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

Flashbacks

[KFury]

Flashbacks of:

• ANSI animations
• 300 baud connections even a 14-year-old could outtype
• when it was still called 'Elite'
• Telebit 2500 was the coolest thing in the world
• until the HST Dual Standard
• Making a 1-line Hermes board on my mom's fax line in the off hours
• and getting people calling all night
• The guy with the spare VAX and a 16-line BBS was tha coolest pimp in tha Valley.

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:ANSI archive sites?

[rodbegbie]

Try http://archives.thebbs.org/index.html

rOD.

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?

Re:The business model from hell

[King_TJ]

I ran my BBS for over 10 years, in one form or another. During its "low point", I was stuck with only 1 phone line and a system shoved in a bedroom closet because the apartment I was living in would only allow a maximum of 2 phone lines - and we needed a voice line.

Despite all that, I put up with a *lot* to keep it running, but never looked at it as some sort of "business model" for making a monetary profit.

I also wouldn't say it was "just for fun", because believe me - staying up all those late nights validating users, correcting spelling mistakes and incomplete file upload descriptions and keeping everything updated wasn't exactly a picnic.

There was a sort of profit to it, but it was more intangible. For me, it was the thrill of going to the local computer store and having techs come running out of the back room to meet me when they heard I was the sysop. It was the opportunity to meet some of the most interesting and intelligent people I've ever run across (some of whom are still good friends of mine today). It was the personal satisfaction of knowing I was doing something that enriched so many other people's lives in some small way.

Near the end, yes, I did gladly accept donations and even did optional "subscriptions" that bought the user some extra online time and download credits -- but I never so much as broke even on it. I never expected to. Most hobbies are like that. If there's a mistake people were/are making with Internet sites today - it's being too obsessed with making it into a business. Do it because you enjoy and love it, and because the mere presence of it satisfies you in some personal way. If you do this, the money may well follow.... but people can tell if your heart is in a given web site or not.

One important I forgot!

[antdude]

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

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.

Re:ANSI archive sites?

[BrookHarty]

On WWIV BBs's, you could include an Ansi signiture. I put a fake "SysOp Chat mode Enabled" then pretrended to hang up them and pause. I dont Remember exact WWIV chat, but it was something like. And I put pauses between keystrokes, to fake a real person. :)

[SysOp Chat Mode Enabled]
Hey There, I have to remove your account, Nice knowing ya. :)

+++
NO CARRIER

Ahh the good ole days. God a few nasty emails about that.

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.