Every BBS That Ever Was

Jason Scott writes: "With a collection of over 30,000 textfiles from the 1980's, I suddenly got a rather weird thought: Why not start taking all the BBSes mentioned in all the textfiles and create a really, really huge BBS list? A few weeks later, I'm up past 77,000 BBSes listed, with many including the Sysop's name, software used, and if you're lucky a relatively accurate timespan for the years that BBS graced the telephone network. I've imported FidoNet nodelists, WildCat! customer lists, and a whole range of other lists as I find them (USBBS List, Darwin List, etc.). Come by and remember what places sucked up all YOUR long distance calls and sleepless nights, trying to get past the busy signals. I'm also making an open call for everyone and anyone to send me old BBS lists to integrate. With luck, we can have some sort of permanent record of all the BBSes we ever knew."

I still have the code to the last BBS I wrote.

Back when I got my commodore 64 in the 80's the second big project I wrote was my own BBS. (The first was a disk editor.) I ended up writing three of them on the commodore (in basic, compiled with blitz.)

I learned C so I could modify a friend's copy of WWIV. That's also why I got my own PC. (And THERE was an early bazaar community if ever there was one, the WWIV .mod file community.)

The last BBS I wrote was in, a multinode fidonet compatable bbs written from scratch in c++ including my own fidonet message processing routines that were WAY more efficient than anything else I'd seen. A friend of mine ran a copy that's listed on there (xblat, under the 609 area code). Strangely, my own bbs (The Conversation Pit) is listed as "unknown". :)

I had xblat multitasking under desqview with no synchronization primitive except file locking. I had the capacity to do 9 nodes (8 FOSSIL driver ports plus one on the keyboard), plus the mail tosser running. Not that I had that many phone lines. :)

And the mail tosser processed 30 messages/second on a 386/33DX while updating a text mode display of what it was doing. And I eventually got it to where it would handle outgoing messages posted by a user on another node in the middle of digesting an incoming fido packet without ever having to look at the same message twice. All done without resorting to Turbo C's "huge" pointers, I might add. :)

Those were the days...

In 1995 I started porting it to 32 bit OS/2 code under EMX, but I had a day job and I'd found the internet anyway. (Strangely, my BBS work never impressed IBM. :) Kept meaning to write a BBS in java, but I wanted to make it internet based and I couldn't find a hosting service that would let me run actual daemons instead of just CGI on a web page. Eventually I moved on to other things...

Rob

It's a shame, but I think the BBS' time is over

The BBS period was a unique time in the progression from offline to online computing, and I don't think it is something that can be revisited. Remember commercial boards? There were boards that took $10, $20, even ones where you paid by the hour. I don't think the level of dedication to a BBS by a Sysop would be there any more, when anyone with an AOL account and a new iMac can go over to eGroups and set up what's more or less a BBS.

Whether it was the level of technical knowledge you needed to even connect to a board, geographical / area code barriers, or just the fact that nobody would DREAM of spamming a BBS, I think those days are over. I'm not saying the online community is dead, you just have to look harder. Isn't the Well still around? The Internet makes it so easy to reach the critical mass where you have to whore your site out to an ad network just to pay for hosting. Throw a million lamers shouting "a/s/l" into the mix, and the chance of a real community emerging is pretty low.

I do agree that there was an art to the BBS culture..

--

Exactly!

FIX [www.fix.no] was one of the first internet-based BBS's, and continues to do very good business. We have over 5000 registered users, with about 200 who are regular on a dialy basis (with hundreds or thousands more who swing by a couple of times each month).

We're currently developing some serious new software, as the BBBS software can't really handle what is thrown at it these days - FIX has performed some serious mods on the original BBBS code, but it's getting a bit flaky now.

Oh, and despite the "retro" look of the webpages, we finally decided it was time to update them :-)

But anyway, back to the point: Plenty of very good BBBS's live outside of the US. Hell, we even have regular US users at FIX!

Mong.

* ...Student, Artist, Techie - Geek *

Interview from 1980

Call me a karma whore, but I found the interview linked in from the About page to be absolutely fascinating:

http://www.jps.net/foxnhare/cbbs.html [jps.net]

It's from the April 1980 issue of "Kilobaud Microcomputing" (love that name), and the subjects of the interview are Ward Christensen and Randy Suess, the founders of the first BBS ever. Interesting musings on networking ("nationwide netting might become complicated and expensive"), early modems ("We are running the Potomac Micro-Magic and are really happy with it"), starting new BBSs ("you could easily do it for $2000"), etc. Check it out, and marvel how things have changed in the last 20 years...

Cheers,
-j.

only US

Just like Americans to not understand that there are other countries then their own. And all BBS aren't dead, there are some alive, i know since i use one regulary, albeit it's not really a BBS in the true sense since you don't call to it, you telnet.

Smiles

Man, that brought some smiles to my face! Now if we could only add notes on them to the list! It would make a great history

There was a BBS in MA called "Davey Jones' Locker" which I actually managed to get on a few times (difficult enough, especially as it was a long distance call. :) that, if I remember correctly, was seized because of all the illegal software it had.

Little histories like that would be great to see. To perhaps see postings from people with odd handles which you once bumped into every now and then!

Re:BBS never die (or at the last phone keeps ringi

I called one a few years back and I could hear a teeny tiny pissed-off voice coming out of my modem speaker (after the dial tone and ring) saying "Hello? (shit) The BBS is gone, man! Hang up! "

To add to the list...

(909) area code The Enchanted Forest and The Keep.

I miss Flash Attack, BTW...

Re:There used to be a couple of BBS's outside US t

Collecting the same kind of information for all the BBSes around the world sounds like a pretty big job. I don't think the guy can be blamed if he's not interested in taking it on.

Of course, in the spirit of the old BBSes, you could always do it yourself, since it is such an issue for you, rather than just bitching about it.

-

why stop there?

Why not resurrect the BBSes themselves? Seriously, look at some of the most popular websites out there. They're often community-based. There was a real art to virtual communities that has been lost since the internet was taken over by commercial interests.

I mean, pr0n sharing, ASCII art and muds aside (or maybe even with them), BBSes (BBSen?) often embodied the best of what the internet could be.

And considering how low-end these things often were, can you imagine how fast they'd be?

Just a thought. I guess even though I've become a bit of a karma whore over here, Internet browsing has just become a bit too much of a passive experience for me. I remember many of the BBSes I visited as having been a bit more engaging.

BBS never die (or at the last phone keeps ringing)

I remember that years ago I actually wrote a BBS package for the Apple II (CP/M) - it even had a FidoNet module so it could do email and echos.

Well after a few years I didn't want to do this and stopped, then I tried to use my phone line as a regular line again.

But for YEARS (at least 3) afterwards that line would still ring on weekends with people trying to connect... Even after I had tracked down every BBS list in Hong Kong and got my number removed.

R.

Re:Wow this post brings back memories.. (NirvanaNe

Really! Both of my BBS's were listed on there... Even though one only lasted a little over a year, and the other only a few months.

Back in 1993-4, before my area got Internet, BBS's WERE the net... I set up on FidoNet, allowed access to hundreds of Echos (the precursor to Usenet) and even had a way for users to send Internet E-mail (via the FidoNet-Internet gateway)... basically you could do much of what you can on the Internet today, it was just much slower.

There definately are some that are missing, looks like they used old FidoNet nodelists to get their information.

My old address was 1:2260/140 :) haven't typed that number in years.

Re:Oh, jeez...

I work for the MIS department of an insurance company. The few years I've been working here, I've become highly irritated and acutely aware of the AGONY of dealing with and servicing obsolete crap technology. Having to keep a small fleet of 486 systems going (for some reason?) has given me a particular bias on this issue. As far as I'm concerned, any hardware or software more than 3yrs old should be thrown away....no, OBLITERATED. permanently...to save everyones sanity, and prevent good money being spent preserving old junk.

I dunno about everyone else here, but I've never had any problems keeping older systems running. I believe the phrase to keep in mind is, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." Perhaps it's your skills that are lacking rather than the old hardware? Being on the "bleeding edge" has it's problems.

You seem to be obsessed with the notion that "newer is better." That's not necessarily the case. In my home environment I have been far happier with my system running Windows 98 than I am now that I upgraded to Windows 2000 Pro. I've looked at the Windows XP beta, and I like that even less. Programmed obsolesence is not a good thing. Everybody likes to throw shiny new features at us that we probably don't even need. Don't get me wrong, progress is a good thing, but it's incredibly short-sighted of you to believe that everything that isn't the "latest and greatest" is junk.

BBSes died out because they SUCKED. The internet came along and swept the BBS scene (and rightly so) overnight -- it thoroughly kicked its ass to death.

That's not really true. BBS's died out because the Internet came along and was the next big thing. Though the Internet can't be centrally controlled, access to it was generally controlled by several large service providers in the beginning. It was packaged and mass-marketed to the world and the world bought into it. You can't market an individual BBS to 100 million people like you could Compuserve or AOL or Netcom. ISP's became like a utility company and BBS's were like the corner pub or coffee shop.

Now, I'm not saying that BBSs are better than the Internet, because that's a subjective judgement. But there are some areas where BBSs excelled and the Internet does not. Like forming a community of users who are not tied together by any special common interest, but only because they enjoy the company.

As far as you personally, it's truly sad that you have so little respect for the past. You might actually be able to learn something from it.

There used to be a couple of BBS's outside US too

or i must have logging onto some fake system for all those years :-)

Re:Oh, jeez...

If you "missed out" on BBSes, dont sweat it -- you didnt miss anything good. What we've got now is *WAAAAAAY* better...so much better it's not even funny. And that's the truth. Wow, as a former Sysop of a BBS in the S. California region (1983-1994), I really resent this comment. Obviously this person was a) too young to remember the days of BBSs, or b) was digging trenches back in the late 80's. I, too, was very young when I started my RCP/M (13 yrs), but I must say that running that BBS helped me technically more than just about anything I ever did. You see, a 386 or 486 is not old. Try working on an Z80-based S100 bus system with 64k (yes, that KILOBYTES) of memory. Try hacking CP/M to remove dangerous commands from the user interface (like DEL and REN) so people couldn't hack your system. Try getting something as complex as ZCPR3 working on that beast, when you've got only 4-8k of memory to work with. Assembly language was all you had! C++ (or even C for that matter)? Forget it. I was writing 8080 and Z80 assembly back in 1984. Running a BBS or RCP/M back in those days too dedication and a lot of discipline. Those are the things that I learned during my late teenage years and early into my 20s. And yes, those things have helped me tremendously in my career even today at the ripe old age of 31. So to sum it up, you are an idiot... go mess with your plug-and-play Windows system so you can feel like a bigshot. The rest of us will enjoy looking back on a time when us "computer geeks" *really* had some experience under our hats.