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Revisiting the wonder and betrayal of online life circa 1992:
I suppose that some of you, like me, will remember the very early days when logging in to a BBS was the only way to connect to other people on the internet. But how many of you actually ran a BBS? Here is one such story:
Thirty years ago last week—on November 25, 1992—my BBS came online for the first time. I was only 11 years old, working from my dad's Tandy 1800HD laptop and a 2400 baud modem. The Cave BBS soon grew into a bustling 24-hour system with over 1,000 users. After a seven-year pause between 1998 and 2005, I've been running it again ever since. Here's the story of how it started and the challenges I faced along the way.
In January 1992, my dad brought home a gateway to a parallel world: a small black plexiglass box labeled "ZOOM" that hooked to a PC's serial port. This modem granted the power to connect to other computers and share data over the dial-up telephone network.
While commercial online services like CompuServe and Prodigy existed then, many hobbyists ran their own miniature online services called bulletin board systems, or BBSes for short. The Internet existed, but it was not yet widely known outside academic circles.
Whereas the Internet is a huge connected web of systems with billions of users, most BBSes were small hobbyist fiefdoms with a single phone line, and only one person could call in and use it at a time. Although BBS-to-BBS message networks were common, each system still felt like its own island culture with a tin-pot dictator (the system operator—or "sysop" for short) who lorded over anyone who visited.
Not long after my dad brought home the modem, he handed off a photocopied list that included hundreds of BBS numbers from our 919 area code in North Carolina. Back then, the phone company charged significantly for long-distance calls (which could also sneakily include parts of your area code), so we'd be sticking to BBSes in our region. This made BBSes a mostly local phenomenon around the US.
With modem in hand, my older brother—about five years older than me—embraced calling BBSes first (we called it "BBSing"). He filled up his Procomm Plus dialing directory with local favorite BBSes such as The Octopus's Garden, The Body Shop, and Chalkboard. Each system gained its own flavor from its sysop, who decorated it with ANSI graphics or special menus and also acted as an emcee and moderator for the board's conversations.
I have a distinct memory of the first time I realized what a BBS was. One day while I looked over my brother's shoulder, he showed me the file section of one of those BBSes—a list of available files that you could download to your local computer. Pages of free-to-download shareware games scrolled by. My eyes widened, and something clicked.
"You can download games for free?" I remember thinking. I noticed one file labeled "RAMPAGE.ZIP" that was one hundred kilobytes—or "100K," as listed. Thinking of Rampage on the NES, which was one of my favorite games at the time, I asked my brother to download it. He declined because 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.
Online time was precious back then. Since most BBSes only had one phone line, you didn't want to hog the line for too long or the sysop might boot you. 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. But whatever the risks, the thrill of remote projection by computer sunk into me that day and never left.
Follow the link for the full story - and he is still active today but not on a BBS....
(Score: 4, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Sunday December 04 2022, @08:21PM (8 children)
I started using BBSs in late 1983, first @300 baud, not too long after at 1200. By summer of 1984 I was running one using a downloaded program, and by 1985 I had significantly improved the performance of that program up to where the 1200 baud modem was the bottleneck. Remember: these things ran on 2MHz 6502s and used 88kb 5 1/4" floppies for "mass storage.". I sold (and supported) a copy of my improved BBS software for something like $20.
Around 1985-6 I became aware of Fidonet which wasn't limited by free local calling / long distance charges - with positive and negative impacts on the BBS communities that accessed Fidonet. I finally got fed up with running my own BBS, people never did learn to respect operating hours to share the line for voice use, and shortly thereafter I faded from the scene altogether.
I'm surprised to read about anyone getting started with a 2400 baud BBS as late as 1992. I suppose the "supermodems" (38.4kBaud) didn't really start until Mozilla became popular, I do remember that PCs stuck with the single byte buffer RS-232 chips until those modems made them an undeniable bottleneck and the new standard became an emulated 16550? with a 16 byte FIFO buffer.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Monday December 05 2022, @03:18AM
Wow, that is some serious old-timing!
My first modem was a 2400 baud... got it for my 286, in 1993, at one of DAK's fire sales, for the whopping sum of five dollars. Oh, the many BBSs that modem called...
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday December 05 2022, @03:27AM (3 children)
For $40 I used a VT 100 clone, 2400 baud modem, and cable - the last being half the cost of the setup - to complete my masters thesis. When you're on a shoestring budget with really cheap shoestring back then, this sort of thing worked surprisingly well.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday December 05 2022, @12:53PM (2 children)
I transitioned from university to industry in 1991, neither operated on a shoestring as far as PCs went.
My personal computer was an Atari 800 until ~1988, then an Atari ST 16 bit which was mostly used as a dumb terminal into the University systems, usually in VT100 emulation mode.
Because school / work has all these PCs that cost 2+ months of my salary, I didn't buy a home PC until maybe later 1992, a 486 because they were quite a bit more affordable than the 386s.
As I recall my masters thesis was 70 pages in Word Perfect 5.1 it didn't do integrated images so I left gaps in the text and literally cut and pasted the images printed from other software into the gaps then photocopies the mixed text+image pages for the final document. It and the WP5.1 software traveled from one PC to the next on floppy disk, I forget if we were still carrying the OS around on floppies too, I think by 1989 most of the PCs had the OS on a hard drive.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday December 05 2022, @10:36PM (1 child)
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday December 05 2022, @11:27PM
I had a prof who wrote his own filter circuits textbooks in Latex - lots and LOTS of fancy formulae formatted inline.
One day the Vax his text was being written on gave a little hiccup of a storage error, but then kept going. Prof came through the lab and I mentioned that he might want to backup as the spinning mechanical drives sometimes warn of impending doom like this. Being a proper arrogant prick, not one to take advice from some kid barely 1/3 his age he spouted some nonsense about how a backup was unnecessary.... I believe it was 12 hours later that the drive with his Latex file on it went down with over 6 months work in it, all they had was the paper output....
I don't know why he turned so purple in the face when he found out, it was his grad students who would be re-coding the Latex from paper....
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by stormreaver on Monday December 05 2022, @03:32PM (1 child)
I was a teenager in Hawaii when I first started using the precursor to BBS's in 1985. One of my first experiences was dialing into the University of Hawaii's* public timesharing system, chatting with other people, and playing games like Star Trek. It wasn't a BBS, as messages couldn't be posted and read**. But it was the first real-time chat system I ever used. I discovered real BBS's around that time, and spent a LOT of time on them. I was always sure to stay within the local calling distance, as I didn't want my parents to be mad at me. I didn't have the financial resources to host my own for several more years.
I was happy to have been in the middle of my degree program when the Internet started making BBS's obsolete.
* It might have had a different name, but University of Hawaii is how I remember it.
** If the capability existed, I didn't have access to it.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday December 05 2022, @03:58PM
The BBSs I used in 1984 were storing their messages on floppy disks (quite limited space, even when streaming text at 120 characters per second), and they tended to have many layers of access - some open, some advertised as limited access apply here to join, and some invisible unless you knew who to ask to upgrade your account.
It it was University of Hawaii hosted (and not just some guy at UH running his own thing) it may not have had any message storage or secret rooms, but most BBSs I interacted with around that time had some number of "secret rooms" in them.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Monday December 05 2022, @04:54PM
My internet experience at home started in the late 90s to early 2000s. Until I got fed-up with my parents' dial-up and paid for a point-to-point wireless setup as well as the monthly fee. They took over the payments when I moved out. They just recently were able to get wired internet. Some utility company was laying fiber along with electric and they were able to get that. They signed-up for pretty much the lowest plan, but it works nice. It's not like they live out in the boonies either, they're just barely outside the city limits.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"