41 Years Ago, There Were BBS Instead of the Internet
theregister.co.uk
41 Years Ago, There Were BBS Instead of the Internet
1–10 of 114 posts
Re: 41 Years Ago, There Were BBS Instead of the Internet
#2I used to be a sysop and made some of my deepest friendships that way. One-to-one chatting via fullscreen realtime updated text with no other distraction has some magical quality to it that makes you talk about all manner of things in depth with another person.
Re: 41 Years Ago, There Were BBS Instead of the Internet
#3LOIS BBS stuck around for a while after the internet was created. For a while you could telnet to it. It was really popular on the central coast of California and as folks got jobs, moved around, that was a way for people to keep in touch. I remember seeing multiple split-66 blocks in the sysops room the BBS was running from, with a couple dozen phone lines. It's sysop (Pete a.k.a. Communicator) passed away and the BBS was run by another member for a while and then it eventually faded away.
There were a lot of great memories created from that group of people. Given the localization aspect of BBS's in the day, it was common for a lot of people to meet up on a regular basis.
Re: 41 Years Ago, There Were BBS Instead of the Internet
#4Ah what I would do to play a good ol’ game of TradeWars 2002 the ol’ fashioned way
Re: 41 Years Ago, There Were BBS Instead of the Internet
#5BBSs are still alive; mostly accessed over amateur radio.
Re: 41 Years Ago, There Were BBS Instead of the Internet
#6BBSs are still alive; mostly accessed over amateur radio.
I’m brand new to amateur radio, but loved my BBS back in the day. Can you tell me more about this?
Re: 41 Years Ago, There Were BBS Instead of the Internet
#7Re: 41 Years Ago, There Were BBS Instead of the Internet
#8BBSs are still alive; mostly accessed over amateur radio.
And... over the internet. Quite a few internet connected BBSs around still, many of which are even part of FidoNet. Speaking of which... FidoNet is still alive too, along with several other similar BBS mail networks. :)
Re: 41 Years Ago, There Were BBS Instead of the Internet
#9Ah what I would do to play a good ol’ game of TradeWars 2002 the ol’ fashioned way
Recently, as I was doing some deep cleaning in my study, I found a warpgate map in my files that I made in the late 80s. I had forgotten all about Tradewars, so that brought back some memories.
I lived in a small town, but there was a service available at the time, a sort of modem gateway network with nodes in a lot of smaller towns. It was a subscription service. Connect to it via a local call, and from there you could dial out to most major cities without paying long distance, and the local node proxied connections over some independent network. It was limited to 1200 baud. I can't remember what it was called.
When I went off to school, I ran a local fidonet point, which basically was a sub-node that could connect to a full fidonet node and collect mail and group messages, and hang up. I could then read and respond at my leisure.
Compuserve eventually replaced Fidonet for me, well before they offered Internet access. I had one of the old numerical IDs.
Re: 41 Years Ago, There Were BBS Instead of the Internet
#10The internet predates BBS. And I'd credit HTTP, Netscape or AOL for killing off BBS rather than TCP/IP.