51–60 of 99 posts
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PTT_Bulletin_Board_System
Interestingly, none of my friends that use it know what Telnet is. It's almost exclusively accessed through unofficial dedicated smartphone apps.
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…
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…
Also all of these 312ers and no mention of Ripco in these comments? Ripco and its G-Files changed my world. [Edit: many of which are on this textfiles.com site, if you poke around!]
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…
It's not complicated. The rate of assimilation has to be kept higher than the rate of immigration. That doesn't mean small, but does mean a bit insular and/or "LURK MOAR."
no-one has quite squared the market opportunity around those communities yet.
I think they have. Forums, slack, blogs, their own websites, email lists, subreddits, twitter, facebook, g+, etc...
The problem with the types of community you describe, is not that they're small, but that they're actually communities. Not userbases branded as a community. They can flit on and off services as they come and go because the community has multiple ways to talk among itself.
You can sell them a tool or host a place to talk to a group of friends. But they're in too strong of a negotiating position with you for you to start a social network and scale it to the moon. They're already on the social networks anyway.
If you're targeting a community, your competition isn't facebook. Your competition is a guy with a dreamhost account and a copy of phpbb.
If you really want a killer app for communities, I think it was called Trillian. But that was back when the popular communication platforms were less rigorous at keeping everyone in the branded client.
(God, did I just say global village, what's next, "Information Highway?"
Here's my funny BBS story: I was a heavy user in the early 90s, but in 1994 I got recruited into the military and was sent to a remote corner of the world where we had one official-business-only phone line for about 250 people, so no BBS scene. I came back in 1997, met up with an old friend, and inquired about where to get a current BBS list for the town. And of course he laughed and said there was no such thing anym…
It... pretty much did. 1994 through 1995 I recall as being the big turning point from where usage went primary on BBS' to primarily on the Internet by around 1996. At least in terms of people who I wanted to talk to were doing. By mid 1995 I was pretty much Internet only other than to dial-in a few times a week to check a few local boards I participated in.
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.
"Please, he prayed, now - A gray disk, the color of Chiba sky."
Which of course now means a clear, deep blue.
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…
Randy, AFAIK, still holds CBBS reunions from time to time. Went to a couple back in the day. They were a very tight group.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are two "features" that are hard to re-create with modern BBSes. These, in my opinion, partly lead to the good user experience. 1. Because you tied up a phone line (on both ends), your time was limited. This results in not only not wasting time while on there, but also an increase in anticipation for when you can next get on. It prevents people from getting to far ahead in games. 2. Banning could actually mean…
> Banning could actually mean something. You were not really anonymous (at least on the local ones) since you can be identified by your phone number and maybe banned that way Hypothetical question: if we would see a new emergence of mobile based BBS's, using some novel protocol without identifiable phone numbers but with ability to assign unique IDs to users and solve those problems, could it take off today?
The fact things were on a phone line helped in some ways (exclusivity, time, identifiability), but doing it all through a mobile phone or other telephony does not really capture that. For one, there would only be single node BBSs unless you got creative, so I think the mobile phone part is too literal on the concept of phones.
Secondly, while this is less popular, a lot of us including myself were not actually identifiable unless we wanted to be. This happened because you could call a BBS through an intermediary such as a PBX, and it was common to war dial to find and hack these (or use open hardware) to dial out long distance. Another way was carding (stealing credit cards) to pay for calls, which would also often answer caller ID requests with another number than your own depending on what you bought.
The anonymity was more complicated as you can see, but yes, it did help quite a bit to have some sort of reputation attached to your name. A BBS handle could carry weight across many systems, and word did spread. Some Sysops were pretty nasty to people and went out of their way with that, but I think most people accepted it and didn't do things like try to take them to court like we have today. Somehow, whether they knew who you were or not, it just was not worth it and getting other users to accept you in one form or another was important. This happened via message bases, uploads (try to be top, avoid being banned for bad uploads), new user signup, games, and more. So souring your reputation had a cost if you were an avid BBSer, and even more so if you had met people in real life.
I think anything remotely similar to BBSs in terms of success needs to do at least some of these things:
- No frills access
- Tie things together as a cohesive hole
- "Character" per system. Logging on to X should not be the same as logging on to Y, but familiar enough to still be usable.
- Distributed (run by a person/people)
- No advertising. Advertising is at the root of ruining a lot
- Cross-over between the real-world and the virtual-world. Ex: In person meetings.
- Sense of urgency
- Connections to several rabid groups of sub-culture that will drive future updates, modding, usage, etc. In the old days, this was HAM Radio operators, ANSI artists, Anarchists, Punks, Crackers, Warez kids, Phreakers, D&D players, and many other groups.
- Decent give and take type systems. Ratios, time, and chat often worked this way and sometimes were all interconnected. The more you upload, the more time you get, and the more you can chat for example.
Many more things, but I'll stop there.
It's worth noting that there's a Taiwanese BBS established in 1995 that's still extremely popular, with "over 150,000 users online during peak hours" according to Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PTT_Bulletin_Board_System Interestingly, none of my friends that use it know what Telnet is. It's almost exclusively accessed through unofficial dedicated smartphone apps.