Definitely get a nostalgia buzz thinking about the early 1990's BBS scene. Had a very vibrant community of BBS users in my city during that time.
It is ironic and somewhat interesting that the biggest aspects of the BBS scene that most people seem to miss (the community/local culture, meeting like-minded people in real life, some of the games, ANSI art, Echomail discussions), are all things borne from the technical limitations of the time. Slow modems and high long distance charges meant most people kept to their local boards. Games had to be designed in text with only a rudimentary colour scheme (sure, there was RoboBoard, RIP, NAPLPS and other graphical protocols - none which really caught on all that much) and still be compelling. Most were limited turn based (which meant being forced to only spend a couple hours a day playing, then having to wait). "World-wide" networks like FidoNet were dog-slow by today's standards (it was a toss-up whether a message would reach its recipient faster on an FTN network or via snail-mail), so discussion threads would last for days but only have several hundred messages in them to sort through.
I remember the years and work spent to try to improve on these limitations. Galacticomm and eSoft had their huge hackish ways to get past the non-multitasking nature of DOS and the IRQ limits of PCs to allow people to run huge multi-line boards on regular PCs. We saw Planet Connect dramatically lower the cost of distributing FidoNet packets via satellite downlink (still needed telephone uplink if you were sending, though). We saw big serial breakout boards and modem boxes (Galactibox?) come out. And of course, faster modems. Up to rip-roaring 33.6kbps speeds at the peak of the BBS era.
Ultimately, the internet and the "real" operating systems that are commonplace today overcame those limitations in ways that were pretty unfathomable to most of us common BBS users and sysops of the day. Unfortunately, BBS's today really only appeal to those of us who had lived through the struggle of configuring COM ports or QWK readers (or for many of us, a tosser/scanner, door game, FOSSIL driver, or getting DESQview working just right).
BBSes is one of those last places in the internet where you still can find your tribe without algorithms and, too much crying about politics. I’m glad it’s still hard UX entry to many as we don’t need many there. Just those enough few who get it
I think that if you are 40+ which is BBS target continually, then you should know all neighborhood nerds worth knowing, internet BBSes where you don’t lose time on idiocracy is exactly that neighborhood worth virtual saving. Post code doesn’t matter that much as the right mental model to survive and thrive there.
San Jose. My wife and I have lived in the same house for 10 years and know about 80% of the neighbors in a two block radius. We also probably know 50 additional families within a square mile as a result of our kids going to public schools here. This is essentially just like how it was when I grew up in the 80s, in a rural East Coast City of about 75k.
In the area where instead of Waymo, local taxi driver who still look like me and speaks my language drives the cabs and gives me discounts when we both have last ride back home from downtown. And we talk to each other more than sue each other
Interestingly, the FediVerse has that. Not in the big nodes that you've probably heard of, like Mastodon.Social. But there are loads of smaller nodes that definitely have moderate to strong degrees of locality.
I'm ok with losing location bias. being from a small town and only having 50 ppl in our area code that werent long distance that knew about bbss meant 80% of them were crazy, old, or had weird/obscure interests. I did make a lot of friends during that era.
Yes, I miss those days. The late 80's through mid 90's was the golden age of BBSing. The transition from BBSes to ISPs was fun, but I still miss the community aspect of BBSes.
> I’m glad it’s still hard UX entry to many as we don’t need many there. Just those enough few who get it
Of course, we can't forget the rampant elitism among sysops (and no, I'm not counting myself outside of that group - I was downright insufferable back in the day).
I tried getting into Telnet BBSs 20 years ago, but quickly got so sucked in that I was afraid it would turn unhealthy and I stopped doing it.
Tangentially, what do people use for telnet programs today? I used to just use the telnet command line on Windows, but that's gone for very obvious security reasons. Have most BBSes moved to ssh or similar?
There are a couple of well-supported Telnet programs you could use. A common one is SyncTerm which is purpose-built for the BBS scene (also is free). Zoc is another popular one, but it is more designed as a general-purpose terminal emulator (great for SSH-ing into servers). Zoc is commercial software.
Reminds me that I wanted to expose an old T.A.G. BBS to the web as a nostalgia project recently. Feel free to check it out, create an account, play some LORD, Trade Wars 2002, Usurper, Messages, etc. I just wanted the experience to live on as I remember it with nothing more than a modern web browser required. https://nightwatchbbs.com
It is ironic and somewhat interesting that the biggest aspects of the BBS scene that most people seem to miss (the community/local culture, meeting like-minded people in real life, some of the games, ANSI art, Echomail discussions), are all things borne from the technical limitations of the time. Slow modems and high long distance charges meant most people kept to their local boards. Games had to be designed in text with only a rudimentary colour scheme (sure, there was RoboBoard, RIP, NAPLPS and other graphical protocols - none which really caught on all that much) and still be compelling. Most were limited turn based (which meant being forced to only spend a couple hours a day playing, then having to wait). "World-wide" networks like FidoNet were dog-slow by today's standards (it was a toss-up whether a message would reach its recipient faster on an FTN network or via snail-mail), so discussion threads would last for days but only have several hundred messages in them to sort through.
I remember the years and work spent to try to improve on these limitations. Galacticomm and eSoft had their huge hackish ways to get past the non-multitasking nature of DOS and the IRQ limits of PCs to allow people to run huge multi-line boards on regular PCs. We saw Planet Connect dramatically lower the cost of distributing FidoNet packets via satellite downlink (still needed telephone uplink if you were sending, though). We saw big serial breakout boards and modem boxes (Galactibox?) come out. And of course, faster modems. Up to rip-roaring 33.6kbps speeds at the peak of the BBS era.
Ultimately, the internet and the "real" operating systems that are commonplace today overcame those limitations in ways that were pretty unfathomable to most of us common BBS users and sysops of the day. Unfortunately, BBS's today really only appeal to those of us who had lived through the struggle of configuring COM ports or QWK readers (or for many of us, a tosser/scanner, door game, FOSSIL driver, or getting DESQview working just right).
I met many local people though BBSs. It was an amazing way to find like minded geeks near you.
Of course, we can't forget the rampant elitism among sysops (and no, I'm not counting myself outside of that group - I was downright insufferable back in the day).
Tangentially, what do people use for telnet programs today? I used to just use the telnet command line on Windows, but that's gone for very obvious security reasons. Have most BBSes moved to ssh or similar?
- IcyTerm - SyncTERM - TERMinator - NetRunner
All support SSH. The top 3 support audio, sixel, RIP, and others as well. Even support for Amiga and C64 fonts/etc.
Enjoy!
SyncTerm: https://syncterm.bbsdev.net/ Zoc: https://www.emtec.com/zoc/index.html
But Telnet Client has not been enabled by default for a while now.
https://www.laptopmag.com/how-to/enable-and-use-telnet-on-wi...