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.
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 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.
The old internet died long before these centralized services appeared. The old internet was when we ran our own servers, built and hosted our own websites, and we were truly free in the wild wild west.
Its easier than ever to run your own servers, but today few do.
The old internet is dead (for now) and it looks more like the BBS era today. But we innovated past that then, and we will innovate past that now.
I am greatly looking forward to all of the decentralization work that is in progress from the numerous people on HN and the internet.
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.
Yep, the internet is an improvement and it changed the world. We are all better off for it.
I suppose the article brought me back to a different time. That original all text green-on-black, terminal-like, view really took me back to the BBS (Bulletin Board System) days. You might not remember but modems were a thing before the internet, I can remember my Dad tying up the house phone for hours while dialed into the mainframe at the office.
And the early days of the internet probably looked like a service like Prodigy for a lot of people. Prodigy was a fancy BBS. And everything had to work at dial-up speed. Even Berners-Lee's original pages would have been data-conserving and fast.
Its interesting that the user experience in those times felt, and probably was, faster. Our fancy modern graphics take a lot of resources in comparison. While its easy to point to numerous benefits to the modern internet, we've slipped in terms of time to display info on the screen. Modern web apps treat bandwidth and storage as infinite and free resources, its really the opposite of what we used to do and maybe not for the better.
I suppose that the key difference is that Berners-Lee's WWW used the benefit of an always-connected network. Where the BBS days were all about temporary network connections. While we use WWW and Internet almost interchangeably, its the always-connected network - the concept of packet switching over circuit switching - that brought the benefit of the WWW. I'm sure in 30 more years we'll have things I can't imagine today, its the power of the network.
The internet evolved, it wasn't just useful all at once (as in "a demonstration that struck me"). Early users struggled every day to grow its utility and find more uses, all the way from a glorified BBS to what it is today.
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.
I worked for an eary/mid-90s mom-n-pop ISP started out of a spare closet of another business. Every customer was sent two 1.44 MB 3.5" floppies (which I also had the pleasure of having to duplicate), with Netscape, Eudora, and Trumpet Winsock so they could dial-in.
Having had Internet access through an academic organization before that (and pre-WWW), I fundamentally think that the Internet would not have taken off before web browsers -- even Gopher sites were too unfriendly. We were able to just barely get people to install one floppy after the other, copy a few files, and type in their username and password. The idea of working with the other CLI-based protocol driven ways of accessing information would have simply been impossible for 99% of our users.
No OS at the time came with a dialer or browser out of the box, we had to supply them for every user.
Back in the day, I used to use BBSes via local dial-up. Everyone did, so you could expect BBSes were on the rise from so much usage. Meanwhilr, governments were stuck on ArpaNet and futzing around with some newfangled "TCP/IP" protocol. What good does government support even provide???
I regret the passing of an internet that was free to
use, give or take a connection. They did steal it.
That's when I fell in love with the potential of the www/internet and switched career paths.
But in hindsight that was never really going to last. When the guts of the public www (browsers, servers, data pipes, protocols, TCP/IP support in operating systems) were being built out in the 90s, it was all predicated on the belief that it was the future of commerce.
Without that explosion, "the free internet" probably would have just been a slightly evolved version of the dial-up BBS scene in the 1980s and 1990s. Which is cool, and honestly depending on my mood I might be willing to trade 2023's technology hellscape for that simpler time.
Even if it’s only 11 million, most of those users were not on the internet in 1994. They were on local BBSes, CompuServe, GEnie, The Source, and other online services. Do you remember that time? I do. I’ve started BBSing in the late 80’s and first got on the Internet in 1991. It was mostly academics, defense contractors, and early ISPs… which generally started as BBSes.
I don’t dispute the early internet could’ve supported many more users than BBSes. They simply weren’t there yet.
I think we lost something with demise of BBSs that the Internet was never able to replace. It's one of those things where one technology is better in almost every way, but something gets permanently lost in the transition. One analogy would be the upgrade from vinyl to CD/Digital music.
> 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.
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