How did Bulletin Board Systems in the late 80s and early 90s work?
In: 70
Used BBSes extensively in the early 90s
Basically, think of it like you had to dial in to each specific subreddit. You’d get a number, log on, and then there’d be a list of other BBSes in the area, add it all together and there were about 25 in my area I could call locally for no charge. Some were dedicated to specific computers (apple, commodore, PC) some topics, one posted mainly business stuff (kind of a proto-linkedin).
They had message boards, which was the main interaction, but you’re talking maybe 25 messages a day on the most “active” BBSes. All told there were only about 200 messages a day to read EVERYTHING.
Secondary function was distribution of shareware. I remember spending hours to get the original Doom shareware. A few BBSes also had hidden piracy forums where you traded games.
Additionally there were door games, games that ran on BBS software, some were rudimentary like checkers and chess, a few utilized the format pretty well Legend of the Red Dragon was most popular, but a few were pretty ambitious and almost MMO like.
Lastly, a couple of BBSes had multiple lines, so it was possible to chat with people in real time.
Some had buy and sell forums, sorta like craigslist, I remember buying two computers this way.
I was in my early teens though, everyone was WAY more trusting than now. A few times I’d find other teens, sometimes girls, and you’d send them a direct message, get a phone number and then communicate that way and eventually hang out in real life.
The BBSes themselves were run by single individuals (Sysop: “Systems Operator”), at their own expense of time and money, you tended to give them quite a bit of reverence think of Mods and Admins.
I haven’t thought about this in awhile so I appreciate the trip down memory lane. I remember T-files (text files) being pretty popular. People would take chapters out of the anarchist cookbook, or write their own, a few groups specialized in them like cult of the dead cow, but it was stuff about how to make homemade bombs or drugs. And I recall just being fascinated by “omg, this forbidden knowledge” they were very small in size which played well with 2400 baud modems. This was sort of the “4chan” of BBSes. T-files would also list BBS numbers in other states, and a few times I paid long distance charges to download a fresh batch of T-files to share with other kids locally.
One local BBS had access to FIDONet, which was sort of like newsgroup software specifically for BBSes. Every day they’d dial in to a central server and download the latest batch of message threads and update everything, it’d be like if reddit “refreshed” once a day. Probably one to two thousand messages everyday. That was pretty much information overload, and none of these people were local, so I never really fucked with it. Again I was a teen and wasn’t a subject matter expert on really anything, so never felt comfortable contributing.
Whatever, I’m telling all the stories here. A few local BBSes had porn forums. Because of file transfer speeds it was mostly text based, but some people hosted pictures, but the file sizes would be huge. It could literally take an hour to download one image. And it was mostly softcore stuff too. Animated gifs were kind of a thing as well.
It’s strange to explain, but just how LITTLE content there was. I remember downloading everything hosted on a BBS whether I was interested in it or not just because I could, the aforementioned Business oriented BBS, had like accounting software and tech articles, and I just download it because I ‘could.’
In 1993 I convinced my parents to get me a text based internet account for $20/month, and things just escalated there. Early days of the internet were wild too.
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