| up with reading the text as it downloaded. In the late 80's/early
| 90's 9600 baud became more widespread a bunch of other improved
| speeds until finally ~56k (IIRC, this was the theoretical limit
| of the analog phone system and couldn't often be reached. Also,
| the higher baud rates assumed some compression which really only
| performed on some types of content... i.e. not images/archives)
|
| _What was the cost involved?_
|
| Modems typically cost $100-300 (by the mid-80's) and by the end
| of the modem era were included with your PC/laptop. In the U.S.
| in addition to paying your monthly phone bill you typically had
| zone charges (~$0.10/minute for phone #'s more than a few miles
| but less than ~30 miles from you you paid to the 'baby bell' who
| had the regional monopoly in your area) or long distance charges
| (~$0.30/minute for everything else you typically paid to AT&T
| until MCI/Sprint became a thing in terms of alternative long
| distance providers). _Most_ smaller BBS systems were free though
| the larger ones like The WELL charged fees in addition to any
| phone company charges. All of the commercial services charged
| hourly connection fees in those days ~$5-20 /hr in addition to
| phone company charges and if you were lucky, they had a point of
| presence phone # that was near enough that it would only cost you
| zone charges. (if you lived in say NYC there were most likely
| POPs a local call away)
|
| _Barrier to entry?_
|
| There were a lot of free BBS systems that just required you to
| set up an account by dialing in and selecting a user id and
| password. Some the more hacker-oriented systems would require a
| referral from an existing member. And some people just ran
| systems for their friends but these were typically private and
| you'd never hear about them otherwise.
|
| One thing to note re: barrier to entry was often the difficulty
| of just getting a modem connection to a given BBS. On a smaller
| BBS, their main incoming line could also be their main voice # so
| you'd have to call (late) at night or a person might answer. On a
| more popular BBS, they might have multiple (no more than a
| handful, typically... each line typically cost ~$20/mo in phone
| company fees plus the cost of hardware) incoming dedicated modem
| lines but they were often far fewer than the number of people
| attempting to connect at peak times so automatic redial in client
| software quickly became a must. In the mid- to late-90's many
| people experienced this quite frequently when using AOL for their
| internet access. Lots of articles and posts at the time about the
| AOL issue(s).
|
| _How similar was it to current social media networks?_
|
| I remember the conversations as being more real. Typically the
| content was more technical since it was mostly computer geeks
| hanging out on them and we were mostly trying to figure things
| out / get things done. As the years ticked by, a lot of geek
| culture stuff started being discussed (i.e. sci fi/fantasy, board
| gaming etc) It's similar to how if you tune in to ham radio
| frequencies you'll often hear hams mostly talking about ham
| stuff. Also, there was a cultural distaste for being
| overtly/overly commercial if not outright banning it. If someone
| asked a question and you had a product/service that would help
| them, it was usually OK to mention it with a disclaimer. If you
| were mainly there to sell something, you could expect to be
| booted off sooner rather than later.
|
| _How big the industry around it actually become?_
|
| Dunno... millions, maybe tens of millions of dollars for the BBS
| side. For most it was a hobby rather than a business. The
| commercial services (CompuServe/AOL/etc) side was probably on the
| order of 100 million+ until it exploded in the mid-90's due to
| them acting as some of the first ISPs for millions of users.
|
| _From a tech point of view what do you think were the major
| breakthroughs and what made it to the internet we see today?_
|
| Very little. Probably the main thing that transitioned over was
| the concept of user forums and the continued use of .GIF and .ZIP
| files. The BBS era was a Tower of Babel in terms of protocols (we
| went from XMODEM to YMODEM to ZMODEM for transfer files...
| sometimes Kermit which covered terminal emulation as well as file
| transfer), file formats (.ARC, .ZOO, .ZIP as well as a bunch of
| others best forgotten) and separation of responsibilities (with
| the higher speed modems data was compressed but you were also
| transferring files/archives that were compressed which would
| result in a slower transfer as the modem tried to compress an
| already compressed data stream making it larger.) One other
| annoyance was the fact that there was some platform specific
| stuff that needed to be address: on the Amiga archives had to be
| zero-padded either on the sending or receiving end and on the Mac
| there were resource forks to contend with. So this resulted in a
| few other oddball things such as .SIT/.SEA files on the Mac. The
| Internet predated the BBS and was growing exponentially at the
| same time using TCP/IP since the 70's. FidoNet was basically the
| BBS attempt to do something similar to the Internet in terms of
| letting BBS's talk to each other. Some BBS operators fortunate
| enough to have Internet connectivity were also running gateways
| and you could dial in to them for UUCP/NNTP to the 'real'
| Internet.
|
| The reason BBS became a thing was very similar to the reason the
| PC did: the Internet already existed, had better performance,
| better reliability, better protocols and better software.
| However, you had to be connected (i.e. know someone / be
| associated with certain institutions) and have much more
| expensive hardware/software well beyond the hobbyist/home budget
| to use it at the time.
| mahoro wrote:
| I hosted a BBS in St.Petersburg, Russia at the dawn of the age of
| BBS, in 2001-2002. Everybody had a dial-up Internet connection
| these days but it was too pricy to be the only "connectivity".
|
| File hosting using BBS is almost completely lost its value, maybe
| only cool demos collections were valuable. And eventually,
| someone may download some FIDO software.
|
| To me, a BBS was partially a self-expression method (I draw poor
| quality ASCII graphics), and partially an old school
| "chatroulette" :) There was a chat in BBS software, and visitors
| often used it to talk about everything :)
|
| Many BBSes in my city were active at night time only. Mine was
| open from 11 pm to 8 am, and most active hours were from 11 pm to
| 2-3 am.
| enos_feedler wrote:
| My favorite memory of the BBS days was stumbling across an
| "elite" BBS full of warez and txt manuals like the jolly roger
| cookbook. In order to get access you needed to be voted in by
| others. How does a 10 year old know anyone to get voted in? Well,
| messing around at the "front door" of this BBS got me to realize
| that new users were still able to login with limited status.
| However, one thing they could do was vote on other new users.
| Boom, I created 3 fake accounts to vote my real account in ;)
| __enos_feedler2 wrote:
| ha nice ;)
| enos_feedler wrote:
| lol
| pavlov wrote:
| Upload ratios for all the interesting stuff (demos, MOD music,
| software) were a real headache for me as a teenager.
|
| Typically the ratio was around 4:1 downloads vs. uploads. In
| other words, to download 4 megabytes, you were required to first
| upload a megabyte.
|
| Since disk space was expensive, sysops on high-quality boards
| kept a close eye on uploads and verified them. If you uploaded
| junk, you'd probably get banned.
|
| Where does a 13-year-old go find something to upload? There were
| a few older kids in my school who were connected to the "scene".
| I would sometimes try begging them with a floppy disk in hand. I
| don't recall it working often.
|
| Upload ratios motivated me to create something of my own that
| would be decent enough to upload and not get me banned. That
| strategy didn't pay immediate dividends either, but it set me on
| a career path that has been mostly fulfilling and interesting.
| h2odragon wrote:
| Government BBS systems had Census data and other fun stuff...
| _and_ no ratios. Good for a seed library.
| pimlottc wrote:
| Another challenge was have enough time to download. Most BBSes
| had a limit on the number of minutes you could use per day,
| which could severely limit how much you were able to download.
|
| For example, on a 14.4k modem, it takes about 15 minutes to
| download a single 1.44mb floppy disk image. A typical game
| could be anywhere from 1 to 10 disks, so if your daily quota is
| 30 minutes, it would take multiple days to download a complete
| game.
|
| On very popular systems, you might not even have enough time to
| download a single disk. Keep in mind that many early modem
| transfer protocols didn't support resuming downloads, so if you
| ran out of minutes before finishing your file, you just had to
| start over again. So what to do?
|
| The solution was to use the "time bank". If you were done using
| the system for the day, you could "deposit" your unused minutes
| and store them in your account, up to some max limit. Then once
| you had enough time saved up, you could withdraw them and
| finally download that big file you've had your eye on. At
| least, as long your parents don't pick up the phone...
| kingcharles wrote:
| After 2 hours of download, 98% complete...
|
| Hearing your Mum talking to your Dad downstairs.. "I'm just
| going to give Aunt Lucy a call.."
|
| Me: "NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!"
|
| *click*
| throw0101a wrote:
| > _Keep in mind that many early modem transfer protocols didn
| 't support resuming downloads, so if you ran out of minutes
| before finishing your file, you just had to start over again.
| So what to do?_
|
| You're not wrong, but it's also worth defining "early", as
| Zmodem was out in 1986 and had restartable transfers:
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZMODEM
| [deleted]
| pimlottc wrote:
| There may have been some version of Zmodem available in
| 1986, but as Wikipedia itself says, it didn't become widely
| supported until at least the early 1990s. For example, it
| wasn't built into ProComm Plus, one of the leading terminal
| programs, until 1991 [0]. If you didn't have native
| support, you could add it to your terminal software as an
| external binary, but that was a bit trickier. [1] And, of
| course, the BBS you were calling had to support it too.
|
| But when it was available, it sure left Xmodem in the dust!
|
| 0: https://books.google.com/books?id=aAtUrtU87kQC&pg=PT180&
| lpg=...
|
| 1: https://github.com/fredrikhederstierna/fymodem/blob/98af
| 4588...
|
| P.S. Old schoolers will recognize the infamous Rusty n
| Edie's BBS in the directory screenshot in the linked PC
| Magazine article...
| linker3000 wrote:
| There was me (in the UK), my Commodore 64, Miracle Technologies
| WS2000 manual 1200bps modem and the 80 (yes, 80) column vt100
| terminal emulator with XModem that I wrote in assembler. Oh, and
| the phone bills. So much simpler than now, and much more fun on a
| pioneering level.
| [deleted]
| SavageHenry wrote:
| First off, there are many eras of BBS'ing. So you might get
| different responses based on the vintage of the respondee..
|
| In the early-mid 90's, BBS's were still a subculture driven by
| word of mouth, particularly in the period before the web came to
| AOL. With BBS's, you came for the technology, but you stayed for
| the community. There was a huge technical barrier to entry for
| kids/teens that didn't have a mom/dad that could help them
| configure things like arcane AT commands for their specific
| make/model of modem, or explain the differences between things
| like the various download protocols (named things like "y
| modem-g" or "z modem"). Sysops took on a mentorship role and
| probably helped countless 90s teens get into tech. I mention
| community because it's the most memorable value-add of BBS's.
| Something that's arguably been lost for most web & app users, but
| maybe still lives on in tight subreddits or Discord channels. I
| think there were 2 major drivers of the tight knit community on
| BBS's. First, due to the cost of long distance calls back then,
| the people that you were talking to were almost always from your
| same area/city. You weren't trolling someone on the other side of
| the world, but someone that could live in your neighborhood.
| Second, the barriers to entry were pretty high and it filtered
| out the userbase to mostly just geeks. You had to have a PC
| ($2-3k) with a modem, dedicated phone line (or an understanding
| family that didn't mind not making calls), and the luck to have a
| BBS in your area code that you'd even heard about. I wouldn't
| underestimate the latter point. Without the web or access to
| newsgroups, how I even heard about and got the number for a local
| BBS bewilders me. These were platforms run out of people's
| basements and didn't advertise through traditional channels. One
| thing I just recalled was how payments worked. Running a BBS was
| expensive (paying for multiple phone lines, expensive hardware,
| and software licenses for the BBS application itself). You could
| usually mail cash to the sysop, but a major innovation was BBS's
| that provided a service where you'd call a 900 number that
| charged $20 to your phone bill and, when you called, would read
| off an access code that you'd redeem for "minutes" on the BBS.
| Huge. One major use case for BBS's in this period was as download
| repositories for text files (tech, counterculture, even pirated
| software, etc). This sounds ridiculous now, but people were
| information starved back then compared to today. For BBS text
| files, imagine Wikipedia but way worse and way more bullshit.
| Still, it was incredible to get access to text files on BBS's.
| Porn wasn't a thing on the BBS I went to, but must've been out
| there. Media files were usually low-res jpeg, gifs (not animated,
| just static images), and "ASCII art". Video was not possible in
| any form. A 28.8k modem might achieve 3 kilobytes per second of
| download speed and rates were sensitive to analog line noise (the
| wiring from your house to local branch made a difference).
|
| Multiplayer gaming was also a major use case for BBS's during
| this time. Multiplayer FPS deathmatches on Doom & Descent were
| very popular and was mind blowing. Id software eventually offered
| an official dial-up service for FPS Doom multiplayer called
| Dwango, but it was very expensive and not in my area. For most
| BBS users, emulating a LAN over dialup was a compelling
| alternative to building an actual hardware LAN at your house.
|
| Sorry for any typos -- I'm typing this on my phone. Happy to
| answer any questions about this long forgotten technology.
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