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The 25th Anniversary of the BBS
Jason Scott writes "25 years ago today, Ward Christensen and Randy Suess officially announced the creation of a little project they threw together with a 300 baud Hayes modem, a Z-80 based S-100 computer, and a phone line. They called it "Chicago Bulletin Board System" (CBBS) and it was the first dial-up BBS. From this beginning, BBSes grew into the many thousands and became an entire industry, and when the Internet started to mature with the World Wide Web, the users who had cut their teeth on BBSes moved over to it. So raise a toast to these two fellows for a quarter century of great online times."
I rememberm dialing into the Local High School BBS and just chilling, and playing games with other. who would have thought back then, those BBS'es would turn into this, what we know now.
it is kind of cool to think about
Cheers to the invention of the BBS!
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BBS were my first dosage of electronic connectedness. It was so awesome that I could hold discussions with such wide ranges of people, and nearly all of them stayed hospitable. Or who can forget Legend of the Red Dragon. I remember I downloaded I Renegade BBS software just to install LORD. Oh those were the days. BBS also introduced me to my first porn. Was it called GIFlink? It let you watch the picture as it was transmitted, great way to weed out duplicates. So much has changed in 10 years.
I credit early days BBSing with my typing skills, helping my writing skills, and even my socialization skills (uh, you know, on the war boards...). If you missed those days you missed out; it was so much more "underground" than the Internet ever was, and consequently, a lot more enjoyable, especially for geeks. You could come home from your boring school filled with stupid jocks and just enter a totally different world.
I'm definitely still nostalgic for the 80 column greenscreen and carrier tone.
-iocat -uif -immortal
Dude, I think I can see my house from here.
Somtimes it's good to have a global scale, and sometimes it's good to be able to go have a beer where everyone knows your name.
The internet is like an planet sized mall. A BBS is like your neighborhood bar.
Yes, you and your friends can meet at a bar in the mall, but it *isn't* really the same thing.
I guess we just have to redefine "neighborhood" now.
There are certainly benifits to the "mall" model, I admit. I "know" people all over the world, whom I've never actually met, who I could call on to put me up on their couch for a couple of days if I needed it.
The flip side is that I, perhaps, know fewer in my own meat space neighborhood of whom I could ask this favor.
The world is different for "interneters" than it is for BBSers.
KFG
The worst part about the internet IS precisely because you can't separate one group from another. The nice part about BBSs was that you had a nice local group and that heck, if you didn't WANT to be part of the same system as everyone else, you didn't HAVE to.
The internet is the great melting pot--or cesspool, depending on how you look at it. Just looking at my firewall logs makes me wish there was some other internet I could join, sometimes.
Sounds like a BBS to me.