Ask HN: What was it like to use BBS?
what was the cost involved
what were the entry barrier for an average person to join
How similar was it to current social media networks
How big the industry around it actually become
From a tech point of view what do you think were the major breakthroughs and what made it to the internet we see today.
I have watched the documentary www.bbsdocumentary.com , so I have some context but want some more anecdotes if I can :)
[+] [-] MandieD|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jasonjayr|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] c23gooey|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cyanydeez|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pavlov|4 years ago|reply
Typically the ratio was around 4:1 downloads vs. uploads. In other words, to download 4 megabytes, you were required to first upload a megabyte.
Since disk space was expensive, sysops on high-quality boards kept a close eye on uploads and verified them. If you uploaded junk, you'd probably get banned.
Where does a 13-year-old go find something to upload? There were a few older kids in my school who were connected to the "scene". I would sometimes try begging them with a floppy disk in hand. I don't recall it working often.
Upload ratios motivated me to create something of my own that would be decent enough to upload and not get me banned. That strategy didn't pay immediate dividends either, but it set me on a career path that has been mostly fulfilling and interesting.
[+] [-] pimlottc|4 years ago|reply
For example, on a 14.4k modem, it takes about 15 minutes to download a single 1.44mb floppy disk image. A typical game could be anywhere from 1 to 10 disks, so if your daily quota is 30 minutes, it would take multiple days to download a complete game.
On very popular systems, you might not even have enough time to download a single disk. Keep in mind that many early modem transfer protocols didn't support resuming downloads, so if you ran out of minutes before finishing your file, you just had to start over again. So what to do?
The solution was to use the "time bank". If you were done using the system for the day, you could "deposit" your unused minutes and store them in your account, up to some max limit. Then once you had enough time saved up, you could withdraw them and finally download that big file you've had your eye on. At least, as long your parents don't pick up the phone...
[+] [-] h2odragon|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thesuperbigfrog|4 years ago|reply
It is really slow, with a text user interface or menu driven interface.
It might have a forum or text-only email that does not get updated very fast.
There are some files that you can download, but not very many (maybe a hundred), but it takes several minutes to download one file. You can upload files you want to share, but that takes several minutes per file as well.
There are some multiuser games, but in most cases only one or two users are playing at a time. One of my favorite was Trade Wars 2002: http://wiki.classictw.com/index.php?title=Jumpgate
It was not at all similiar to today's web and social media because each BBS was local (who had the money to call long distance for far away BBSes?), and it was so much slower than today's Internet speeds.
Seriously, BBSes over a 2400 baud or 9600 baud modem were so much slower than the data speeds that most cell networks offer today.
Another big factor was that calling BBSes used a phone line. If your family had a single phone line, it was in use when using the modem. No one could make or receive phone calls when you were online. This meant that serious BBS users and sysops running BBSes had multiple phone lines. Those who couldn't afford multiple phone lines were calling late at night when no one else was using the phone.
[+] [-] whartung|4 years ago|reply
It should be stressed that "really slow" is relative. 1200 baud for text, specifically scrolling text, is really usable. You feel it much more if you're constantly repainting a screen (because now you're sending 2K of text over at 120 cps).
But scrolling simple prompts, simple menus, text messages are all fine at 1200 baud. That's faster than reading speed for most people. Systems were kept terse due to slower rates, but when it came down to actually "using" the systems, folks weren't typically shouting at their machines to go faster.
When BBSs became more focused on software than messaging, speed became a much bigger issue.
[+] [-] 13of40|4 years ago|reply
This is an important distinction, because depending on the size of your town and how social you were, there was a good chance you might meet these people in real life. Imagine if everyone in this thread actually went out for a beer or played disc golf with each other every once in a while.
[+] [-] User23|4 years ago|reply
My brother would pick up the phone and yell into it to knock me offline.
BBSes were the gateway drug to MUDs for me. And even at 1200 baud a DIKUMUD was plenty playable.
[+] [-] wheels|4 years ago|reply
The main costs were a computer ($2000-ish, $3700 in 2021 dollars), and a decent modem ($200-ish, again, $370-ish in 2021 dollars), which wouldn't stay decent for long. In the around 4 years I was doing BBSes, I spent something like the equivalent of $700 2021 dollars on modems alone. (I supported all of this with my juvenile lawn mowing business, where I mowed several of the neighbors lawns.) After a few months of serious BBSing (and before I started hosting my own), I convinced my parents to let me get my own phone line, which was around $15/month, which I also paid for.
Compared to being online today, virtually everyone was local. I wasn't aware of anyone else on the boards being from significantly out of town.
Comparing it to today's internet doesn't really seem possible. There are some structural similarities, but the scale is so radically different that the comparisons break down. It'd be like trying to describe the social lives of someone in a town of 200 in terms of the social dynamics of New York City. Except that that's still off by several orders of magnitude.
A lot of these boards had a few dozen regular users. That was it. In larger cities some had hundreds or thousands, but really you'd recognize the handles of all regular users.
There were also meetups in town, which I only went to once since I felt kind of out of place for being a young teen. Most of the folks were either university students or adults, almost all men, and it kind of blew my cover to be a 14-year-old sysop.
Some boards used a lot of inter-board forums (FIDOnet), but most of the ones I was on didn't. There it was funny because usually they'd all exchange messages in the middle of the night through a network of long-distance calls. But because of that, messages weren't real-time -- they usually took a day to arrive. My board was a FIDOnet node, but almost nobody used it on my board (including me).
But also, a lot of the content wasn't about chatting or forums. A lot of it was multiplayer games. Honestly, that's mainly what I did. Legend of the Red Dragon was the big game in those days. A lot of it was also about software... for better or worse, almost every board had a "FaF" (friends and family) section where the cracked stuff was, and if you were friends with the sysop, you'd have access to it. That was how I got access to some of the first compilers I'd ever used (which in those days were pretty expensive -- usually several hundred dollars).
The tech ... very little of it seems to have made it over to the web. God, we had vector graphics (RIPscript) already in those days. In comparison, early HTML and Gopher felt pretty backward. They just had access to a lot more info.
[+] [-] MandieD|4 years ago|reply
Magic moment for me: my high school history teacher telling me about TENet (Texas Educators’ Network) and pointing out that my mom was entitled to that $5/yr Unix shell account with a local dial-up as a public school teacher.
Thank you, Mr. Horner.
[+] [-] logosmonkey|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dharma1|4 years ago|reply
Checking out what files other people had uploaded or what comments they had made was fun, and you could sort of have a real-time chat with the sysop when they were online. Downloading stuff took ages, sometimes overnight.
Warez was a big part of it, but so was all sorts of text files for making various stuff, tracker music, demos etc. It was a real DIY culture and a lot of fun.
If someone else in your household picked up the phone to make a call when you were online, the connection dropped (the modem used the main phone line). That was the worst! Luckily you could continue downloading where you left off usually after reconnecting. Many BBSs had leech ratios - you needed to upload stuff as well.
This was late 80s/early 90s… Beyond the PC and modem cost you’d pay for local calls, which was pretty expensive for a bunch of 12 year olds. International calls were out of the question
[+] [-] addingnumbers|4 years ago|reply
Ashamed to admit I was unzipping my zips and re-zipping them with `pkzip -e0 ...` to disable the compression before uploading them to another BBS. It inflated my upload ratio several times over and the upload looked unbelievably fast because zmodem transfer protocol would do decent in-line compression on uncompressed files.
[+] [-] sumthinprofound|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thedougd|4 years ago|reply
Even better was when these were combined with an image viewer that would let you view an image as it downloaded. Progressive gif let you see it in full, but blurry and watch as detail filled in.
[+] [-] iszomer|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SavantIdiot|4 years ago|reply
It was a large-format magazine (glue-binding) with hundreds of pages, mostly ads in the front, and international BBS's in the back.
The back was basically a paper version of WHOIS. Not every BBS listed what it did, and some were lame, but others had up to 16 (gasp) modems. Most you just got busy signals. And porn, lots of CGA 4-bit porn (this was before 320x200x8 VGA). But sometimes there were multiplayer games where you got one turn per day.
The ads were for Chinese/HongKong companies that made clone parts. "Clone" was the big word back then, as in PC Clone. It was DIY without a helmet! I bought my first 32MB MFM HDD (back when you had to manually enter cylinders, heads, and sectors into the BIOS) and a 286 mobo out of Computer Shopper (with 512KB of DRAM in DIP format that cost like $500). And then started calling random BBSes all over Europe. Learned real quick to read the costs on my phone bill.
There were also simple services for businesses. For example, my first job in the 80's used Novell token-ring netware in the office computers, but a few lucky people had modems. I remember using a service called EaasySabre [sic] to buy a plane ticket for business travel. It connected you to a TTY terminal that looked just like the screens the airline counter agents used. I felt supremely cool booking a ticket at 2400 baud from my first office, despite it taking FOREVER.
[+] [-] bencollier49|4 years ago|reply
I was about 15, in 1993, when I managed to convince my parents to buy me a modem. I used to use it out of hours when phone calls were cheaper. Nevertheless, I think I managed to rack up a £200 phone bill in the first month or so.
Eventually I started running my own BBS, which would only become available at 8pm and come offline at 8am. If I remember correctly, I called it "The Graveyard". I had a steady stream of callers on the single line that it shared with the home phone. I would often chat to them via "Sysop Chat" whilst simultaneously talking to friends nearby over CB radio.
When I wasn't doing that, I was calling into all sorts of odd places - hacker boards (one of which I was thrown off for asking if there was a non-colour version, "l4mer", me on my Commodore PC20-III) - some cyberpunk boards (including the CyberCafe in London), and "Ooh!", on which I remember being repeatedly propositioned on various insalubrious chat groups, when I wasn't reading posts about Babylon 5 on Fidonet. On another I learned about raves happening vaguely nearby.
The whole thing was a wonderful, glorious chaotic mess. It felt like exploring a mysterious universe which was growing and mutating every day, full of infinite possibilities, and of course it was much better than what we have these days.
[+] [-] beej71|4 years ago|reply
Dial the rotary phone, listen for carrier. If you got one, unplug the handset and plug it into the back of the VICModem. And have fun reading posts by the locals at 300 bps. :)
Basically it was 99% computer geeks using these things, I'd wager.
The experience was very similar to Hacker News, actually. It was a bulletin board, after all. Except far more local and the threading UI was worse. Same arguments. :)
Most BBSes only had one phone line, so if someone was logged in, you couldn't connect. You'd get a busy signal. When I finally got a Hayes-compatible modem, I could at least autodial until I got through.
Some BBSs had games you could play. If you managed to get through before midnight, sometimes you could play today's turns, roll over midnight, and then play tomorrow's turns before anyone else, giving you an edge.
The games I remember most were TradeWars and one called Dominion, IIRC.
No cost as long as you weren't making any long-distance calls.
Not really similar to existing social networks. And it was often a bunch of people in town that you knew in person, if the town was small enough.
I remember when the first BBS in town joined WWIVnet and we were able to send email (very slowly) over longer distances without incurring long-distance charges. Then someone else got on FidoNet. And there was a Waffle BBS with NNTP, I think.
Bang paths to send mail...
Eventually in the early 1990s I got internet through my college and BBSs went largely forgotten after that.
[+] [-] lynn_harold|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tmsh|4 years ago|reply
I was lucky enough to be a middle schooler when BMUG [2] was going strong. And even attended a few of the Thursday night meet ups they had. I remember one person talking about "encryption" for the first time for me. And how they were thinking about maybe one day computers would need to find more "entropy." E.g., use the random variations in the hardware to seed/salt communication. That was a 'hmm, interesting' experience for me that drew me more towards technology.
I also remember getting access to BBSes via friends of friends that specialized in 'software'. And having handles / trying to come up with badass handles. And other mischievous things.
But it was fun - and with Macintosh software - freeware, shareware, etc., I variously remember different BMUG catalogs - with CDs full of shareware in the backs of paperback books per year or per season, etc. Funny how things have changed and yet the most advanced stuff that was going on then is more or less what's just normal now (higher quality videos, bandwidth, etc.). People have been chatting and posting online for a minute.
UPDATE. These icons are a throwback: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FirstClass#/media/File:FirstCl...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FirstClass
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_Macintosh_Users_Group
[+] [-] ridiculous_fish|4 years ago|reply
https://twitter.com/ridiculous_fish/status/13078734651148492...
[+] [-] im_down_w_otp|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jasonpeacock|4 years ago|reply
Some sites has upload/download ratios - you could only download so much many files without uploading files, forcing an exchange rate.
There was a selection of download protocols you'd choose from, based on what your client support and the BBS supported: "KERMIT", "XMODEM", "YMODEM", "ZMODEM", and "JMODEM"
The better protocols supported batch, multi-file, compression, and resuming interrupted downloads - very important for when your session was interrupted by someone else in the house picking up the phone and trying to dial.
We had a second phone line installed for the modem; I learned how telephone wiring worked and re-wired the our phone outlets to use the correct lines.
[+] [-] addingnumbers|4 years ago|reply
One day I came across a drop-in replacement for the zmodem transfer executable called "super zmodem" that let you play ascii Tetris while a transfer was going on and it blew my fricking mind.
In total I probably played more Tetris on that download screen than I did with my Nintendo Gameboy that only had three games.
[+] [-] samstave|4 years ago|reply
EDIT: And oh yeah - please insert Game Disk #2
[+] [-] mikewarot|4 years ago|reply
Thus, the fastest modems were 8000 baud.
PS: Yes, it was amazing to see the text actually flow / smooth scroll up the screen for the first time in my life, way faster than I could read it when it got a US Robotics Courier HST modem.
[+] [-] icedchai|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sanjayparekh|4 years ago|reply
Lexington had an interesting mix of BBS systems. Transylvania University had a system that was open to non-students and had 3-4 incoming lines so you could do real time chat (!) unless of course someone improperly disconnected (dang call waiting) which would cause that line to hang for 30-60 minutes IIRC until it timed out.
Also another great BBS in Lexington was one running Pyroto Mountain where you're a wizard and there are different chat levels depending on your wizard level. Going "up" the mountain required answering trivia questions. To this day a lot of trivia still in my head is from those early Pyroto Mountain days.
I eventually moved to a 9600 baud (Hayes brand!) and then a 28.8k and then 56k modem. Zipping at a 1gig connection at home (always on - no call waiting!) is really quite amazing to experience in just 40-ish years.
[+] [-] earltedly|4 years ago|reply
I lived in Lincolnshire in the UK, a pretty rural county - not very wealthy. It was a local rate number - same area code and it meant free calls. The person who ran it had a pretty big switchboard so could handle about 10-20 connections at once.
The best thing about it was it had a persistent MUD running. You had a character which moved around room to room, slaying monsters but also PvP. If you killed the other person you got all their stuff. One of the problems was if you logged off your character just sat there and would only rudimentarily defend themselves if someone else came along. So you'd need to find somewhere in the middle of nowhere to leave them.
Now the _really_ great thing about this BBS is the owner also had a Compuserve connection. He had it set up so you could trade gold pieces in the MUD game for Compuserve credits - minutes on the _actual_ internet.
I remember finding a logged out player, killing them, getting a jackpot in gold coins and then eagerly spending them to get on Compuserve. It was the first ever time and I didn't really know what to do. I seem to recall their was a directory of _all_ the websites in a big listing with their corresponding index numbers. You could then browse over and take a look.
It felt like some crazy magical sci fi novel at the time. I was about 11 or 12 back then - very early 90s. Just before the blizzard of AOL trial CDs hit the UK.
[+] [-] maximilianburke|4 years ago|reply
The feeling of creating a space for people to come and enjoy I think is thoroughly missing from todays social media.
[+] [-] lubujackson|4 years ago|reply
I've forgotten more than I remember, but the constraints are all important to how the experience was: fixed width screens, chunky graphics, async communication, locked phone lines, whiffs of the larger Internet coming.
The biggest unique aspect was the geographical focus. Phone calls out of your area code used to be EXPENSIVE, so most people only ever called nearby BBSes. This provided psuedo-anonymity that could be bridged with in-person meetups.
It was an amazing space to experiment with identity, especially growing up in a small town, pre-Internet.
[+] [-] perardi|4 years ago|reply
I got on a BBS through a local university (Bradley University) in 1994 on my first computer: a Performa 630CD, with a Global Village 14 Kbps modem.
If I recall, and I barely do, because I was in 4th grade, I got into it via a “gifted child” (ugh) outreach from the university. We got a floppy disk with ZTerm, a number to dial into, and a default password. That I somehow still remember.
What did I do on there? I really don’t remember much, besides it had what I seem to recall as a web portal. In my memory, it had a predefined set of websites you could pull up, and it would scrape the HTML and return text and links. (Now that I type that, maybe it was just Lynx running on their server, but I swear there were more hoops to go through.)
It felt like the future at the time, though it didn’t last long. We briefly joined Apple’s eWorld†, which very quickly went away, and then we were on to AOL. From a CD. Probably shrink-wrapped Macworld Magazine.
I feel very old now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EWorld
[+] [-] mahoro|4 years ago|reply
File hosting using BBS is almost completely lost its value, maybe only cool demos collections were valuable. And eventually, someone may download some FIDO software.
To me, a BBS was partially a self-expression method (I draw poor quality ASCII graphics), and partially an old school "chatroulette" :) There was a chat in BBS software, and visitors often used it to talk about everything :)
Many BBSes in my city were active at night time only. Mine was open from 11 pm to 8 am, and most active hours were from 11 pm to 2-3 am.
[+] [-] davismwfl|4 years ago|reply
Something people don't remember is that long distance calling was not free, you couldn't call other area codes or states in the US without paying a per minute fee. It was more on-par to international calling today then with mobile phone calls. Oh, and busy lines were not uncommon, you'd spend hours trying to dial into a system to get a file or post on a forum etc.
I would say it is less like social media today and more like forums. So less Facebook/Twitter and more reddit style. Though BBS' were also less filtered and far less big brother IMO. Of course some site admins would be militant about their feelings and only allow certain view points but that was fine because there were tons of other BBS' to play on.
The industry was fairly big and growing fast, one of the larger us BBS systems was execpc, you can find stuff on them still. They started as a small BBS that turned into a fairly large internet provider eventually. But there were tons of players, and there were systems like Tag BBS etc. I both hosted a BBS for a number of years and was a user of tons of them.
Another key thing people don't think about today, disk space was at a premium (especially for personal computers). We used floppy disks for moving files a lot and hard drives were expensive so getting 10Mb or 40Mb drives was awesome. Putting in 3-4 hard drives to get yourself over 100Mb was crazy. Drive technology was still evolving so lots of different types with pros/cons and most were loud, pretty large and obnoxious.
A lot of the search & compression technology we created during the BBS days is still in use, though in different ways now. Compression being pretty critical since for most long distance sites you paid per minute and downloading a 1Mb file over 9600baud was slow. Man I remember going from 1200-2400-9600-19200 then 38400 and 115200. You felt like a damn rock star when your file downloads didn't take 6-8 hours and could be done in like an hour or so.
It was definitely a lot of community and sharing. There were trolls then just like now, but generally I feel like back then they were less damaging or hurtful and more entertaining. Of course, there were scams on most forums just like now, but good BBS sites did their best to keep them at bay.
[+] [-] ryandrake|4 years ago|reply
I started BBSing in the late 80s, so saw the very tail end of 2400, but the first modem I bought was 9600, so I missed the big 2400-9600 change mostly. Road the wave all the way up to 56K. I had planned to finally start my own BBS when I moved off to University in 1994, since my parents wouldn't let me buy dedicated phone lines. Saved all my cash from working McDonalds and was all ready to pull the trigger on multiple V.34 56K USRobotics Courier modems and had the BBS (based on WWIV) all ready to turn on. Confirmed that the University would allow multiple phone lines per dorm. Got to University, and lo and behold! The summer before, they outfitted all dormitories with two 10-base-T ethernet connections to the Internet backbone. Mind blown. Ditched the BBS idea instantly and that was it, I never dialed into another BBS or ran my own.
A lot of my BBS friends also instantly lost interest the moment they entered University and had a proper high-speed Internet connection.
[+] [-] ok123456|4 years ago|reply
"Local" calls weren't always free either. Each locality had their own set of exchanges that were considered "local" and beyond that it was "local-long distance." It was completely arbitrary. The "local-long distance" rates were often higher than the actual long distance since there was still something of a monopoly.
Then in some areas they didn't have flat rate lines, where local calls calls were "free". There were message rate lines where calling different places within your locality cost a different number of message units per call, and only a fixed number of them were included with your service. It's very similar to cloud pricing now.
[+] [-] VLM|4 years ago|reply
Around 1990 they started a parallel "less serious" service called execpc chat, or something like that (had a few names) and I played online trivia on exec chat for MANY hours. For some strange reason I seem to remember Thursday nights. For a long time if you had a subscription to the "serious" execpc they gave away a subscription to the "fun" exec chat service. Eventually around '92 I got on the internet and IRC (later MUDs) then dozens of people because normal.
Exec-PC the main service had an interesting file search system that used an enormous number of PCs in parallel and they called it hyper-search or something like that and it was ridiculously fast, like Google search speed.
You could tell if someone was serious about BBS stuff because they had multiple PCs on their desk. The fancier PC for gaming or programming or using in general, and the lame PC that barely booted but could be dedicated to downloading files for an hour or whatever who cares. Magnetic interference between adjacent CRT monitors was a problem, or some company named "Black Box" sold monitor switchboxes so you could have as many as four analog VGA PCs plugged into one monitor, only one visible at a time of course, or a similar switch could connect one keyboard to multiple computers. I remember seeing an ad for my first KVM switch, well, KV, anyway, and that was pretty mindblowing that you only need one box instead of two. I had multiple PCs on my desk from the late 80s until about 2018, habit I guess. Many people also had a TV on their desk; start a download, watch TV, who cares how long the download takes.
[+] [-] StanislavPetrov|4 years ago|reply
Here in New York, you couldn't even call within the same area code without paying a per minute fee and a connection charge. On Long Island the plans included unlimited calling to several close, adjacent towns, but calling towns even 10 miles away in the same area code incurred a substantial per minute surcharge.
[+] [-] ecpottinger|4 years ago|reply
I remember some silly reporter did not understand and he called BBSes all around North America posting the same message, and for the next week or so you would see repeats of his message all the way from California and Florida.
[+] [-] CottonMcKnight|4 years ago|reply
It took advantage of a simple game exploit: in TA, your character gained experience simply by attacking; darts, a throwing weapon, did almost no damage but any class could use them; thrown darts would land on the ground at your feet so you could pick them up and reuse them, even if you threw them at a mob in a different room; the Sorceress in the tower was programmed to never leave her room, so she wouldn't chase you if you threw a dart at her from the next room over.
So I wrote a script to stand one room away, throwing darts at the Sorceress all day, drinking when I was thirsty, eating when I was hungry, and going back to town when I ran out of food or water to buy some more.
[+] [-] enos_feedler|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] __enos_feedler2|4 years ago|reply