How did Bulletin Board Systems in the late 80s and early 90s work?
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I ran bulletin boards from 1982 to 1995. My first was on an Atari 800 using software I wrote myself. I had a 300 baud modem (30 bytes per second), and advertised my BBS on other BBS’s. It was a lot of fun as a teen watching people log into your board, leave messages, upload/download files using xmodem, ymodem or later zmodem (Kermit and that were on the unix side of the house).
In 1985 I moved to the IBM PC with a 1200 baud modem and ran Colossus (which later became Wildcat). From 1990-1995 I switched to using PCBoard and DESQview to run multiple instances with 3 internal modems. By mid 1995 the Internet was here and bulletin boards died.
We operated our boards using packet networking. At night, a process would take all the messages in forums and zip them up into a packet. We would make a call to a central bulletin board near us and upload our packet , and download their packet. They in turn would combine packets and upload them to hubs. We would do this a couple times a day, so a message written in a public forum that we subscribed to would take 12-24 hours to get back and forth. Networks such as “Intelec” were huge and had hundreds of forums and moderators.
Hard drives didn’t get into the gigabytes until the mid 90s, and were usually only 1-4 gig. So I had 3 CDrom drives with shareware discs in them running 650mb a disc. Modems in the early 80s were outrageously expensive – like $2000 for a 1200 baud. But in the end you could get 56k modem for $30 bucks.
Those were good times spent coding, sharing games, files, code snippets and talking to people online.
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