The larger BBSes around here eventually turned into ISPs. Others added Usenet and email. There was definitely some overlap in the mid to late 90's, but in general, you are correct: BBSes either went over to the Internet, or disappeared.
Agreed. A lot of BBSs both thrived and ruined themselves over having pay tiers. Sometimes it was pay for "premium" content which was usually warez, porn, etc. Then there was a period of charging for access to parts of the Internet (gateways), like email or usenet messages through your BBS.Other BBSs simply asked for donations and got quite a bit because people were passionate.
Ugh, modem incompatibility was an awful thing. The modem manufacturers often got greedy or out right lied about supporting standards correctly. It really was a case of needing to pay for quality. The worst period I remember was toward the end of the era with "Win modems" tied to windows. They'd pop these pieces of junk inside Dell, Packard Bell, eMachines, Compaq, and other consumer junk.
You're absolutely right about tiered access. I will say that torrent sites, especially private ones do have some levels of tiered access. As do some web forums in terms of moderation privileges. That's about the closest you get, but it's no where near as nuanced, draconian, or as powerful. The class-based access did have positive effects like you hint it such as discouraging lurking, creating exclusivity, encouraging uploads, discouraging bad actors. I kind of laughed at the web when years back they tried to do some version of that via game-ification and in most cases it ended badly excluding the obvious notables.
That's true but the BBSes were available to anyone with the money for a computer, modem and the phone bill. Usenet and the internet was reserved for the chosen few.
So in that sense BBSes would predate Usenet for most people.
The everyday consumer did not have access to the Internet until the 90's when it was commercialized. True, it "existed" before that, it was primarily education / academia and defense-related orgs that had access.
BBSes were primarily text based... early Internet providers opened up access to Usenet newsgroups, email, IRC, etc. which made traditional BBSes look like a toy in comparison. The web put the nail in the coffin, but they were already on their way out before then.
While I strongly sympathize with anyone sitting at #6 or #7 who views a move to any previous step as a huge regression, I can't sympathize with denying people any kind of connectivity unless they can snap their fingers and manifest the infrastructure to enable #5. All of those previous steps served a purpose at the time.
Developing economies have an opportunity to learn from our mistakes as first mover, and leapfrog ahead to something more robust against all these threats we're facing today (centralization, stratification, eavesdropping, denial of service, walled gardens...).
BBSes were an artifact of the old phone infrastructure, so that's not a necessary phase, but otherwise the story would look roughly the same: Local communities gradually connect peer-to-peer and then interconnect. This time wirelessly, securely, without entrenched middlemen.
I was going to say this as well. Even pre internet my first inclination from dialing BBS was how do I make one of these? How can I get a dedicated phone line in my bedroom? From there, chatting with people who called my board, then moving to IRC which was all UGC. Bots, scripts, file hosts etc. distributed servers.
I think my take away is more that these large “visions” of what the internet could be were made by outsiders from an outside vantage point. They had difference answers to the question of what the internet could be. The insiders were too busy playing around on it to think about answering that question.
Yes, but it was fairly short lived. What will be interesting to see is if the internet ebbs and tides between the open (early internet like usenet and bbs, and more or less current form of the internet), and closed (AOL, and possibly now facebook) or if this is a more permanent switch back to a comfort zone for people online.
> claims that was the state of the art in the middle 1990's
The blog does not claim this, full stop. The author says "before anyone I knew had an Internet connection", describing a personal experience, presumably during his childhood or teenage years ("I just had it open during the night, so that my parents could use the phone line during the day").
Why attack the author's personal experience and anecdotes?
fwiw, my own experience mirrors the author's exactly. In my area (Philly) there were around two hundred single-line hobbyist boards in the mid 90s, meaning ~1993-1997. It was not a "fading retro thing" quite yet, and as a teenager I didn't personally know any frequent internet users until at least 1996.
For historical context, Yahoo wasn't incorporated until 1995. Internet Explorer v1 was released in mid-1995 and wasn't even initially bundled with Windows 95. Widespread home internet adoption took a couple years, and (at least in my area) dial-up hobbyist BBS's only started to dwindle in the late 90s, while the commercial ones (many-line majorbbs/worldgroup systems) transitioned to become dial-up ISPs.
For another data point, I developed a couple BBS doorgames from 1999-2003. The BBS scene was definitely dying off at that point, but nonetheless I still sold several hundred registrations for my games during that period.
There were private FTP and IRC bots, DC++, etc. Private Minecraft and other game servers are still pretty common.
> Internet still has not achieved that kind of decentralized p2p in the mainstream.
BBSes were never mainstream. Personal computing in the 80s and early 90s was not mainstream. This is the insurmountable problem in trying to recapture that experience.
Although the internet was many years ahead of the BBS scene and Fidonet in the sophistication of its technology and its online culture, the BBS scene and Fidonet would have by now become a global network integrated into commerce, government and other aspects of daily life if the internet had not gotten there first. Or the technology behind France's Minitel would have been adopted globally and gotten there. Or something like that.
The early Internet was less crowded and less commercialized. There were often local communities, organized around local BBSes and ISPs. That is what I miss.
I certainly don't miss Netscape crashing every 10 minutes, and waiting for downloads over my 33.6k modem.
Late 90s/early 2000s when there were tons of smaller isps offering a variety of solutions. This was back when operating a CLEC was a viable option before the incumbents found a way to fix that issue.
“Late 1990s” is a bit of a stretch. Dialup ISPs were widespread by the mid-1990s, and there was broad enough demand that third parties shipped TCP/IP stacks on Windows 3.1 before Windows 95 built one in.
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