I agree. Where I grew up local calls were metered. Hence no real BBS culture, and not much in the way of modems.
When I got the Internet at university in 1990, ftp was a revelation. Downloading files from anywhere and everywhere was insanely empowering.
I remember downloading files on hard-drive (MFM) settings to use old hard drives with my salvaged controller cards.
It's hard to convey how "hands on" computing was back then. Lots of jumpers to set, lots of hardware, and software, things to set to make it "work just right". Lots of trial and error, but really cool when it worked!
Now i just buy any old USB thing, plug it it, and off we go. I confess I prefer the present, these days I'm using the computer to do things, not "make the computer actually work."
We never figured out how to stop the rs232 mouse from having an IRQ conflict with the modem, but it didn't matter: we just didn't use the mouse when dialing into our freenet's lynx browser.
I still use Lynx today to read articles with just walls of text (and often without the paywall!)
Conversely, although in Europe (mostly) we paid for local calls, we didn't pay to receive calls, so mobile phones grew faster here in the 1990s and 2000s.
Here in Canada local calls were also free. Weirdly even calling someone you only had to use five digits I still recall my old phone number 2-2506.
But the other part of the BBS hobby was the computer itself to be able to afford it. At the time computers were expensive, not necessary, an extravagance only well-off families had them. Even modems back then were quite expensive.
Sweden did not have free outgoing calls but absolutely had a BBS culture. Definitely so in the Amiga age (late 80s), not sure about the 8-bit systems that was a bit before my time.
Ah, I was just reminiscing about the WWIV BBS that I used to regular as a kid: Dead Cat Alley out of Chico, CA.
Doing Advent of Code this year, I was wishing for a more layered puzzle...something like a BBS where you had to solve puzzles to get to the next layer, or next door game. Maybe even the ability to program agents to play the door game for you.
I ran a dual-node PCBoard BBS in 1992 that had a custom scrolling ANSI login screen developed by JeD of ACiD, which was a pretty big accomplishment at the time.
The annoying thing was the "page sysop" going off at 3 AM from my closet while I was asleep.
BBSs helped setup social connections in the SF East Bay that resulted in in person social activities that ran, in some form, continuously for 20+ years.
The systems used were based on WWIV. Another was a multi-line system that included games one could play against others called Popnet - it was a custom system written by a father/son pair.
This is pretty much a description of me in the same era. I didn't know what the modem in my 386 was for, didn't have it plugged into anything. Then a nameless living saint at the local Radio Shack explained what it was for. I bought a phone cable, plugged it in, lightning struck, cue the montage that leads to the present day. I had a WWIV board, something called JetBBS, and finally Renegade, which ruled.
In San Diego at one point there was around a thousand BBS systems. Fidonet members would meet up occasionally and we would fill up a big room. It was an incredible time.
Funny reading this... Including myself, I know a handful of friends who ran BBSes and were all about this age. I'm pretty sure that we're all now in some form of IT job as well.
It's not just a matter of age, but of location. I am old enough to have grown with 8 bit computers, but at that time, I didn't live in a country with free local calls. The price of local calls was 0.50c a minute in current US dollars. As you might imagine, it's difficult to have a BBS culture with those prices. BBS use was going to have to be attached to some phreaking activities, and at that point, you might as well go international instead of calling down the street.
Countries with that kind of local pricing jumped straight to the internet, at whichever time the prices for the general public became reasonable. For instance, In my home country the first special data rates started in 1995, where a dollar would get you an hour of internet, everything included. With that 30x drop in prices, internet usage exploded.
Here’s a good video (I checked several; this one seems best) with demonstrations and explanations of how it used to work, and how it works now https://youtu.be/JWdr4zeE3JU
Such a familiar story. Also racked up a big phone bill that angered dad. Also set up a BBS, with the help of an older mentor sysop who helped hook it up to a message exchange network. Also lost all data (and started again from scratch), although not because of a trojan but from just accidentally formatting the wrong drive.
> it would have taken over five minutes to transfer on our 2400 BPS modem. Any file around one megabyte would take about an hour to download.
A few years removed from this, I remember the agonizing hours trying to download a plug-in for Escape Velocity. The Star Wars plug-in was something like 2.4MB, and your best hope was to do it whenever no one else wanted the phone line.
A friend and I spent a fair bit of time working on a Star Trek: First Contact plug-in, but it didn’t really go anywhere. Somewhere between normal use and programming is the odd art of ResEditing your way into a tool or toy you want.
Lol same here! I wrote a barebones BBS in QBasic when I was in 6th grade = 11 year old. Only had like 5 users all of whom were friends, still good times!
LOL! Same here. The initial version of my home brewed BBS was written in QB 4.5 (I believe), which I later ported to GW-BASIC because it allowed me to compile the BAS file to EXE (binary). Those were formative years for me that solidified my commitment to technology, which is going strong to this day…
I never got into BBS because Europe but I had a similar experience (or origin story). My first quest to find another programming language came when I figured out I needed something that could produce .exe instead of .bas. I went to a local store and browsed the computer books section and picked up a TurboPascal 7.0 (iirc) book that came with the compiler on a floppy disk. I selected the book and thus my second language after Basic (which came on the computer, no idea how I ever "found" it) by a great process. It was the biggest book so it must be the best. Oh kid logic :D
And why did I need to write some .exe...well I wanted to write a password protection for the computer that I could load in command.com so that I could lock out my sister from useing the computer. Nobel causes and ideas indeed that brought me to where I am these days. I'm still baffled how I figured all of this wizzardry out in the first place (the guy who sold us the computer must have mentioned command.com...I cannot recall how I even know it existed).
We got a computer super late and noone I knew was remotely interested in this stuff. There was no internet (or BBS) because we didn't have any connections to anything. I still remember how thrilling it was to go to the library and browse the computer books and learn there's evene more programming languages.
Amazing :D - it's quite similar to my experience. I think many folks naturally ended up moving to Turbo Pascal after Basic. I believe many of the BBS systems were initially written in Turbo Pascal (v4?). I know for a fact that WWIV, Telegard, and Renegade were all in done in TP, and then later moved to C++ because of the limitations associated with running Door games.. ah, the good 'ole times
I could never figure out things like FOSSIL drivers, I bought a Pascal compiler because I heard that's what door games were written in.
But what I did do was write a QBASIC BBS simulator, and a few kids in our computer class would 'log in' to it and we'd leave stupid messages for each other, and play blackjack and a few other games but I don't remember what they were.
The best part was one of us quickly figured out the random number generator wasn't seeded properly and would create the same cards every time you played, so they quickly got the high score.
I also started a BBS when I was 12. When I got my first PC with a modem I ran a telephone extension cable from my room all way across the house to the kitchen. It hung about 2 feet high. After 2 weeks of my parents tripping over the cable every morning, they decided to get me my own phone line in my room.
From that point forward, I ran a BBS for many years. I can still find my name in those old BBS listings from textfiles.com.
I have a lot of fond memories of my time in the BBS scene. As much as I love the internet it's a very different creature and you really lose the local/community aspect.
My dream was that we'd eventually get a similar local BBS culture back in the form of small neighborhood wireless mesh networks offering forums along with LAN gaming and P2P file sharing - instead we got things like facebook groups, subreddits, and Nextdoor
I think that's because setting up and maintaining the small neighborhood networks is work. People mostly don't care for that, they just want to have that group going with a bunch of people / play that game / etc. The "geeky" aspect of things is just a hindrance to their goals. 30 years ago, they had to do that if they wanted to participate. Mostly, they chose to not participate at all. Today, they can outsource those things, so they gladly do so.
I also have those memories and am a bit nostalgic of the internet of olde, and maybe even somewhat annoyed with some aspects of what it has become, but I can't help but notice a certain discrepancy even in myself.
While I absolutely love tinkering with my computers, and, for lack of interested neighbours, doing the small network all by myself in my apartment, I really don't have the same relationship with my phone, which I consider just like an appliance: allow me to call people, play some music, show me a map, and leave me alone.
But, there is a reasonable chance that a local wireless mesh will be far less work than you might think (ie technically an appliance) - but it will still need / benefit from moderation and participation- the "fun"
bits.
But there's an already an alternative that allows you to spend exactly zero time and effort maintaining a local wireless mesh network. And you still get to have the fun bits. So why bother involving the local wireless mesh at all?
The local wireless mesh makes it much harder for l33t script kiddies on the other side of the world to pwn ur base. (You still have to watch out for sophisticated malware, but you're not going to get hit by, say, DDoS attacks.)
When most people started to discover the internet, early 00s, facebook wasn't as it is now. It appeared less malign, wasn't able to track as much, and just less creepy.
It grew into what it is, slowly. So when the potential for this dream of community owned stuff could have born fruit, facebook was simple, easy, and far more appealing.
You see facebook now, after the vine has slowly grown, twisted about its users, crushing, but at first it was a pretty plant.
Facebook would have never, ever, ever been as popular, or twitter, if they started as they did.
I think it'd be pretty easy to see who was connected to what network, at least for someone else in range and collecting wireless traffic, and triangulation could track down any one of them.
Phone lines might even be worse though since that would mean having a record of your every call and its duration handed directly over to the state by the phone company and maybe even sold to any number of interested third parties as well.
Total anonymity wouldn't really be the point though. In the BBS days we used to have regular meetups/events and so at least for most of the frequent users you could already put a face to a username/handle. Making meatspace friends with the people near you was often a part of the appeal.
> and triangulation could track down any one of them.
You know, I used to think that, but I'm not sure anymore that triangulation is easily done with radio signals. I mean, if we're talking about triangulating as measuring the difference in time of reception of a signal between 2 or 3 antennas, because light travels so fast you need an impractical distance between them, like the distance between GPS satellites, or maybe at least cell towers.
There's probably other techniques that are more achievable though, like measuring changes in signal strength as you change positions, or using a directional antenna and pointing it in different directions.
> Phone lines might even be worse though since that would mean having a record of your every call and its duration handed directly over to the state by the phone company and maybe even sold to any number of interested third parties as well.
Was thinking more about anonymity from the general public you're communicating with. You know, the threat model being someone taking offense at some comment, political or otherwise, and deciding to do something extreme. Death threats for dumb stuff like opinions are seemingly not super rare.
> Total anonymity wouldn't really be the point though. In the BBS days we used to have regular meetups/events and so at least for most of the frequent users you could already put a face to a username/handle. Making meatspace friends with the people near you was often a part of the appeal.
Yes, but I imagine you had the level of control for not anyone to know your physical address, at least. I didn't mean total anonymity.
I was also a sysop as a child. Every night / 4am I had an incoming call from FidoNet syncing latest state. that also included emails…
So the ‘local’ community was indeed nice, but then some of my family moved abroad. and suddently Skype with a dial-up and internet was a game changer for them.
Maybe the newer decentralized approaches will get some of that.
I missed the days of BBSes but I did run a Hotline server at that same age of 12 or 13, for quite some time. I still have SyQuest and MO disks full of the server archives. I also still have the notepads full of IPs for servers and my login/password for them. I was online earlier than that too (1992), but I completely missed (or even ignored) the whole world of BBSes sadly. To my young self, the full-color high-res web seemed far superior to the 80-char dot matrix printouts from my friend whose older brother was finding neat stuff from BBSes. It turned out I could generally find all the same stuff on the web, and then some. What I didn't realize I was missing was the community/networking, especially locally. Hotline was amazing, but due to it being internet-based, there was definitely not any sense of "familiar local crew". That said, I still have friends I regularly talk to that I met from Hotline back in ~1997 onward.
I had that same model Zoom modem. The case was actually slightly transparent and the status lights were LEDs on the main board, so they showed through when lit, but the light also lit up the board around them enough to see it. Very early-90's hardware aesthetic.
I used 3 of these - one personally and two on a BBS - and they were legit. They were just absolute workhorses, and they really were software upgradable to whatever was happening in the industry. My school acquired two via an educational BBS program and they were the only two modems the program ever bought.
At home I started with a Boca 14.4, and upgraded to a US Robotics Sportster 33.6. I got the Sportster early and the modem ended up having a "death spiral" issue where speeds would decrease over the length of a call. Thankfully USR socketed the ROM in the modem so you could login to their BBS, request the new ROM and then replace the ROM to resolve the issue.
After going through the ROM ordeal, and then seeing 56k fracture into two incompatible camps initially (X2 and K56Flex), I really wanted to get into a Courier at home to avoid a likely double hardware upgrade. I eventually got into a US Robotics discount program and was able to make it happen by flipping the Sportster. I ran that modem to the end, and sure enough when 56k was standardized into V.90 it was a simple software update on the device.
In 1991/92 I was a couple years older but with the same background. I ran a BBS on the side. For a couple of months, I had been using my modem to connect and retrieve different "software" and messages. I purchased a BBS and contacted the phone company to set up a dedicated line without my parents knowing. They came and installed the line without them knowing anything about what I was doing. I had a job delivering newspapers (I know, it was a different time) which funded the BBS. The learning curve was steep, but the insight and knowledge provided me with a foundation and knowledge base of computers, networks and programming that placed me light years ahead of most other people working within the field of IT.
I was writing assembly, C, pascal, emulation, graphics, music, animation, 3d rendering, reverse engineering and networking, all on the same "powerful" computer. It was very much a secret life. I had few friends, and even fewer who knew what I was doing. I was spending hours spending time reading messages pulled out of message boards retrieved from different BBS, and even hours chatting with different sysops.
But jokes aside this shows a difference on how such things have been done 30 years ago and now. Nowadays you can just start a Discord 'server', run a group of like-minded ones for years and still don't know a bit on how computers are operating.
Long ran on a 300 baud modem (I think it was one bit per transition!.) Upgraded to a 2400 baud Hayes smartmodem full-duplex (V22bis!) and eventually a 14.4k Zyxel running some strange proprietary protocol with asymmetric channels. If I remember correctly, it's been a long long time.
Did anyone else's sister intentionally pick up other phone lines regularly to ditch the modem transfers so she could talk on the phone?
Nice article, I remember the thrill of calling new bbs' back then. Especially the elite-bbs' and getting hold of the NUP (new user password). This is also where my love of ascii-/ansiart started. And lets not forget door-games. Legend of the Red Dragon anyone? :) Those were the days.
"And there was extra jeopardy involved. Since we were using our regular house telephone line to connect, the odds that my mom would pick up and try to dial out—thus ruining the transfer process—remained very high. "
I can relate to this! It seems like no matter how much you explained to your mother that if she heard buzzing sounds, she needed to urgently hang up the phone. Instead - each time - she would go "Hello? Hello? What's going on?". Ah, mothers :-)
Going on a major tangent, VR today feels a lot like the BBS era: too few people see the potential and future of the technology. Of those few who do see it, they tend to be geeks in their tweens and teens.
“Why are you typing on the computer on the internet? Why not just use a phone?”
VR already solves a lot of problems such as better sims for various applications, and more presence when interacting with people physically far away. There are plenty more XR centric solutions that are novel. However, just like in the homebrew computing and pre-internet BBS eras it’s mostly teens and younger who could understand and see the future
The things you describe sound more bleeding edge and free-form than the combo of bukkit servers, skype, and flash games I was messing with around that time yet in their ends they kinda did the same thing. Setting up my own bukkit server and port-fowarding it for friends was probably the most technically involved thing I managed to set up around that age short of bricking an early android phone when I first discovered XDA-developers was a thing (ouch).
The things I see kids doing now are impressive. For every spam tabloid story I see of a kid being stumped by windows explorer I see another kid making youtube videos of how they pmprovised a (bad) vr setup out of a google cardboad and an xbox 360 kinect. Kids these days armed with video tutorials scare me but so do the platforms that actively try to court them...
Honestly I have no idea what the "kids these days" use as their ends for this same kind of stuff, java minecraft and discord, though I notice the kids that do care about computers seem to be getting steam accounts earlier and earlier which is wild to me.
Good old times. I used to run a BBS and Fido node before I moved over to the Internet. I was barely older then 15. My youngest point was just 11. Even though we were all pretty young, someone below 12 was a novelty for us as well. Last time I met him, he was doing SixXS admin work :-)
Oh wow. So some countries had free local calls, which boosted the local BBS culture. That's pretty cool, huh. I had no idea. In my home country there was no such thing, so BBS's tended to be owned by big companies.
Ha, that's awesome - I'm the same age as you, and started a BBS the same year. 486/66 with a 14400bps modem. Some of the Door games and things people uploaded were definitely not age appropriate in retrospect, but they didn't do me any harm. Even met my first girlfriend through the board. (Rather before meeting online was a thing!)
As many others I also got in trouble for racking a phone bill. The fix was using the white pages that had a section that showed your prefix and all the other prefixes that were in the same zone, which was considered a free local call.
Yeah that hit home to me as well. When I was 13, I remember downloading some kind of exe file that dialed out to some international number to some BBS in South America. It was just one time but that call ended being a several hundred dollar phone bill. I got my computer taken a way for several months after that. It was good lesson in computer security to not trust random files from the Internet.
Ran up the same massive phonebill (and same horrendous trouble), life changed for the better (with BBSs and then the web!) when the phone company started doing free evening calls to local numbers up to an hour long... Set the timer, disconnect, dial back in.
Still bizarre to think you were literally dialling a stranger's house, then you'd find a list of other numbers in some random text file on their BBS and just take a chance dialling those. The excitement of finding somewhere great!
I stuck with local BBSs and don't think I ever wound up with a big phone bill that way. I did one time rack up a large bill when Sierra came out with their "Sierra Network" dialup service. I don't remember if that was a non-local call thing or a pay by minute bill for the service, but whatever it was that only lasted a month.
It’s amazing to see that many of us on this thread share the same experience and passion for BBSs! I was a 13-year-old SysOp myself, running a heavily modified instance of WWIV (later transitioned to Renegade) on two dedicated lines that were hosted on an IBM 8088 my dad got from a liquidation sale. I was also part of a couple of ANSI art groups, and loved using TheDraw and ACiD Draw. We also made l33t animations in Assembler where the goal was to produce incredibly complex animations with the smallest possible file size (<10kb).
Does does anyone remember extenders that folks used to “extend their area code”? My dad’s company was nice enough to let me use it occasionally, but I remember that many were released and traded illegally by the phreaker community.
An extender is designed to be used for making phone calls without directly billing the caller. Most mid-size and large companies that operated from multiple cities/countries used them.
Extenders connect to a PBX that is normally exposed via a toll free number (1-800), or a local number that allows the user to dial out to long distance numbers without incurring long distance connection charges.
It’s basically how prepaid long distance cards work nowadays: You dial a number, enter a code, get a dial tone, then dial your long distance number to connect.
I grew up BBSing in Southern NH where you could not make a free call from Manchester to Nashua or Concord but it was a free call to towns in between those cities like Hooksett or Derry and a free call from those towns to adjoining cities.
One cheat we developed was a script that would make the BBS hang up, program the call forwarding, wait for a ring, then remove call forwarding. This way the caller could call a local BBS, choose a BBS in a distant city, hang up, dial again, then reach the second BBS.
It never really caught on for a few practical reasons, one was that somebody else could dial the first BBS when call forwarding was active and end up reaching the wrong BBS.
circa 1988 and we were both into serial programming. He wrote a program that would answer the phone on one line with a modem, let the caller pick a target BBS, then it would dial out on another modem to connect to the BBS. Unlike the other solution it tied up two phone lines on the relay for the whole length of the call but it never redirected people who weren't expecting to be redirected.
The times were so different back then. I recall back in 90, I saw someone post on another BBS they were testing out a new BBS. The phone exchange was the same as mine, so I called him up. Turns out he was in my class at high school, and we've remained best friend since.
I can't even recall how many how I spent making ANSI art for many local BBSs. The opening screens, menus for difference access levels, etc. This was a great way to get sysop access and increased download limits. Many BBSs I recall had upload / download ratios and didn't like leachers.
I ran a few toll-free bbs systems in the late 80s and early 90s. Started with AmiExpress and Paragon then ended up with Renegade, PCExpress, and Maximus. Cott Lang used to dialup and chat. I stopped running Renegade, Telegard, and Celerity/x when the backdoors became rampant.
> popular door games to my BBS, such as TradeWars 2002, Operation: Overkill II, Global War, and Food Fight.
IIRC "Global War" was a Risk clone. I really enjoyed it. I think I tried tradewars but my memory of that one's hazy.
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