Every BBS That Ever Was

Jason Scott writes: "With a collection of over 30,000 textfiles from the 1980's, I suddenly got a rather weird thought: Why not start taking all the BBSes mentioned in all the textfiles and create a really, really huge BBS list? A few weeks later, I'm up past 77,000 BBSes listed, with many including the Sysop's name, software used, and if you're lucky a relatively accurate timespan for the years that BBS graced the telephone network. I've imported FidoNet nodelists, WildCat! customer lists, and a whole range of other lists as I find them (USBBS List, Darwin List, etc.). Come by and remember what places sucked up all YOUR long distance calls and sleepless nights, trying to get past the busy signals. I'm also making an open call for everyone and anyone to send me old BBS lists to integrate. With luck, we can have some sort of permanent record of all the BBSes we ever knew."

Comments

I still have the code to the last BBS I wrote.

[landley]

Back when I got my commodore 64 in the 80's the second big project I wrote was my own BBS. (The first was a disk editor.) I ended up writing three of them on the commodore (in basic, compiled with blitz.)

I learned C so I could modify a friend's copy of WWIV. That's also why I got my own PC. (And THERE was an early bazaar community if ever there was one, the WWIV .mod file community.)

The last BBS I wrote was in, a multinode fidonet compatable bbs written from scratch in c++ including my own fidonet message processing routines that were WAY more efficient than anything else I'd seen. A friend of mine ran a copy that's listed on there (xblat, under the 609 area code). Strangely, my own bbs (The Conversation Pit) is listed as "unknown". :)

I had xblat multitasking under desqview with no synchronization primitive except file locking. I had the capacity to do 9 nodes (8 FOSSIL driver ports plus one on the keyboard), plus the mail tosser running. Not that I had that many phone lines. :)

And the mail tosser processed 30 messages/second on a 386/33DX while updating a text mode display of what it was doing. And I eventually got it to where it would handle outgoing messages posted by a user on another node in the middle of digesting an incoming fido packet without ever having to look at the same message twice. All done without resorting to Turbo C's "huge" pointers, I might add. :)

Those were the days...

In 1995 I started porting it to 32 bit OS/2 code under EMX, but I had a day job and I'd found the internet anyway. (Strangely, my BBS work never impressed IBM. :) Kept meaning to write a BBS in java, but I wanted to make it internet based and I couldn't find a hosting service that would let me run actual daemons instead of just CGI on a web page. Eventually I moved on to other things...

Rob

It's a shame, but I think the BBS' time is over

[CaptainSuperBoy]

The BBS period was a unique time in the progression from offline to online computing, and I don't think it is something that can be revisited. Remember commercial boards? There were boards that took $10, $20, even ones where you paid by the hour. I don't think the level of dedication to a BBS by a Sysop would be there any more, when anyone with an AOL account and a new iMac can go over to eGroups and set up what's more or less a BBS.

Whether it was the level of technical knowledge you needed to even connect to a board, geographical / area code barriers, or just the fact that nobody would DREAM of spamming a BBS, I think those days are over. I'm not saying the online community is dead, you just have to look harder. Isn't the Well still around? The Internet makes it so easy to reach the critical mass where you have to whore your site out to an ad network just to pay for hosting. Throw a million lamers shouting "a/s/l" into the mix, and the chance of a real community emerging is pretty low.

I do agree that there was an art to the BBS culture..

--

Exactly!

[mong]

FIX was one of the first internet-based BBS's, and continues to do very good business. We have over 5000 registered users, with about 200 who are regular on a dialy basis (with hundreds or thousands more who swing by a couple of times each month).

We're currently developing some serious new software, as the BBBS software can't really handle what is thrown at it these days - FIX has performed some serious mods on the original BBBS code, but it's getting a bit flaky now.

Oh, and despite the "retro" look of the webpages, we finally decided it was time to update them :-)

But anyway, back to the point: Plenty of very good BBBS's live outside of the US. Hell, we even have regular US users at FIX!

Mong.

* ...Student, Artist, Techie - Geek *

Interview from 1980

[jpatokal]

Call me a karma whore, but I found the interview linked in from the About page to be absolutely fascinating:

http://www.jps.net/foxnhare/cbbs.html

It's from the April 1980 issue of "Kilobaud Microcomputing" (love that name), and the subjects of the interview are Ward Christensen and Randy Suess, the founders of the first BBS ever. Interesting musings on networking ("nationwide netting might become complicated and expensive"), early modems ("We are running the Potomac Micro-Magic and are really happy with it"), starting new BBSs ("you could easily do it for $2000"), etc. Check it out, and marvel how things have changed in the last 20 years...

Cheers,
-j.

Smiles

[Isldeur]

Man, that brought some smiles to my face! Now if we could only add notes on them to the list! It would make a great history

There was a BBS in MA called "Davey Jones' Locker" which I actually managed to get on a few times (difficult enough, especially as it was a long distance call. :) that, if I remember correctly, was seized because of all the illegal software it had.

Little histories like that would be great to see. To perhaps see postings from people with odd handles which you once bumped into every now and then!

why stop there?

[wrinkledshirt]

Why not resurrect the BBSes themselves? Seriously, look at some of the most popular websites out there. They're often community-based. There was a real art to virtual communities that has been lost since the internet was taken over by commercial interests.

I mean, pr0n sharing, ASCII art and muds aside (or maybe even with them), BBSes (BBSen?) often embodied the best of what the internet could be.

And considering how low-end these things often were, can you imagine how fast they'd be?

Just a thought. I guess even though I've become a bit of a karma whore over here, Internet browsing has just become a bit too much of a passive experience for me. I remember many of the BBSes I visited as having been a bit more engaging.

BBS never die (or at the last phone keeps ringing)

[raymondlowe]

I remember that years ago I actually wrote a BBS package for the Apple II (CP/M) - it even had a FidoNet module so it could do email and echos.

Well after a few years I didn't want to do this and stopped, then I tried to use my phone line as a regular line again.

But for YEARS (at least 3) afterwards that line would still ring on weekends with people trying to connect... Even after I had tracked down every BBS list in Hong Kong and got my number removed.

R.

Re:Wow this post brings back memories.. (NirvanaNe

[mikethegeek]

Really! Both of my BBS's were listed on there... Even though one only lasted a little over a year, and the other only a few months.

Back in 1993-4, before my area got Internet, BBS's WERE the net... I set up on FidoNet, allowed access to hundreds of Echos (the precursor to Usenet) and even had a way for users to send Internet E-mail (via the FidoNet-Internet gateway)... basically you could do much of what you can on the Internet today, it was just much slower.

There definately are some that are missing, looks like they used old FidoNet nodelists to get their information.

My old address was 1:2260/140 :) haven't typed that number in years.

There used to be a couple of BBS's outside US too

[snake_dad]

or i must have logging onto some fake system for all those years :-)