How did Bulletin Board Systems in the late 80s and early 90s work?
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My first interaction on the internet (before it was really called the internet) was to connect to a BBS. It was about 1993 when my boss said to upgrade the firmware on a cable tester we had. I followed all the instructions in the manual not really understanding how this was going to work. The modem dialed out and all the sudden I saw this text-based welcome message with several options underneath it. It was easy enough to use and it took about 10 minutes to download the firmware. But it was another year or so before I actually ever saw my first web page and realized what this was all about.
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.
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.
We used devices (modems) that converted the analog sounds of a telephone line into digital bits to/from the computer. That way we could send bytes of data over a phone line. If you tried to listen to is with your ears, it sounded like horrible screeches and hissing because the frequencies changed so fast.
Okay, so now you need software to display the data, convert your keyboard signals into data, and talk to the modem (usually through a serial port, using a protocol called RS-232). An example of that software is “terminal emulator” software like ProComm. or Telix.
So now you use ProComm to talk to the modem and issue a special command, to dial a phone number and connect. Something like “ATDT15554321234”. Once connected, the speed and maybe compression is negotiated by the remote software and your software. Bam, you’re connected and receiving the welcome screen. Presented with choices… and can interact using all the keys on the keyboard.
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