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A Documentary About Bulletin Board Systems
Windrip writes: "Jason Scott is compiling a history of the BBS. The BBS documentary is a virtual park bench waiting for people who want to reminisce about the good old days of FIDO, 9600 baud, zmodem. /. had an earlier post from Jason about textfiles.com, now he's looking for a few of the million stories in the naked net."
I was on FIDOnet when 9600 was only a wet dream. I was so 1337 that I had a 2400 baud modem. In the beginning I mostly ran it on 1200 because it felt strange to run 2400 unless you really needed it. Also many of those BBS were designed from the fact that the modems were no faster than you could read the text as it read it on screen. Later on, the concept of a "more" function was introduced. :-)
Ah those were the days.. and lets not get started on the 75 baud modems, yes 75.
Fido was a lousy system for communications. The message format and controls just got in the way of discussions. It was, in short, not well-designed for "talking."
It was great for files, though. Really kicked ass there. And it was good for pure information sharing, of the question-answer style.
Now, what was (and is) great for communication -- that is, discussion and discourse -- was/is the Citadel-style BBS. Man, that thing was honed for chatter: streaming sequential messages, closer to dinner-party conversation than anything else.
I do hope that this documentary doesn't ignore the discussion-based BBSes. There were a lot of people who shared a lot of opinions on those systems... and some of us even had our minds changed because of their persuasive arguments!
--
Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
Some of you who followed it to the end saw what happened to most of the BBS packages. Clark Development went belly up. Searchlight and MSI sold their software to small companies who squeezed every last dime from the software (and still try to market it!). I don't know what Galacticomm ended up doing with MajorBBS/Worldgroup. Lesser-used packaged like TAG and WWIV dropped off the face of the planet.
In all this, there is a neat story, involving Rob Swindell and his Synchronet BBS software. His company, Digital Dynamics, sold Synchronet for a noteable price "back in the day". They had full page spreads in Boardwatch along with Clark, Galacticomm, MSI, and the other big players. However, when the bottom fell out of the market, instead of squeezing every last dime from the product, Rob Swindell cleaned up his code and released everything into the public domain at which time he himself ceased all development.
It gets even cooler than that. About a year ago, Rob picks up the project again and turns it into open source with the release of a Linux version. Synchronet now supports Windows, OS/2, and Linux versions, all free and all GPLd. You can check it out at www.synchro.net .
If anyone here used the ZChat chat door, that was my "child".
maru
www.mp3.com/pixal
Many of the smaller BBSs were programmed in Basic (with console i/o routed thru the modem port and ctrl-c etc trapped). One problem that many of these systems had is that although they had error trappng and recovery via "on error goto", floating point overflow and underflow errors were not handled properly because the author never thought about that happening. These systems could be brought down by typing something like 9e99 or 9999999... (>75 nines, if they stripped out non numeric chars) when the system asked for a number, like a message number to read.
The need to replicate BBS content was driven only by the cost of calling long distance. BBSes would certainly have been more centralized (and specialized) if long distance had been free back then.
I'm surprised that the Internet has made it this far without any kind of "per hop" pricing... I can buy a leased line in California, and my traffic to Australia costs no more than my traffic going across town. It just doesn't seem like a sustainable model.
So replication of Internet content is driven not so much by cost (yet), but rather by the needs for performance, evasion of law enforcement, and load distribution.
Meanwhile, google is doing a pretty good job of archiving things for posterity. Still it would be great to see a FreeNet-like system actually work long term, and have all the most important content mirrored everywhere, forever.
I think we *are* making progress.
9600 bps didn't even exist when I first started 'modemming'. Heck, XModem was the univerasl download protocol. I remember discussions about the ymodem protocol on some tech boards, and then the zmodem protocol started to get talked about. So few systems actually supported zmodem at the time, though, I never really got a chance to play with it.
Anyways, my first modem was a 110 bps acoustic coupler. I remember my parents being absolutely confounded at this gizmo that I spent 4 months of my paper route's salary on. I was only allowed to use it after 11PM. I decided then and there that I needed my own phone line. My parents were reluctant to let me have one, however. It took almost a year to convince them.
Right after I got my own phone line, I went out to WestWorld computers, and bought a Hayes Micromodem for the Apple ][+. It could do 110/300bps, and could even autodial! (although it could not do tones, only pulse-dialing.) I remember being the first person I personally knew to have an autodialing modem. (gloat, gloat, gloat) There were a few people I knew _of_ that had autodialing modems, and I had even heard of people having 1200bps, but at the time I had never personally met any of them. I had seen 1200bps modems at the computer store where I bought my modem, but they cost way more money than I could afford.
That summer, the sysop of one of my favourite systems at the time decided to hold a BBS-BBQ. It was the first time most of the users on that system had heard of something like this, and there were about 60 of us that said we would come. Actually seeing the faces for the first time of people who I had formerly only known as "Happy Hacker", "Robin Hood", "The Illuminoid", or what have you, was an experience I still don't have words to describe.
I had to grow up sometime, however... we all did. The modem ended up getting stored into a closet as I became too busy for that kind of socializing. I had brief flings with assorted groups on usenet in the passing years, but I can sincerely say that no place in cyberspace has ever felt as much like "home" as those old BBS's of the early 80's.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
I remeber first going online at a friends house, he had 300baud...I thought wow, this is cool. My first modem for going to BBS's was a hayes 2400, nice modem...still works ;)
But a few BBS's stick out in my mind, there was Hogman and I think Mitch Cole was his name that owned it...maybe your reading this, if so...email me. Bunch in town, I remeber the old Empire Boards 4 nodes at one point, before it disapeared. I remeber the weekly stradegy for BRE, and Tradewar's where the guys in the city would get together in the local coffee shop to plan the weeks stradegy. Ahh there was one run by a nice guy named bill, whom I haven't talk to in year we were friends, then the "inner" sanctum of BBS owners going awol on each other, spreading lies and rumors...basicly brought down this great community we had.
Oh well, I still play BRE on a couple of leages, one out austraila and one out of germany. Though I fondly remeber dialing up the music archive, of MP3's to get the best ones...such a shame when they went to a paid service.
Sometimes I wish I could trade my childhood back, sometimes I'm quite sure I missed the most importan point...and that was the fun of it all...but running a BBS myself...that didn't leave too much unfortunatly. But such as life, and it was a good experiance.
---
"A human being should be able to change a diaper,
plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship,
design a building, write a sonnet, balance acounts,build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently and die gallantly.
Specialization is for insects."
-- Robert A. Heinlein
Om, nomnomnom...
202 meg WD Caviar and a HUGE 1.275 meg Conner
;)
you mean 1.275 Gig?
It sits collecting dust below a table in my partner's cellar. We will never dispose of it.
You might want to make a project of archiving any surviving public discussion boards (and the software to read it!) to a CD or something, just to preserve a backup copy of a 'snapshot' of a time.
I've found some archives of discussions on timeshare systems from around 1980 before - it's an interesting perspective into the events of the day - like what people thought about this new President Reagan guy, 3 Mile Island, Iran, etc
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
I was active in Charlotte and Asheville, NC, and in Japan (within the US Army).
First pass in Charlotte, I had bought my father a 300 baud modem (couldn't afford the 1200 baud ones available at the time) which he plugged into his Kaypro II... but I got the most use out of it. I was in my early teens, and heavily intrigued with this nifty technology.
For a while, we had to convert binary files to hex (so they were ASCII), then download the ASCII without error checking to convert back to binary again on the other end. It was the worst way imaginable to transmit files.
Eventually, Ward Christensen's (sic?) protocol became available. This is either the precursor or the same protocol that later became known as XModem. This made file transfer significantly easier.
I joined the Army, and moved to Japan. While I was in Japan, I got involved with FidoNet. Our computer club maintained a FidoNet node, communicating mostly with other BBSes in English-speaking Japan.
Eventually, having lost an election to become the system operator of the club's BBS, I started my own using an old Amiga and Citadel. I had tried a variety of BBS software for the Amiga, eventually settling on Citadel because of its emphasis on textual communications over files. I had the most unique BBS in Japan.
Then, I finished my term of service and returned to Charlotte, where I tried to get Machine's Machination running again. I caused a couple of other people to start Citadel BBSes in an area where WWIV seemed to have become the dominant player.
Ah.. WWIV. I spent far too much time on WWIVNet. Eventually, we had a kind of contest where you could vote for various WWIV community members, and see who won at an awards ceremony that was held in some sports bar or something.
I won three awards. The first was for the best TradeWars handle (Fearless Fleeb, flying the Garn Blooie Drekship, establishing Garn Blooie Dreksectors and Garn Blooie Drekports). The next award I won granted me status as the most eloquent user, a title that stunned me. I was asked to give a nice speech, but not having prepared, I did not have much to say (a pity, in retrospect). Most amusingly, however, was finding myself with the third award, voted the most verbose user (where those who asked me to give a speech told me to shut up).
I eventually ran Machine's Machination in Asheville, and for a little while networked with Citanet, but eventually had to take it all down. I wouldn't dream of running one now, with the Internet as it is and all.
But Citadel, from my perspective, had the best user filter available; only those people clever enough to figure out the peculiar user interface could 'join', and those people tended to also be the ones that liked signal over noise. Hence, my BBS of choice.
And so it goes.