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Social Media’s Dial-Up Ancestor: The Bulletin Board System

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Re: Social Media’s Dial-Up Ancestor: The Bulletin Board System

#41

Post by optionalparens »

phil21 wrote: post #39
optionalparens wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure I could point you to anything specific since I lived through it and never bothered to look, but there seems to be some alright stuff scattered on wikipedia. You can also learn a lot just downloading old ansi packs from http://sixteencolors.net/ and reading the news and info files in each pack. The thing is, the history of that era is huge and has many parts. The BBS Documentary covers some of it, but IMO…

At risk of not adding much to your comment, this really rings true having been a teen when a lot of those names were big on the "scene". This definitely brought me down memory lane, and made me start thinking of finding some of my old local 2600 friends to see what they got up to over the years. One thing I will add is that the energy and excitement was just so much more genuine and the passion was at a different lev…

You reminded me, should add these to the lit section:

* 2600

* Cult of the Dead Cow

* Phrak

Re: Social Media’s Dial-Up Ancestor: The Bulletin Board System

#42

Post by kingrolo »

LarryMade2 wrote: post #22

Back in the day there were BBSs running on just about any type of microcomputer, CP/M, Apple II/Mac, Atari 8bit/ST, Commodore VIC/64/128/Amiga, TRS-80, etc. Most overviews focus just on the IBM-PC stuff (or what the author used back in the day - like Jason Scott an Apple II user). The smaller micro BBS were their own vibrant little universes. The Commodore 64 boards had a quite a few BBS systems from pretty spartan 6…

Systop of Overdose BBS, sometime around 1993/94. I was 13 or 14 years old.

From a look at a list of software on Wikipedia I think we were running Remote Access (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RemoteAccess). I remember hooking up a Fido mail feed which fetched email at 5am every day towards the end of things, and playing a Mud (Mud 2) and Lord.

Crazy to think how far things have moved on in 20 years.

Re: Social Media’s Dial-Up Ancestor: The Bulletin Board System

#43

Post by Doctor_Fegg »

optionalparens wrote: post #14
rhapsodic wrote: post #3

I can still recall the little rush I'd get when that 14.4KBS modem would get a handshake and the lines of green characters would start scrolling down the old CRT screen... Good times.

14.4? Slow down there, friend, we lucky people were using Hayes 300 baud modems. I still remember my glorious upgrade path: 300->2400 (now we're cooking)->4800->9600->14.4->19.2->28.8->56k USR, Courrier, and Hayes were usually the best ones for me. I skipped 33.6 among other upgrades. The Courrier also had that extra punch if you were lucky enough to get one on the other end. The Unix stuff was pretty pedestrian as f…

And 1200/75 (download/upload) for a while- very popular in the UK.

Re: Social Media’s Dial-Up Ancestor: The Bulletin Board System

#44

Post by tyfon »

orionblastar wrote: post #5

A BBS as the original social media site. Most people were from the same area code and had BBS Meetings to see the faces behind the handles.

Oh yeah.

I still remember my fathers face when he saw the 5000 NOK phone bill from me dialing a non local bbs a few too many times in the early 90s :) Here in Norway we had charges by the minute for all calls, but long distance (outside your area code) was a lot more expensive.

In the end i had a separate phone line installed on my room and ran my own bbs using https://no.wikipedia.org/wiki/MBBS (I can't find any non Norwegian sources, use translate).

Re: Social Media’s Dial-Up Ancestor: The Bulletin Board System

#45

Post by anexprogrammer »

60654 wrote: post #28

Oh that takes me back. There were so many BBSes in the 312 in the mid 90s. Just reading the list [1] is like a trip down the memory lane. The end of that article makes a great point. There was a huge diversity of communities back then, and each of them was small enough that they didn't devolve into spam and mindless trolling. It's something I really miss, and something that can't be replicated by uber-sites like redd…

The sense of community was very real with BBS's. Real friendships developed with people you would likely never meet. SYSOPs cared about the people who dialled in to their little hobby project. Many organised meet-ups and BBQs. Memories for some of the phone bills are less warm though!

It all disappeared incredibly fast in the mid 90s as ISPs and the net grew.

Social is, ironically, far less personal with none of that sense of community.

Re: Social Media’s Dial-Up Ancestor: The Bulletin Board System

#46

Post by enobrev »

60654 wrote: post #28

Oh that takes me back. There were so many BBSes in the 312 in the mid 90s. Just reading the list [1] is like a trip down the memory lane. The end of that article makes a great point. There was a huge diversity of communities back then, and each of them was small enough that they didn't devolve into spam and mindless trolling. It's something I really miss, and something that can't be replicated by uber-sites like redd…

Not that I'd possibly remember the details, but in 1992 / 1993, during my freshman year in High School (living in 312 as well), I visited a new HS friend at his house and he showed me his array of 6 or 8 modems running a BBS.

By that point I'd only tried out BBS once or twice from my old Laser 128, and didn't really get it. After my new friend invited me to hook into his BBS, and I found all this great stuff to download and try out, I was hooked. I feel like that's where I first learned about the Anarchist Cookbook as well.

Re: Social Media’s Dial-Up Ancestor: The Bulletin Board System

#47

Post by firegrind »

optionalparens wrote: post #41
phil21 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At risk of not adding much to your comment, this really rings true having been a teen when a lot of those names were big on the "scene". This definitely brought me down memory lane, and made me start thinking of finding some of my old local 2600 friends to see what they got up to over the years. One thing I will add is that the energy and excitement was just so much more genuine and the passion was at a different lev…

You reminded me, should add these to the lit section: * 2600 * Cult of the Dead Cow * Phrak

Well worth a listen to some old Off The Hook shows from 2600.com - they go back a long way in time and culture. Off The Wall too.

Re: Social Media’s Dial-Up Ancestor: The Bulletin Board System

#48

Post by rufb »

Growing up in a coffee farm in countryside São Paulo state, I was a late BBSer (from 1994 to the early 2000s). As other people have it with Usenet and early web forums, I just loved how tight-knit and contentful the Internet was back then. I don't subscribe to the Eternal September "newcomers ruined everything" feeling (in fact I'm quite a big fan of massified Internet culture), but I do love and cherish those sorts of small, focused online communities, every day more protective of themselves and thus harder to find.

I still wonder if it's possible to have a large community (beyond, say, Dunbar's number active member) that is able to sustain the feeling of those small ones — as far as I'm concerned, it's an open question in modern design. Points and reputation systems (such as HN, Slashdot and Reddit sport) and closed doors (secret groups on Facebook and other communities that are hard to access or join) are fair compromises, but I still feel no-one has quite squared the market opportunity around those communities yet. But maybe they do have to stay small. And maybe it's a thing that will elude monetization forever, who knows. Right now, as far as I'm concerned, no-one's making money out of those small-and-focused community patterns which are the best and oldest of the Internet.

Re: Social Media’s Dial-Up Ancestor: The Bulletin Board System

#50

Post by baldfat »

beamatronic wrote: post #32

I got into BBSes when I was in maybe 8th grade. Because we didn't have call waiting, and thus it would tie up the phone line, I could only do BBSing at night. Until I got a long extension cable from Radio Shack, I had to move the computer ( Commodore 64 ) to the dining room table every night when everyone had gone to sleep and I could finally BBS! I wish there was some way to convey the excitement of getting online b…

My parents got a second line! I can't tell you how awesome that was to this generation nor the trouble I caused. I bought my first modem when I was in 8th Grade.

Oh the things I learned on BBS.

Back then black boxes, free compuserve, phreaking and other nefarious things got allot of my "social group" in trouble. My favorite thing was to try and find a server and figure out who owned it. To bad my friends who were brothers in Virginia. They had all their computer equipment confiscated by the FBI and were national news. One stupid friend (Capt Kirk) took carbon copies of sales at work and bought tens of thousands of dollars through Compuserve for over a year. He got caught at 17 or 18 and was hired for $40,000 to help their security.

I had learned Assembly for cracking purposes at 14 and I didn't have the heart to throw away my two black garbage bags full of floopy disks away till 2004.

Watching the movie War Games knowing I already owned all that equipment was pretty cool when that movie came out.

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