Remembering the BBS

Anonymous Coward writes "Nice reminiscence about BBS's, back in the day and all. Author describes them as "Where a teenage loser could lose himself", which for me would have been pretty accurate. I still miss being able to find cool ASCII graphics, text-based RPG's, and the Anarchist's Cookbook all in one place."

Comments

those were the days

[Roadmaster]

back then the sysops were real men and the users looked up to us in such admiration.

On-line games such as trade wars were great, where you'd plan group strategy through mail and then log in at stepped, agreed-upon times to carry it out.

Back then, on systems with 2+ lines, multi-person chats were the big thing.

QWK packets were fantastic for reading messages off-line and freeing up the bbs for someone else. I kinda miss them now.

Also, networks like FIDONet were an incredible mess to set up (have seen few things so complicated since then), but once they were up and running it was incredibly fun and satisfying to exchange messages with other local boards, as well as with the guys from other countries.

And then the internet came and killed it all!

heheh

Re:those were the days

[Chasuk]

While technically you are correct, the Internet did indeed kill BBS's. Yes, BBS's didn't get their start until the early 1980's, which the Internet long predates, but vitually no one had Internet access at home until the early 1990's, after which BBS's rapidly declined.

However, the Internet was not the only killer of the BBS scene. BBS's were also killed by their own popularity. In 1986, it was possible to have intelligent, literate conversations on BBS's, but this had become nearly impossible a few years later. Why? The invasion of punks. The trolls, the flamebaits, and the emergence of "doodz."

I was a SysOp for many years, and as soon as the nicks and handles started to become WizzyTheOrgasmicGod and CyberFucker, I knew the end was nigh. I'm sure that others can recount similar stories about IRC and Usenet.

Those were the days...

The business model from hell

[00_NOP]

People really should have looked at BBSes and said "err, no money is ever going to be made out of this internet thingy".

Why did people do them? For fun, but so many of them closed down because the owners ran out of cash (or their wives told them they'd run out of cash and a lot more besides unless they shut them down).

They were fun, sure, When I got my first modem (94 or so) I used to visit them as much as I'd use my IP connection, but as soon as they started to charge I was outta there.

All sound familiar?

I miss them too

[Sheetrock]

We had a pretty thriving BBS community in our area, but naturally all the best boards were long distance. It's kind of strange to be able to access a server in Australia within seconds now without even thinking about what the line charge is going to be, or chat across five or six countries simultaneously, but there's been something lost in the transition between the boards and the Internet. I've never really felt the sense of community on a website, and nothing really seems to have the same sense of cool. Maybe I'm idealizing it, but communication over a network that wouldn't synchronize more than once every day or two seemed more fun for some reason... maybe people used to think more before posting?

Re:Don't forget

[KFury]

• Typing +++ (pause) ATH to hang up...
• 8 bit? 7 bit? Parity??
• Vi}}}sixxn}@ble l{ine noisxç}e

But at least there was no call waiting.

One important I forgot!

[antdude]

Sysops calling you by voice to validate your account. Sheesh! :)

Nostalgia

[silvaran]

sigh... those were the days. I remember terms like SysOp, Co-SysOp, etc. You could page the SysOp and talk one on one (that was cool!!!), the sound of the modem connecting (replaced by the weird pings of now slow-compared-to-broadband 56k modems). I remember how excited everyone was when a sysop would add another "node" to the system, either through DesqView with QEMM under DOS or by using a fossil driver and running Windows.

I miss things like PCBoard and ProBBS... those were the days. Now, with the Internet, not only can anyone hide behind a mask of anonymity but anyone with half a brain (or half a paycheque) can connect to the Internet.

You know what? BBSes were far less commercial (depending on what services they provided). I remember a friend of mine down the street ran a BBS when he was 13 (I did quite a bit of ANSI and ASCII art for him, sloooow over a 2400 though, better at 14400). Back then, advertisements were things you saw on TV, magazines, bathroom stalls (er, scratch that last one).

I remember briding the child internet and aged BBS gap with "virtual" connections: a telnet driver that would respond via the internet and send "RING" or "CONNECT" strings to the running BBS so you could have numerous nodes on one machine through multiple telnet connections.

Now we have popup removals, filter proxies, all to try and eliminate if not reduce the barrage of banners and animations on just about any even remotely-commercial web site out there.

For many people, the hardware technology itself is the same. It's become slightly faster, but you still get your roommate or family member off the phone so you can wait for dial-up, then log in and check your mail. Only now you're responding to the world (neglecting FIDONet, but I had a few problems with that in the past).

The best was to download 1000's of E-Mails from one system for reading off-line, repackaging the .zip file and upload to another BBS as a response. Then again, now we have spam... hmm... which one is better, the 'net or BBS's? The question is becoming more ludicrously rhetoric the more I think about it...

PC Pursuit

[pgrote]

There will be nothing like BBS again. The internet has superceded it in some areas and has faltered in others.

File downloads are clearly better on the internet, as are games.

Message boards, though, suck on the internet. There are islands of information our there, but nothing like it should be. For instance, for HTML help I go to one message board, for domain name advice another and to web hosting even another one.

Everyone remember Interlink, Fidonet, WWIVNet, RIME (PC Relay), etc? These were message networks that were all inclusive. Every topic under the sun was available and the messages were public. You could download your messages using a QWK compatible door and read them offline. Those were the days.

The closest thing we have now is USENET, where the noise to signal ratio is too high.

PC Pursuit is another vestiage of the BBS age. It was a service by Sprint that allowed you to X.25 into other POPs around the country for a low monthly fee. For instance, I could dial my local sprint number, connect to a pad in Boston and jump on Channel 1 with no long distance.

What's missing?

[sfgoth]

I still miss being able to find cool ASCII graphics, text-based RPG's, and the Anarchist's Cookbook all in on place.

You mean, like Google?

-pmb, former 80's sysop.

Tired of Slashdot "BBS==past" attitude

[IGnatius T Foobar]

Arrgh. I am sick and tired of the Slashdot editors pushing this idea that the BBS is a thing of the past. The BBS community is alive and well on the Internet. It's single-line dialup systems that are dead.

BBS's still provide the greatest sense of a cohesive online community out there. Better than "blog" type nonsense, and certainly better than what the likes of MSN and AOL have to offer.

I've run UNCENSORED! BBS for 14 years and I'm not about to stop now. And the 200+ users aren't going to stop logging in, either. Modern BBS's offer access via telnet/ssh or web, your choice. And the Internet-connectedness of it all has made it possible for BBS communities to attain geographic diversity, something which was not possible when you had to deal with long distance modem calls.

Please, people, let's get the perspective straight. The BBS is alive and well, so stop pushing this "bygone era" myth.