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."

Comments

Gee, How Exciting

[ksw2]

This sounds like an excuse for everybody to tell everyone else how much more leet they are because they remember when most hackers could type faster than their modems could transmit.

Woo-hoo.

Re:Gee, How Exciting

[dillon_rinker]

The fastest touch-typist in the world can't type faster than a 300 bps modem can transmit; 110 bps maybe. Of course, most hackers, are hunt-and-peck and can't even reach that. However, I can still remember when I could read faster than my modem could transmit. I'd wait impatiently for the words to finish displaying on my Apple II's greenscreen monitor III, which leads to my point:

You kids complain these days about how long it takes for your fancy videos to download...well, back in MY day, we had to wait for the WORDS to finish downloading, and we LIKED it! We didn't have none o' these annymaitud JIFF files, and we only had one color, GREEN, and the pixels were the size of your fist! And we LIKED it that way! And those empty threes you like to listen to, why, back in my day we were just happy that we could hear CHR(7) - sometimes we'd listen to it over and over! You kids today are soft...sad, so sad...

Re:Gee, How Exciting

[hearingaid]

The fastest touch-typist in the world can't type faster than a 300 bps modem can transmit; 110 bps maybe.

Hell, I can type faster than a 300 baud modem can transmit, and I type funny (I tried to learn how to touch-type, got bored; now I touch with about seven fingers :)...

300 baud, at 8-N-1 or 7-E-1, is 37.5 cps, theoretically. Practically, 300 bps modems only reach that speed when they're getting a steady stream of characters. You wind up spending a lot of time just dealing with RTS/CTS and other junk when you've got an irregular stream, as you do when you're typing.

Of course, most hackers, are hunt-and-peck and can't even reach that.

One of the guys I knew when I was in CS was a trained professional typist. It helped him a lot when he was a starving student (tm); he got these really nice jobs typing stuff (and maybe doing other secretary work; he didn't talk about it much, I think he was embarrassed; it was OK for a geek to be a male secretary but he was also a metalhead :) all summer.

However, it instilled in him a tendency to produce really gross code. He was like a human cut-and-paste machine. If he could think of an inelegant solution to a problem, that only meant typing up 5000 lines or so, he just went ahead and did it. (Okay, I'm exaggerating a little. But he did produce reams and reams of code.) He could code optimally, but he rarely did; he typed so fast that he spent actually less time coding by simply overcoding.

So anyway, the point is maybe it's a Good Thing that most hackers are hunt & peckers.

Anyway, back in my day, I had a Gigi terminal (I think) to do my gfx on. I still remember sneakernetting jpegs back from school (where I had Usenet) to my home (where my Amiga could view them, in truecolour; the machines at school hadn't yet even discovered 256 colours).

Re:Gee, How Exciting

[laslo2]

take a look back at all of the things bulletin board systems offered; nation/world wide email, games, chat, text files, allowing users to post public comments, file transfers (software, text files, pictures). then look at the stuff that has driven the 'internet revolution'. not everyone has a fidonet email address, but everyone has an internet email address. there's irc, icq, yahoo messenger, aol IM. there's lots of news and information sites that have articles to read. people can post topics and discuss things at sites like slashdot. there are lots of sites (freshmeat.net for one) that offer downloads of software. images.google.com lets you (sort of) find images to download.

you may not be impressed, but most of the concepts that make the internet so popular were invented, implemented, and dreamed up by people using, creating, and running bulletin board systems 15+ years ago.

woo hoo indeed.

BBSes versus the Internet

[Cerlyn]

I used to be quite active on the local BBS scene. Operators would get the latest archive CD-ROMs of the day, and then post them online for others to access.

Nowadays, no one really uses BBSes anymore. Everyone has direct links to the resources BBSes used to offer. Most of Walnut Creek's old content was available from ftp.cdrom.com (now run by simtel.net). Want music from the Hornet Archive? You can't purchase the CD anymore; you go online to hornet.org.

This extreme centalization of content worries me. Instead of colleges purchasing CD-ROMs of technical abstracts, they now subscribe to an ever-changing online service that provides them. Should said service go under or lose their data, humanity as a whole is at a loss.

Call me a troll, but one of the biggest reasons we should be against DMCA, SSSCA, and other such acts is because they require all content to be managed from a central authority. Should that authority go bankrupt, millions could lose access to a variety of works.

While peer-to-peer is one extreme the industry does not like, centralization is another problem. We need to start up the BBS era again; anyone have money for a spare phone line?

Re:BBSes versus the Internet

[seanadams.com]

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.

Re:BBSes versus the Internet

[suss]

We need to start up the BBS era again; anyone have money for a spare phone line?

I used to have a BBS running, now there's just a mailer. Most people stopped calling 3 or 4 years ago and a lot of BBS software has become unusable since 1-1-2000 (like the hudson messagebase). I don't really see the point anymore in running a BBS since you can get an internet account for free from many places. In the end everyone only wanted to download jpg's anyway, that took most of the fun out of it for me.

i got yer BBS reminiscence...

[motherhead]

Here is my BBS reminiscence,

I was nice normal American boy. It was 1991. I logged into the Windy City BBS. Some of you may not remember the WCBBS, 70% of all the porn on the Internet posted before 1998 originated there.

Two hours after logging in I was versed in fisting, wife swapping, water sports, bestiality, etc etc etc... I was then ready for college and the brave new world of connected systems.

I blame BBSs for horrible person that I am.

God bless the Windy City BBS! Cheers!

The good 'ol days

[gburgyan]

God, I feel old...

I remember when I was 12 in '85 and playing around with my Commodore 64. I borrowed a 300 baud (back when a baud was a bit... time flies) and quickly got my own 1200 bps. A little time went by and I managed to talk my mom into getting a second phone line -- thus Ground Zero BBS was born. Working for all of 1 meg online: a 1541 and 1581 floppy drive. Ran the thing off of CNet BBS software if I still remember. Phone number at the time was 216-381-6550. Don't bother calling 'cause it's long dead though.

Lasted for around 4 years, which was a fairly long time as far as BBSes went. I still remember the first couple of callers. Watching them sign on and leave messages. I got to know everyone on there. It was like a close group of friends -- maybe 30 or so regulars. We had a couple of get-togethers. By Co-sysop started dating one of them too.

Sigh...

Times are changing. Back then I knew almost everyone that was online in the 216 are code. Now most everyone is on. Heck, the code split twice because of all the new phone lines being put in.

It's something that I'm sure to tell my future kids some day. Back when we were on the cusp of something big. Back when computers were as uncommon as rotary phones are now.

One cool BBS developer

[bad-badtz-maru]

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

A BBS-like era might come back...

[DocSnyder]

...once the Internet has become an unusable, proprietary, virus-plagued and outlawed Big Brother hell.

It might be quite different from the former Fido BBSes as far as technology is concerned, but the users and sysops will have the same spirit: freedom.

And with wireless networking (802.11, Bluetooth)

[vik]

Absolutely. And we'll have some nicer tools to play with like 802.11b and Bluetooth. That way your average mug punter won't even need a phoneline - he just uses the card that talks to his digital camera and PDA.

I hope someone is working out the protocols for this. Very few people realise that the wireless Freenet is going to be as big - if not biger than - the internet we know today.

Vik :v)

Reminiscing

[mark-t]

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.