Are there places where BBS is still in active use?
If you’re near the Bay Area, CA, there’s a few N0ARY BBSes accessible via packet radio. For example, there’s one on Mt. Umunhum in the Santa Cruz mountain range.
BBS: The Documentary (2005)
11–20 of 67 posts
Re: BBS: The Documentary (2005)
#12I used to hang both online and IRL with one of the folks in the documentary. Seems like yesterday. Still have nostaligic memories of being enamored by his stack of USR 16.8k HST modems and the T1 (iirc) he managed to get to his residence.. (again, iirc), his house was like under 1000 feet (loop length) to the CO (central office) where the 4ESS (telephone switch) was located. (could be inaccurate recollections..)
As I recall, I never knew any of the people in the documentary, but definitely used to hang out with various people in the community who were members of a large Cambridge MA BBS.
Re: BBS: The Documentary (2005)
#13(2005)
Also available in the IA: https://archive.org/details/BBS.The.Documentary
Re: BBS: The Documentary (2005)
#14BBS's are mostly a pre-web thing (and were largely divorced from the internet--for which you basically had to work for a small number of companies or universities to get on) so this documentary from @textfiles is a valuable piece of pre-web computer history. BBS's were a pretty important part of my early computer experience once PC's came out.
BBS's were the first point of access for the internet for many - the more professional or BBS-as-a-service charging fees, one local one for example had something like 20 concurrent users possible (20 phone lines in) - were some of the first to get T1 lines following universities, etc.
Re: BBS: The Documentary (2005)
#15BBS's are mostly a pre-web thing (and were largely divorced from the internet--for which you basically had to work for a small number of companies or universities to get on) so this documentary from @textfiles is a valuable piece of pre-web computer history. BBS's were a pretty important part of my early computer experience once PC's came out.
BBS's were the first point of access for the internet for many - the more professional or BBS-as-a-service charging fees, one local one for example had something like 20 concurrent users possible (20 phone lines in) - were some of the first to get T1 lines following universities, etc.
Yeah, my commercial BBS was my first ISP for a time until I got broadband.
Re: BBS: The Documentary (2005)
#16(2005) Also available in the IA: https://archive.org/details/BBS.The.Documentary
Some more recent related threads with nice anecdotes and connections:
2022: Really Enjoyed Jason Scott’s BBS Documentary (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31740247)
2021: Ask HN: What was it like to use BBS? (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29140217)
2016: Social Media’s Dial-Up Ancestor: The Bulletin Board System https://spectrum.ieee.org/social-medias-dialup-ancestor-the-... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12784307)
Re: BBS: The Documentary (2005)
#17I am really happy to have experienced bbses during my youth. Being too young (born 1983) for their golden age, I was lucky to have an older brother who allowed me to get a glimpse into this world. Check out https://16colo.rs/ for good art from the time. And from groups who keep releasing such art to this date.
I was born in '83 as well but seemed to catch the tail end of it - definitely part of my formative years, with experiences like stumbling upon my first "sex chat bot" at age 11 or 12.
BBS's were also my introduction to MUDs [multi-user domain/dungeon games] as well, though it was only once we got dialup internet at home did I find a copy of CircleMUD to then implement ideas I had for my own MUD I called Fallen Shadows - and where a small community of voluntary contributors to create rooms and mobs formed over a fairly short period; someone even made an awesome ASCII art login page spelling out Fallen Shadows in gothic-like style.
Re: BBS: The Documentary (2005)
#18As a teen, I used to enjoy playing around with the limits of what I could do with Amiga C-Net's MCI commands as well as the standard terminal ANSI escape codes.
I used to enjoy posting comments with those sequences embedded to make the reader think they had left the forums and were now elsewhere on the BBS. They eventually gave me co-sysop access so I could write games, which is when I really started programming for others.
Now I do mostly UX design and implementation. I miss the simplicity of 80x24.
Re: BBS: The Documentary (2005)
#19The day I was able to upgrade my 'shoebox' 110 baud modem to a 300 baud modem was the day I thought "I'll never need this kind of speed, but it's nice to have." Thanks for posting about this documentary. I ran a BBS from 1983-1986 on a Commodore 64, a 1200 baud modem and 5 1541 floppy drives. An amazing time for this technology.
Which BBS? I was on a lot of C64 BBSs.
I actually built my own 300 baud modem for my C64 from electronic components I got at Radio Shack. I was kind of a nerdy kid.
Re: BBS: The Documentary (2005)
#20[deleted]