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.
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 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.
But it's possible they did not get online until much later.
My dad did get us dial-up internet in 1995, but he was a uni professor doing stuff with computers for a long while (we've had a Novell Netware network at home in 1993).
But basically nobody I knew was getting online too, and BBSes were still a thing for older beards.
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.
There were BBSs earlier and if you were lucky you worked for a company or university with access but commercial internet access and usage was restricted before the early 90s. So comparing VC to before that point isn't accurate it also doesn't take into account how the internet itself has accelerated the distribution of ideas and tech dramatically.
I think you are vastly overestimating the number of university users that actually used the Internet in those early days. For example, just because a school "had access" did not mean all their students actually used it. Around here, even as late as 1993, at a state school, you had to sign up for a CS class to even get an email address.
I stand by my statement that the total number of BBS users (including online services, like CompuServe, Prodigy, GEnie, pre-Internet AOL, etc.) out numbered the users on the early Internet in 1990.
To be fair the Internet that we know today only really became a consumer service in the 90's. Whilst its origins are before then, it was used by groups which we would class as researchers and early adopters.
I'm in Chicago. I had a BBS in the late 1980s, Compuserve before then, and access through a shared university account in the early 1990s. I did not have access that I could simply write a check for to consistently get access to, say, IRC and Usenet, until MCS started in ~1993.
Obviously people were on the Internet before 1993, but I chose the term "consumer Internet" specifically to avoid this debate. I think it's clear that the Internet wasn't on Group W Cable's mind in 1983.
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.
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.
Maybe to you, but 30 years ago I was already using the internet. BBSes were common in tech circles as well. We didn't have google, but there were search engines to look for files that you could then FTP. AOL was already nearing their peak, them and competitors were in many ways trying to be what the internet became. 30 years ago my dad was already calling in to work from home (2400 baud was not as good as being in the office, but when a customer has a problem at 3am that was the fastest way to fix the problem). 30 years ago people would get the details wrong, but they had already imagined today's world even if they couldn't actually take part in one of the forerunners to it.
Yea, I'm afraid that's not so. In 1993, I was running a WildCat BBS and I was way more hyped about that and it's RIP graphics, lol. The only way I could get on the internet at all was through other peoples university accounts, which required dial-up, Trumpet Winsock, and PPP. It was a chore to get running and was very slow on the 14.4k (and slower) modems of the day. 56k modems weren't introduced until the late 90s. So yea, between 90 and 95 other technologies seemed more appealing like BBSs, Gopher and places like "The Well", at least to me.
AOL, CompuServe, Prodigy, etc had isolated content and communities.
The internet at large (web, gopher, http, ftp, email, etc) existed and was available at universities and through regional ISP's and a smattering of local BBS's but for a very long time there was very little shared traffic between this common "internet" of services and those proprietary services.
The propriety services were delivering convenience, curation, cohesion, and features that the internet-at-large hadn't matured enough to deliver. Consumers liked that.
That's the "dark" time the author, and myself, generally see us trending back towards.
Yes, much more. The internet didn’t go mainstream until the mid-90’s. According to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulletin_board_system there “were 60,000 BBSes serving 17 million users in the United States alone in 1994.”
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.
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.
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