How did Bulletin Board Systems in the late 80s and early 90s work?
In: 70
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.
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