God I miss Totse.
Social Media’s Dial-Up Ancestor: The Bulletin Board System
71–80 of 99 posts
Re: Social Media’s Dial-Up Ancestor: The Bulletin Board System
#72Man those were the days. I was just barely old enough to be able to get into them before they died. Anyone remember the door games? I remember it being pretty crazy that I could play BRE or LORD with people, even across BBSes in some cases. And each BBS had a different setup for LORD. There were some that seemingly just tried to install every possible in game module, and it was the most broken thing ever...
trade wars.. . global wars
Re: Social Media’s Dial-Up Ancestor: The Bulletin Board System
#73Back 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…
Sysop, The Smell of Music BBS (Spitfire), Chillicothe, OH, 1991-1994, FIDONET 1:2220/80
Re: Social Media’s Dial-Up Ancestor: The Bulletin Board System
#74I 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…
Heh I remember one friend boasting about getting a super fast 28.8k modem (the one with the better protocol - IIRC there were two competing compression schemes for 28.8k) Paid only a few hundred for it instead of the about $700 new. That would have been around 1994ish, he was an Amiga user.
Re: Social Media’s Dial-Up Ancestor: The Bulletin Board System
#75Oh 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…
>Social is, ironically, far less personal with none of that sense of community.
I think that's overstating things. I can certainly think of a fair number of exceptions in my case. One thing that could be different in the BBS world, however, was that there often were organized meetups and BBQs because the BBS users tended to be clustered locally because of phone costs.
Re: Social Media’s Dial-Up Ancestor: The Bulletin Board System
#76I missed the BBS phase. I vaguely remember sitting on the floor in my parents room playing with some sort of IBM-Compatible computer, but my real days were the DOS and Windows 3.1 days.
I'm fairly certain I didn't hit the Internet at large until the Windows 95 days. However, I have very fond memories of Usenet and IRC. I am glad IRC is still around, but I still miss Usenet. Even after Eternal September, Usenet was just amazing.
Anytime I'm forced to use literally any website forum, I'm reminded just how far back we've fallen. Usenet clients were amazing. I could quickly and easily catch up on posts in groups I was paying attention to. I could quickly and easily find new groups for literally any interest. Access to a fast server was included in almost any ISP subscription.
Web forums are just so painful to use these days. Especially since there are 400 forums for a particular topic that are all very disjointed.
Re: Social Media’s Dial-Up Ancestor: The Bulletin Board System
#77My experience with BBSes started around 4th grade, in 1983 or early 1984. 1200 baud US Robotics external modem, a Heathkit CPM machine my dad built, and typing AT commands by hand. My favorite at the time was Bongoland, a pacific northwest bbs which was designed more like an adventure game with message boards tucked away in various places, and I'm sure a larger, secret segment I never gained access to. I later discovered some amazing communities (Thrasher Skateboard magazine had a great system) and some horrifying ones (some people loved their pets in ways different than I was accustomed to.)
Within a few years, we got a second phone line and I started up my own. Through a lot of incarnations, but it was most popular as the Chelsea Hotel and was a hangout for miscreants, hackers, and skaters. Through it, I got to meet some people who are very influential today, as well as plenty of anonymous friends.
The experience certainly piqued my interest in other areas of tech, and I can easily trace my path from there to where I am today. I miss the limited access and smaller communities of BBSes, the excitement of hearing the connection tones after having auto-redialed for 30 minutes of busy signals, and of course, Trade Wars.
Re: Social Media’s Dial-Up Ancestor: The Bulletin Board System
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
acoustic coupled modems anyone?
It's a bit grimy, but: http://m.imgur.com/JTwCqyy
That's an A4 piece of paper for scale.
Re: Social Media’s Dial-Up Ancestor: The Bulletin Board System
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
I care. I'd be interested to see your list and notes, even if only to offer some encouragement.
My notes are pretty scattered. Here's some open source BBSs I had bookmarked: * Oblivion 2 XRM => Obv 2 remake, C++, looks OK but no killer new features really and uses Boost - https://github.com/M-griffin/Oblivion2-XRM * Enigma 1/2 => Looks interesting and possibly the best of the bunch, but also more of the same. Good ANSI support. node js-based, so major downvotes from me here - https://github.com/NuSkooler/enigma…
Nice summary, but I'd recommend giving Synchronet a more thorough look. I'd easily wager that a majority of current telnet boards run it. When it relaunched it was miles ahead of the other open source efforts, due to the number of built-in internet enabled servers (telnet, www, ftp, rlogin), support for multiple platforms (windows, linux), and use of JavaScript with a custom object model for scripting.
Some people actually dislike it for its ease of use on the sysop side -- for a while in the early aughts, too many insufficiently-customized Synchronet telnet boards were popping up. Some of the Mystic and Renegade fans feel Sync is bland.
In any case, the new Synchronet is substantially different than the old one, which oddly I never ever encountered in my area (Philly) in the 90s. Around there it was almost entirely WWIV for 1-line boards, WildCat for 2-3 line boards, and the occasional giant MajorBBS/WorldGroup board. The amount of regional differences in popularity of bbs software and doors always fascinated me.
Re: Social Media’s Dial-Up Ancestor: The Bulletin Board System
#80I also miss the BBS scene. Though I grew up in the Chicago area, I first got online in Champaign-Urbana, since my folks categorically refused to buy a modem for the home Apple II. I'm not sure if that was because they thought I might go full WarGames, or if it was just that they didn't want to risk a massive phone bill.
C-U had a hopping BBS scene at the time, but the real standout for me was Tranquillity II, which was conversation only with no downloads. At first it ran on, of all things, a TI 99/4 with the expansion box. Later it was moved to an Amiga. There were several Fido systems, and I ran a point (a subnode of an existing Fido node) for a while. Since I was out of school by then, echomail was the closest thing I could get to Usenet newsgroups.
When I got back to the Chicago area, I continued with Fidonet until the local ISPs started popping up. It still surprises me just how quickly the Internet bulldozed the BBS scene, and I think we've lost something because of that, even though we've gained a lot as well. Sure, there are still BBSes here and there (and Fidonet still exists even today), but telnetting into one halfway around the world just isn't the same as dialing into one that's a couple of miles away.