An old photo of a large BBS (2022)

Same! Really appreciate this find, thanks!

This almost confirms it then, each machine has an external modem tied to 1 phone line per modem, and there are no internal modems in use. The picture shows 50 modems that I can see, and the original article indicates that it's around half of their total setup. Scott notes that they had a T3 (likely a frac T3) with 140 dial-in nodes, which aligns with the articles guess of 134 machines.

So I would say that almost definitely, they are using 1 (or 2 for some on the right side of the photo) external modem per PC connected to the 66 block, those analog phone blocks tied back to the channel bank/multiplexer, and the carrier's T3 tied in there.

No internal modems used at all.

And the person who posted the photo on twitter is none other than Scott Miller, founder of Apogee Software, publisher of some of the most revolutionary games of the late 80's and early 90's, and this BBS (Software Creations) was the cornerstone of distributing the shareware versions of those games. Very cool bit of history, I remember dialing in to Software Creations to download Commander Keen!

Here's a memory: My old Fido-net system, running on a 386, with a single phone line. Connected to a Microcom 34Kbaud modem.

Everything is chugging on, and connects to another system further up the chain at 2 am for network traffic. Except he's on a new phone number, on a new exchange in the state. A 914 exchange. Only the phone company's updates haven't reached all of the telephone switching centers in the sate. Somehow, it was re-routed to 911 services, and I had the police and fire department at the front door responding to a 'silent call'. They went away unhappy. I wasn't very happy either.

From the follow-up article: https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2022/01/27/scale/

"If you are sticking with the 2022 equivalent of MS-DOS and machines that do exactly one thing at a time, then yeah, you are going to have a whole fleet of systems all sitting there busy-waiting on something stupid."

"Don't recreate the basement full of PCs when the problem can actually be solved with a single box sitting in a cabinet somewhere."

If they really were just PCs to act as a modem-to-network bridge, this seems to be remarkably cost-inefficient. I remember around 1997 helping the university chuck out a few serial line concentrators (no idea what they were actually called), each of which had 32x RS-232 ports that worked up to 19200 baud and a 10Mbit coax network connection at the back. The on-board computer (wouldn't be at all surprised if it was much more than a 68000 or two) interfaced with all the serial ports and translated it to telnet on a remote machine. You could also send it an escape code and then via a primitive command line connect to any arbitrary IP address and port over TCP. I remember in my student days (so maybe 1995) using finger and SMTP directly from these text terminals without actually logging on.

No idea when these became available, but we were chucking them out in 1997 or 1998 as we were upgrading the labs of text terminals to PCs, so they probably at least a decade old by then.

Time is a flat circle.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47204799