How did Bulletin Board Systems in the late 80s and early 90s work?
In: 70
[removed]
Because they were before the internet, you would call a phone number with your computer and modem. Once you connected you could access the system. In most bulletin board systems you would create an account with a username. There would be directories, files, chat rooms, etc. It was very simple compared to what we have now, but amazing at the time.
People would put BBS software on their computer and advertise their phone number at computer stores and other bulletin board systems. Most used a dedicated line or even multiple lines. Software was mostly open source / freeware.
FIDO software was a popular choice and had a feature where FIDO systems would phone each other at night (to minimize long distance charges) and exchange DMs, message threads and files.
This was not unlike Social Media today, except it might take a few days for your messages, posts or file requests to propagate around the world.
Step one: Get a BBS phone number. Every BBS at the time had a real landline connected to it, and a modem that would answer when a call came in.
Step two: Use your modem by physically connecting it to your phone line, and use software on the PC to dial out on the phone line.
Step three: Modem connects to modem, and your modem software will display the data that the BBS sends to it over the phone line.
But.. in the 80s and 90s, there was a lot of long distance charges for calls that weren’t within your same area code (and even sometimes when it was, called an ‘interzone’ call). Calling up a BBS was no different than placing any other phone call, so a multi-hour long distance call every day would rack up to like, a $300+ phone bill for 1 month. Very expensive!
Now, if you’re curious how the BBS ‘worked’, when you called it, the BBS modem would answer (sometimes they’d have multiple modems and multiple phone lines to handle multiple people at once, but that was pretty cost prohibitive). Then, on the BBS end was a computer with specific BBS software that would ‘serve’ the information to your computer via the text screen of your dial-out software. Very common dial-out software to use for PCs was called Qmodem, because it could support multiple different connection protocols (Zmodem protocol FTW).
In addition, there were many different BBS software packages one could buy or acquire from friends that would host the BBS.
Source: Me. I used dial-up BBS’s a lot in the mid 90s, and was cut off by my Dad when I rang up a 300 dollar phone bill in inter-zone calls in 1 month. That sucked. But it was phone nonetheless.
how did we find out about new bulletin boards?
somehow i always seemed to get on them.
The internet (email, file transfer, gopher) existed at the time but webpages/www (what most people think the internet is) did not yet exist. But access to it was pretty much limited to universities and some government organizations.
BBS used dialup modems and text-only based interfaces. You could download warez (pirated software), but due to slow speeds it could take hours to download a file. Some BBS had online chat or email if the BBS had multiple dial-in lines.
There were some really big ones like Compuserve. You could get all sorts of information there, weather reports, stock prices, etc. you could even book airline tickets. All text-based.
You would call in to a phone number and browse through different areas of the system using your keyboard, no graphics at all. Early gaming was just commands,
“you are at a cross road with bushes and a sign pointing left that says Town and a sign pointing right that says Mountains, what do you do?”
Look in bushes
“There is nothing to see”
Right
“You have been ambushed by a wandering orc”
Fight
“you have stuck the orc and he is wounded, he struck you back for 5 points.”
Run
“While getting away you were struck with an arrow”
I ran Dark Ages BBS in the 90’s. It was a lot of fun using Fido-net to exchange messages with people around the world, but it could take a couple of weeks to get a reply. The door games were also fun. Land of Devastation, Legend of the Red Dragon, and The Pit were the ones I had on my BBS. People would play these games for hours. Another feature was you could also download files, most of these were simple programs and GIF picture files. It was a lot of fun and many hours spent. But I made a lot of friends so it was worth it.
Modems of old sent data down ordinary telephone lines as audible tones. So it was just an ordinary phone call required to “connect” two computers.
A BBS would be someone/thing with one or more ordinary telephone lines and a public number (no different to a modern call-center or switchboard in the largest instances, down to a teenager who used his house phone number between the hours of 6pm-8pm or whatever).
They would connect a modem to the phone line, and it would answer calls.
Other people around the world could then phone the advertised phone number, using the settings provided, and connect their modem to the BBS modem.
The BBS would then, basically, send the equivalent of teletext / websites / emails / files, etc. down the data line to the user’s modem and the user’s modem would transmit back files from the user (“uploads”), keyboard strokes (e.g. to select menus or search for downloads or play games or whatever), or whatever else.
You could do it between two schoolfriends with modems / phone lines to chat or play games. Between businesses to send documents back and forth. As a business to let your customers connect to you and order things. As an “ISP”, in effect, by letting hundreds of people dial into the same phone line and all connect together, much like you can all phone a company today on the same number.
Basically anything that involves sending and receiving data to each other. You just did it not by voice, but by two computers sending that data electronically in an ordinary phone call between them as a series of beeps and bips and tones etc.
A literal BBS (bulletin board system) was such a system where you could “press 1 to leave a message for a user” and then that user could dial up to the same BBS later to “press 2 to check if someone has left you a message”, for instance. Most BBS were actually a multitude of features – from games and share dealing to “websites”, searching, chat, messaging, file upload/download, etc. etc.
To add, in the SF Bay Area there was a free monthly (?) newspaper called Computer Currents. There was a listing of BBS’s in the classified ads.
Latest Answers