gemini://going-flying.com/~mernisse/33.gmi

To contextualize my experience with BBSes I was particularly active in the local BBS scene for a handful of years in the early to late 1990s. I ran several small single-line BBSes of my own including one that ended up being a FidoNet node and co-sysoped the BBS run by my high school. I continued to tinker with telnet based BBSes into the early 2000s.

The BBS was a truly unique phenomenon. Prior to their creation there were various reasons for computers to call each other over the phone. In many cases it was for large computers to exchange batches of information. USENET and e-mail started out as computers calling each other in the dead of night when long distance phone calls were cheap. Later you started to see modems being marketed to people who needed to use a computer when they couldn't be in the office. I have memories of my father doing this late at night with what would become my first modem, a 2400 baud Hayes SmartModem. This was much like connecting to a modern-day Linux system via a terminal emulator. You had a command line you could use to access the remote computer with. It was often expensive so it was usually limited to important computing tasks. The BBS was different, it was a single computer calling into another computer, typically a single-user home computer affair on both ends. Now this was not dial-up like early Internet connections, though the hardware was the same and the dialing and warbles of handshaking were similar, this was a binary serial link over a phone line bereft of a higher level protocol like SLIP or PPP that could be routed to the larger Internet. You essentially replaced the monitor and keyboard of the remote computer with your own via the magic of a phone line.

Personally I had an IBM PC clone running MS-DOS so I found myself defaulted into the world of DOS BBSes, though I do recall the Apple II BBS scene was pretty big in my area as well. It probably seems these days but none of the popular home computer systems of the day were even remotely compatible with each other. Commodore had a text encoding called PETSCII, Apple used ASCII but the Apple II only had uppercase letters, and the IBM PC had 'extended ASCII' which under featured a swappable block of characters using the 128 characters encodable in a single byte (ASCII is 7-bit, extended ASCII is 8). On systems running DOS this defaulted to 'Code page 437' which provided a host of drawing characters that sysops and artists put to good use (and thanks to their inclusion in Unicode are still being used to this day). Since all of these ways of representing text are incompatible, you ended up only calling BBSes running the same hardware and operating system as what you had. It's also key to note that none of these systems had multi-user operating systems (BSD or UNIX) or GUI operating systems. Windows 3.1 released on the PC in 1992 but I didn't know anyone who got into Windows until 95 came out (in 1996) and even then most of use kept using DOS to call BBSes until we moved to the Internet. Since we didn't have graphical consoles we also were limited to the text modes of the day, so the PC had a luxurious 80 column by 25 row screen. The Apple and Commodore hardware both were stuck with 40 column displays being much older architectures with much less memory.

The other thing worth keeping in mind is that we're talking about very very slow connections. Early on I had a 2,400 baud modem, capable of transmitting around 240 characters per second. It would take just under 10 seconds to completely fill a 80x25 screen so the menu interfaces were generally optimized quite heavily and monochrome. I remember upgrading to a 14,400 baud modem which at 1,440 characters per second would refresh a screen fast enough that I could happily turn on the ANSI color menus! The entire thing was built into the constraints of the day. When I started moving to the Internet in the late 1990s state-of-the-art BBSes had several phone lines, were made up of networked PCs running something like Netware and had several hundred megabyte to single gigabyte hard drives. The maximum speed was 33,600 baud which meant a file transfer speed of around 3KB/sec so downloading a file repository of a gigabyte would have taken around 4 days. Assuming your phone call didn't get dropped. Some BBSes had CD-ROM changers with a collection of CDs full of files that you could browse. Your average home user though still had a PC with a 200 - 500 megabyte hard drive though so you had to pick and choose.

The last thing I think that might not be obvious to folks looking back is that since all of this took place as phone calls over the land-line phone network is that these were very local affairs. I used to go to meet-ups with local BBS user groups because long distance toll charges were a thing. It could easily cost dollars per minute to make a long-distance phone call and with the modem speeds we had just downloading new messages to read could take several minutes. Since local calls were generally free this naturally limited the geographic area you tended to participate in. While networks like FidoNet would allow you to exchange messages with people far and wide, the minimum message delay was 2 days since they only transferred mail to the broader network once at night so you ended up messaging local users much more often. Eventually with multi-line BBSes you got real-time chat, which further strengthened the bonds of the individual BBS' user community. Similar to IRC but without the ability to network, and often with only a single room, this as much as anything else is the stand out memory I have of the BBS days. Sitting up, late into the night typing into a 80x25 screen, talking to a handful of other people that I from all over town.

Once home Internet access became widely accessible in the very late 1990s and early 2000s most of us moved to IRC or IM networks like AOL or ICQ. Our story became the early World Wide Web and the world moved on. Some BBSes were supported by organizations and businesses (several video game companies had BBSes for support and distribution of software) and morphed into forums and websites but by and large BBSes were run by hobbyists and were simply shuttered. The few that made the jump to the Internet became the precursor to the 'modern' telnet BBS.

Hopefully this can shed some light on the context of the day and can help you understand why these things are the way they are. Truly we were operating at the cutting edge of some technologies that unbeknownst to us were about to change the way the world communicated and were very much constrained by the capabilities of the hardware of the day.

[02/07/2023 @16:45]: About BBSes

Background

My Story