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Blizzard Births BBS

Posted by michael on from the havoc-gunstar dept.

Foundryman writes "Nice bit of history at ZDNet about how the blizzard of 1978 led to the creation of the BBS."

49 of 182 comments (clear)

  1. why in my day... by faeryman · · Score: 4, Funny

    Why, in my day, when it was a blizzard we didn't have no fancy BBS. We had to walk 15 miles (uphill bothways, of course) to the nearest house to trade our warez. All we could afford was one piece of paper though, and we had to write the zeros and ones on it. Bah, kids. Zzzzzzz....

    --


    ,
    faeryman
    1. Re:why in my day... by antiprime · · Score: 2, Funny

      ob You had zeros? We had to use the letter 'o'.

    2. Re:why in my day... by Jason1729 · · Score: 2, Funny

      We were so l337 that we used *both* sides out our piece of paper.

    3. Re:why in my day... by UniverseIsADoughnut · · Score: 4, Funny

      >>You had zeros? We had to use the letter 'o'.

      yeah but 'o' is smaller then '0' so you had more compact code.

      anyone ever think printing out something like windows or FreeBSD in 1's and 0's on 3 foot wide paper and making wallpaper of it would be neat.

    4. Re:why in my day... by Troll_Kamikaze · · Score: 4, Funny

      All we could afford was one piece of paper though, and we had to write the zeros and ones on it. Bah, kids. Zzzzzzz....

      Sheit, kid. When I was growin up we didn't have no paper... had to smear the ones and zeroes on birch bark with the bloody stumps of our fingers.

    5. Re:why in my day... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

      I remember hearing that the single-sided paper wasn't safe to use on both sides, even if you punched a hole. It must have been true...why would the paper manufacturers lie?

    6. Re:why in my day... by Jason1729 · · Score: 4, Funny

      We had to punch one hole in it to double-side it.

    7. Re:why in my day... by Anonvmous+Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

      I'm confused by this article. Do we like or hate Blizzard this round?

  2. Out of Curiosity by Adolatra · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Out of curiosity, does anyone know what ultimately happened to the original CBBS referenced in this article?

    1. Re:Out of Curiosity by yppiz · · Score: 5, Funny
      Few know this, but CBBS, running on its original hardware, is the comments server for slashdot.org.

      --Pat

    2. Re:Out of Curiosity by MsWillow · · Score: 2, Informative

      I'm not sure what happened to the *original* CBBS hardware, but several years ago, Randy Suess sold me one of the old hard drives, a 10-meg one, that had been used in *a* CBBS. He also sold off a bunch of S-100 boards, and an old chassis, so I suspect the original CBBS hgardware was sold off, over the years, as parts no longer needed.

      Randy's running Chinet nowadays, and last I heard, Ward had CBBS. You could always ask Randy, if you're curious.

      --

      Lemon curry?
  3. BBSs were great: by Globe199 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I loved owning a BBS.

    Until I realized that using OS/2 on a 486 with 8 MB of RAM, and playing Doom under Windows under OS/2, all the while running WWIV in the background, was not such a good idea.

    Globe199

  4. my heroes by Army+Eye · · Score: 2, Interesting

    What are these guys doing these days? Maybe they can come up with something to get the BBS scene going again. I miss it.

    1. Re:my heroes by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Think "meta" - route around the Internet.

      Work with your neighbors. Build a wireless network using the common pool of equipment. You're not allowed to let other people on the Internet through your connection (check your AUP - many ISPs say something like this), but nothing says you can't let them get to things on your own network!

      Start creating content that only exists on the 'wireless' side of your network. Get other people to do the same. When enough compelling content exists on the "other" net, people will find their own way to get to it.

      Incidentally, this also sidesteps another problem that many people face on their home connections: "no servers". You're serving inward, not outward, so that never becomes a problem.

      I ran a BBS from 1990 to 1999 and shut it down due to a lack of interest. The fundamental concept of a bulletin board where people post about stuff is still needed - stare at your monitor for awhile if you don't believe it. Bring it back at a neighborhood level and you'll find the community that's been waiting all this time.

    2. Re:my heroes by Army+Eye · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I know, it makes no sense. The Internet can do everything a BBS can do, and better. But BBSes were still cooler.

    3. Re:my heroes by haroldK · · Score: 2, Informative

      Why do I keep seeing stuff like this here? If you like BBSs, join one. I'm a member of one and I run one. Mine doesn't have that many users, and is only up for testing purposes, but the other one I'm on has 17 users and 27 rooms as well as a LORD clone (Scary Caverns). There are many others out there with many more users.

      Seriously, if they're cool, use them.

    4. Re:my heroes by gmack · · Score: 2, Informative

      ARE still cooler. Some still exist. Some friends have one running at telnet://bbs.mysticone.com
      We even have registered Tradewars and LORD.

      It's like... the BBS days minus the long distance charges(and multi node is suddenly much cheaper).

    5. Re:my heroes by scott1853 · · Score: 2, Funny

      And by doing everything over a telnet session you get the nostalgic feeling of using a 9600 baud modem while on your broadband connection :)

  5. Snow day... by vspazv · · Score: 5, Funny

    I wonder if the internet would even exist if those guys had had girlfriends during that week snowed in.

    1. Re:Snow day... by rusty0101 · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Actually what became the Internet already existed. ARPAnet existed, and I seem to recall it celebrating it's 30th birthday in the last couple of years.

      What the BBS provided, respective to the Internet, was a bunch of people who had some experience administering equipment that connected computers over the telco PSTN. Many of these people started their own ISPs or went to work for new ISPs when it became obvious that the internet was the way of the future.

      Running a BBS gave you experience with user accounts, privledges, various chat and application options, modems, and in some cases even billing. In many cases it also provided you with a crash course in customer relations or even what has become known as Customer Relationship Management, as you usually were the tech support for your BBS.

      If you did not back end your BBS with a network of some sort, other than fidoNet or RHYME, you probably did not have experience with routers, or file servers. The vast majority of BBSs were single systems with 1-4 modems attached. If you wanted more than four modems you would have to buy special cards that would allow 8, 16 or even 32 serial ports per card. These cards may have been expensive, but in most cases they were less expensive than the added computer, network equipment, etc to add more phone lines.

      If you participated in one of the back end file and message passing services, and there was not a local hookup with another BBS, you almost always ended up paying monthly $100+ phone bills.

      -Rusty

      --
      You never know...
    2. Re:Snow day... by Forgotten · · Score: 2, Informative

      No, it really didn't. It seems that way to many people because they started on BBSes, then moved to dialup shell account access and eventually SLIP and PPP access. But on the actual network side of things, there's little connection between BBSes and the Internet. Some big multiline boards became small ISPs, but that's really more like repurposing old equipment. The only real connection I can think of is between Waffle boards and other UUCP systems, and those notably weren't really ever part of the BBS scene - precisely because they were leaf nodes to the Internet instead. There were FIDONet gateways and such in the early nineties, but rather than evolving they mostly just did out as cheap, real net access came along and the sysops lost interest.

      The relationship of the BBS scene to the ARPAnet/Internet is really one of parallel evolution or microcomputer imitation of what the real iron had already been doing for a decade. It didn't evolve into anything - it died out, as many parallel evolution strains do. I'm not dissing it exactly (you can probably tell I was right into BBSes) but it was the toy version, and the people involved basically outgrew it and left it behind.

  6. Damn Blizzard!! by Nyktos · · Score: 4, Funny

    First BBS's, and then Warcraft!!! What next?? Some sort of fancy persistant universe?? CRAZY!!

  7. Slow News Day? by Quaoar · · Score: 4, Funny

    Two stories from three decades ago...I guess Linux can only have so many kernel updates to report about...

    --
    I'll form my OWN solar system! With blackjack! And hookers!
  8. Ahh Those were the days by Saoi · · Score: 5, Funny

    single character commands, harsh bootings, sounds like my kinda system, pity I wasn't born yet :(

    1. Re:Ahh Those were the days by antiprime · · Score: 5, Funny

      Get drunk to simulate the slow response time, then try to navigate through your favorite modern windowing shell without using a mouse, tie the power cord to your ankle to simulate random rebooting that you somehow blame yourself for: exactly the same effect. For advanced nostalgia, futz with your monitor and display settings so everything's a shade of green and black.

    2. Re:Ahh Those were the days by BinBoy · · Score: 2, Funny

      If you wanted a color monitor, you could buy one of those plastic covers that made the white text look amber.

    3. Re:Ahh Those were the days by FuzzyBad-Mofo · · Score: 2, Interesting

      ..tie the power cord to your ankle to simulate random rebooting that you somehow blame yourself for..

      So you're saying that you had a Spectrum or Timex/Sinclair? <rimshot>

      My Commodore had color graphics, rarely crashed, and had no mouse. It needed no mouse. CBM BBSs' were neat, because they could do color PETSCII graphics and even animated screens made from the graphics characters. It was similar (and possibly superior) to ANSI graphics, but this was at a time when the IBM PC had a green screen and a beeping speaker.

  9. 5 million solders? I dont think so. by DaPhoenix · · Score: 5, Interesting

    "The answer was two weeks later, when the Computerized Bulletin Board System first spun its disk, picked up the line and took a message."

    "Christensen wrote the BIOS and all the drivers (as well as the small matter of the bulletin board code itself), while Suess took care of five million solder joints and the odd unforeseen problem."

    Okay time for quick math.

    60 secs a min * 60 mins a hour * 24 hours a day * 14 days (a fortnight) = 1209600 seconds.

    5 million solders / 1209600 seconds = ~4.13 solders per second.

    Aint no way in hell he did that by hand.

    --
    -- -=innocent ramblings from the mind of an insomniatic programmer=-
    1. Re:5 million solders? I dont think so. by teamhasnoi · · Score: 2, Funny
      Sorry, that was a typo. It was supposed to be, "Suess took care of five million soldiers, joints, and the odd unforeseen problem."

      I'm guessing that Suess was a huge pothead, and traded dope to the soldiers in exchange for the hardware. The "odd unforseen problem" was when he ran out.

      It's all right here in this web site. Just don't /. it. Five million soldiers don't take kindly to DoS.

    2. Re:5 million solders? I dont think so. by Phroggy · · Score: 2, Informative

      Another example is "Three-hundred baud is around five words a second - you can read faster than that". First of all it's more like fifty words per second, and no, you generally can't read novel material faster than that (and I've tried, on live chat with a 300 baud connection when other people were using 2400bps modems - and I'm a fast reader).

      Um, dude, yes, you can read text at 300bps. You might have trouble reading a novel at that speed, but you can certainly read text from a chatroom (or teleconference, as they were called in those days). Assuming N81 (no parity, 8 bits per byte and one stop bit), that's 33 characters per second, which is about 5 words or so. Maybe 6 or 7 if they're short.

      If everyone else was at 2400bps, 300bps may have seemed fast if you were also trying to type at the same time the text was coming in. That was kinda challenging.

      --
      $x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
      $x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
    3. Re:5 million solders? I dont think so. by Mike1024 · · Score: 4, Funny

      Hey,

      Suess took care of five million solder joints and the odd unforeseen problem... 4.13 solders per second.

      Aint no way in hell he did that by hand.

      He did not do it all by hand,
      he did not do it with Ayn Rand,
      he did not do it for a band,
      he did not do it to command.

      He could have used a solder bath,
      that could have worked with your math,
      or may have used another path,
      for the figures which cause your wrath.

      Michael

      --
      "Goodness me, how unlike the FBI to abuse the trust of the American public." -- The Onion
  10. BBS Games by Jason1729 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    What I really miss about BBS's were the game doors, Especially Tradewars and GTWar. I know people run Tradewares via telnet not, but it's just not the same thing. I got to know the other players and it was more fun because it was personal.

    I still hold a grudge against Telus because they bought the company that bought the ISP that bought my BBS to shut it down and harvest their customers. I even cancelled my ClearNet cell phone when Telus bought them.

    Jason
    ProfQuotes

  11. Bulletin: by $$$$$exyGal · · Score: 2, Funny
    Bulletin:
    Bill brainstorms bulletin board before bedtime. Blizzard buoyed brainchild.

    --bare babes

    --
    Very popular slashdot journal for adul
  12. Flashbacks???? by sickboy_macosX · · Score: 3, Insightful
    I thought This was discussed last week, leave it to slashdot to start beating a dead horse..repeadtedly, until people start complaining.

    Not trying to be a troll, just saying hey, we have already discussed it.

    Memo To Malda: Make sure your not posting the same story a week later...

    --
    --- /* In Soviet Russia, the Mac OS X kernel panics you! */
  13. Some BBS's begat great Internet dynasties by 87C751 · · Score: 3, Interesting
    Northwest Nexus, the major ISP headquartered in Bellevue, WA, began as halcyon.com. And halcyon.com was originally a 386, 8 MB of memory, DESQview 386 and the MS-DOS version of Waffle, all running in Ralph Sims' bedroom. With that kit, Ralph was running very close to a full newsfeed to over 100 leaf nodes back in the early 90's. When someone made a DEC Unix box available (it might have been an Alpha, come to think of it), he migrated and I ported BBStevie to big iron for the first time. Soon afterward, halcyon stepped into the ISP business and Ralph got to quit his day job. I recall that Tom Dell was pretty impressed with what Ralph achieved with Waffle. And I think I had a shell account on halcyon until halfway through the decade.

    Those were the days...

    --
    Mail? Put "slashdot" in the subject to pass the spam filters.
  14. I only sigh.... by jlleblanc · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I caught the tail end of the BBS era in the mid 90's just as AOL was beginning to ship out their free trial floppies, which everyone else used to get online. Where I lived, AOL didn't have access numbers, so I explored the local BBS'es and learned about modem commands and such instead. (Much better use of time :) Those days were fun.

  15. One slow day in the news world... by pVoid · · Score: 3, Funny
    Man, this article reminds me of the simpson's episode where bart picks up a magazine of "Find Waldo", and all you see in the picture is this big empty room with waldo in the middle, to which bart says "man he's just not trying anymore"...

    The article is a dupe, and it's not even a karma whore, it's a single line, with a single link.

    I'm not really complaining though, so don't think I'm a troll or something. It's just good to have a sense of humour about ourselves every once in a while.

    1. Re:One slow day in the news world... by jericho4.0 · · Score: 4, Interesting
      I'll back you on this.
      This is a dupe. From what? Three or four days ago. Yesterday we saw a multiple dupe about some interview Bill Gates gave 8 years ago.
      I realize I'm not paying anyone for the right to post this, but someone is paying the editors, no? Christ, start _trying_ to look like pros, at least. Take a fucking journalisim class and discover the concept of journalistic responsibility. I, for one, am tired of seeing dupes that anyone who actually reads the damn site could recognize.

      IMHO, slashdot needs to produce a mission statement that clearly states what slashdot is. Are you news? A gossip site? A bunch of kids playing in Mom's basement?

      I realize that 'go start you're own site if you don't like it' is a valid response to this post, but I simply don't understand the lack of professionalism I see here. We are talking about 20 posts a day kids, get with it.

      --
      "A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" - Alan Perlis
    2. Re:One slow day in the news world... by Big+Mark · · Score: 2, Funny
      Yesterday we saw a multiple dupe
      Three identical stories == tripe?

      -Mark
  16. Never would have known... by cabra771 · · Score: 5, Funny

    that those damn people at Blizzard not only killed all my social skills by releasing Diablo and Diablo II, but now I learn that they got me hooked even earlier! Damn all those BBS's I used to visit!!!

    --

    -my other sig is your mom
  17. Kids and Doors (True Story!) by romper · · Score: 5, Funny

    In the late 80's my parents took away the monitor to "ground" me from playing Tradewars 2002 on the local BBS.

    Of course I could blindly launch telemate from DOS and knew how to turn on the printer log and start the dial-up.

    The printer didn't even have ink! We had to read the carbon copy.

    You kids now with your fancy monitors and colors.

    --
    Right is wrong when left is right.
  18. It was GREAT! by xchino · · Score: 4, Funny

    Oh man, I remember how great those days were. Sitting for hours on end chatting away, playing door games, downloading shareware, adn :)(&(& )_& (*
    *&_(P&*
    (*()*+ *A+S)(*D+)( *

    I(_A)SD*_)Id
    +++
    NO CARRIER

    --
    Everyone is entitled to their own opinion. It's just that yours is stupid.
    1. Re:It was GREAT! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

      True story.. I once got banned from my favorite BBS for swearing in the chat room. the word ass appeared TWICE in a fit of line noise..

  19. Not the only thing... by liquidsin · · Score: 2, Funny

    ...conceived during that blizzard. I was born in November '78, roughly nine months after the blizzard. From what I know, the snow was so deep you couldn't leave the house for days (weeks?) on end. Thank you blizzard, for leaving my parents with nothing much else to do but have sex.

    --
    do not read this line twice.
    1. Re:Not the only thing... by dacarr · · Score: 2, Funny

      A blizzard? You were lucky! Here in southern California, in 1978, we had to make do with a really nasty rain storm and flooding in Yorba Linda.

      --
      This sig no verb.
  20. Usenet Born at the Same Time - Synchronicity by Futurian · · Score: 5, Interesting

    The impetus to electronically intercommunicate was strong. Usenet was born in 1979, one year after the creation of the CBBS. I was an undergraduate at Duke at that time, and recall being shown a prototype of the project by Tom Truscott. The early messages included arcane comments about operating system programming for "Unix wizards". I told Tom it was excellent, but with my limited horizons I internally felt that the early games "adventure" and "Zork" were more exciting. In retrospect, Tom Truscott, Jim Ellis and the other creators captured the zeitgeist and deserve lavish praise. A full Usenet feed topped 500 gigabytes in 2002, a mind-boggling size circa 1979, and the leviathan keeps growing.

    Tom and Jim were great people. They were enthusiastic, friendly, and helpful even to a "lowly" undergraduate. They were always trying to improve Usenet and spoke extensively about how the data structures of the news program had to be redone. Even in 1979 more sophisticated structures were needed to scale up and handle the growing number of news articles. The Duke graduate school did not have a budget item for long distance telephone calls to swap Usenet news items. Luckily, Bell Labs charitably became a hub of the early network and subsidized the long distance calls.

    Jim Ellis enjoyed reading SF and his programming skill helped make one positive SF scenario, inexpensive fast electronic communication, come true. I never had a chance to thank him for all his help and for suggesting I read "Shockwave Rider" and "Forever War". Thanks - via the celestial internet.

  21. Here is some more info by Billly+Gates · · Score: 2, Informative

    He worked as a consultant for IBM. Whenever you bought IBM mainframes and or mini's a consultant usually came with the purchase. My father purchased 1 mainframe and several mini's back in 79 and happened to recieve Christensen as a consultant.

    Anyway the link is here written by Christensen back in 88. Amazingly his old cbbs program for cp/m ran for 15 years before being retired!

    He tried to get my father to join his bbs but my old man didn't have a pc or I should say Micro-computer back in those days and did not see the fun in it or understand why anyone would need a computer at home. Back in 78 the pc's did not have any off the shelve software like development tools( besides Microsoft Basic), spreadsheets, or games. Christensen's z-80 computer for example only had 16k of ram, an editor and assembler compiler. Thats it. My father only knew cobal and IBM 360 assembler so he couldn't really program it.

    Anyway how it got started was that he loved to share diskettes and tapes with his buddy in Michican. The blizard of 78 was real bad. My parents could not leave the house for close to a week and snow drifts almost reached the roof. It took 2 days for my father to clear out a path to his car. We had close to 5 feet of snow. Anyway as the story goes he couldn't share the diskettes with his buddy so he decided to develop a way to use a phone line and a cbbs was born.

    He also came up with the idea of using phone lines before modems were around. Back in the early or mid 70's he was playing with a spectograph and was analzying analog data over an ethernet line. Out of curiousity he examined a phone line and saw striking similarities when examing the wave forms. He wondered if it were possible to use phone lines as a poor mans wan. He began working on a modem and hayes beat him to it before he was done.

    --
    http://saveie6.com/
  22. When was the blizzard? by AKAImBatman · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Erm, am I the only one who remembers that the "great Chicago Blizzard" was in '79 not '78? Don't believe my rusty old memory? See for yourself.

    --
    Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
  23. online discussion systems on mainframes by thvv · · Score: 3, Interesting

    BBS-like functions were provided by
    various mainframe timesharing systems well before
    1978.

    Multics had an online threaded discussion system
    called "continuum" (later renamed "forum") which
    I used while housebound during the Massachusetts
    blizzard of 78. The Multics machine wouldn't
    fit in my apartment though: I had a TermiNet 300
    dialed up to MIT's Honeywell 6180.

    Multics continuum was first written in the mid 70s
    in order to bid on a RFP for the Executive Office
    of the President of the United States
    (we lost the bid, IBM got it).
    At the time we were told that the capability
    desired was similar to a discussion system on
    the Dartmouth timesharing system.

    The PLATO system at University of Illinois
    had a threaded discussion system in the 70s,
    as did a similar system, forget its name, at
    Stanford.