Ask HN: What was it like to use BBS?

Something people don't remember is that long distance calling was not free, you couldn't call other area codes or states in the US without paying a per minute fee. It was more on-par to international calling today then with mobile phone calls. Oh, and busy lines were not uncommon, you'd spend hours trying to dial into a system to get a file or post on a forum etc.

I would say it is less like social media today and more like forums. So less Facebook/Twitter and more reddit style. Though BBS' were also less filtered and far less big brother IMO. Of course some site admins would be militant about their feelings and only allow certain view points but that was fine because there were tons of other BBS' to play on.

The industry was fairly big and growing fast, one of the larger us BBS systems was execpc, you can find stuff on them still. They started as a small BBS that turned into a fairly large internet provider eventually. But there were tons of players, and there were systems like Tag BBS etc. I both hosted a BBS for a number of years and was a user of tons of them.

Another key thing people don't think about today, disk space was at a premium (especially for personal computers). We used floppy disks for moving files a lot and hard drives were expensive so getting 10Mb or 40Mb drives was awesome. Putting in 3-4 hard drives to get yourself over 100Mb was crazy. Drive technology was still evolving so lots of different types with pros/cons and most were loud, pretty large and obnoxious.

A lot of the search & compression technology we created during the BBS days is still in use, though in different ways now. Compression being pretty critical since for most long distance sites you paid per minute and downloading a 1Mb file over 9600baud was slow. Man I remember going from 1200-2400-9600-19200 then 38400 and 115200. You felt like a damn rock star when your file downloads didn't take 6-8 hours and could be done in like an hour or so.

It was definitely a lot of community and sharing. There were trolls then just like now, but generally I feel like back then they were less damaging or hurtful and more entertaining. Of course, there were scams on most forums just like now, but good BBS sites did their best to keep them at bay.

A few years later I setup my own bbs running Color64 bbs software (upgraded hardware to a 2400 baud hayes modem and 20meg hard drive to facilitate file exchanges).

The experience was nothing like social networks today. Some BBSs had multiple phone lines and supported concurrent users which gave you the ability to chat someone on a limited basis with whoever else was signed in but it was, for me, more file sharing than community focused.

The feeling of creating a space for people to come and enjoy I think is thoroughly missing from todays social media.

Some sites has upload/download ratios - you could only download so much many files without uploading files, forcing an exchange rate.

There was a selection of download protocols you'd choose from, based on what your client support and the BBS supported: "KERMIT", "XMODEM", "YMODEM", "ZMODEM", and "JMODEM"

The better protocols supported batch, multi-file, compression, and resuming interrupted downloads - very important for when your session was interrupted by someone else in the house picking up the phone and trying to dial.

We had a second phone line installed for the modem; I learned how telephone wiring worked and re-wired the our phone outlets to use the correct lines.

Checking out what files other people had uploaded or what comments they had made was fun, and you could sort of have a real-time chat with the sysop when they were online. Downloading stuff took ages, sometimes overnight.

Warez was a big part of it, but so was all sorts of text files for making various stuff, tracker music, demos etc. It was a real DIY culture and a lot of fun.

If someone else in your household picked up the phone to make a call when you were online, the connection dropped (the modem used the main phone line). That was the worst! Luckily you could continue downloading where you left off usually after reconnecting. Many BBSs had leech ratios - you needed to upload stuff as well.

This was late 80s/early 90s… Beyond the PC and modem cost you’d pay for local calls, which was pretty expensive for a bunch of 12 year olds. International calls were out of the question

Once you are 14 years old and your favorite games are THE PIT and TRADE WARS! on the nearest BBS which is in (408) and you live in (916) - and your parents pay the long distance bill... and you liked to smoke pot and play TRADE WARS and accidentally sell when you should have bought thus fucking up the galactic market-corner you had on wheat...

But then your dad gets a $926 phone bill because you were on the fucking modem all day and then you get grounded for a month....

Yeah - thats what BBS'ing was like...

Then I setup the first CAD network with GeneriCAD and a bunch of Everex machines and then installed a BBS on our School EVEREX STep Cube server... and served warez out of Northlake Tahoe's first ever connection to the online world...

Yeah that was fun.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_terminal#Dumb_termina...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acoustic_coupler

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_Line_Internet_Protocol

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doors_(computing)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBS_door

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whiz_Kids_(TV_series)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phreaking

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phreaking_box

The main costs were a computer ($2000-ish, $3700 in 2021 dollars), and a decent modem ($200-ish, again, $370-ish in 2021 dollars), which wouldn't stay decent for long. In the around 4 years I was doing BBSes, I spent something like the equivalent of $700 2021 dollars on modems alone. (I supported all of this with my juvenile lawn mowing business, where I mowed several of the neighbors lawns.) After a few months of serious BBSing (and before I started hosting my own), I convinced my parents to let me get my own phone line, which was around $15/month, which I also paid for.

Compared to being online today, virtually everyone was local. I wasn't aware of anyone else on the boards being from significantly out of town.

Comparing it to today's internet doesn't really seem possible. There are some structural similarities, but the scale is so radically different that the comparisons break down. It'd be like trying to describe the social lives of someone in a town of 200 in terms of the social dynamics of New York City. Except that that's still off by several orders of magnitude.

A lot of these boards had a few dozen regular users. That was it. In larger cities some had hundreds or thousands, but really you'd recognize the handles of all regular users.

There were also meetups in town, which I only went to once since I felt kind of out of place for being a young teen. Most of the folks were either university students or adults, almost all men, and it kind of blew my cover to be a 14-year-old sysop.

Some boards used a lot of inter-board forums (FIDOnet), but most of the ones I was on didn't. There it was funny because usually they'd all exchange messages in the middle of the night through a network of long-distance calls. But because of that, messages weren't real-time -- they usually took a day to arrive. My board was a FIDOnet node, but almost nobody used it on my board (including me).

But also, a lot of the content wasn't about chatting or forums. A lot of it was multiplayer games. Honestly, that's mainly what I did. Legend of the Red Dragon was the big game in those days. A lot of it was also about software... for better or worse, almost every board had a "FaF" (friends and family) section where the cracked stuff was, and if you were friends with the sysop, you'd have access to it. That was how I got access to some of the first compilers I'd ever used (which in those days were pretty expensive -- usually several hundred dollars).

The tech ... very little of it seems to have made it over to the web. God, we had vector graphics (RIPscript) already in those days. In comparison, early HTML and Gopher felt pretty backward. They just had access to a lot more info.

Getting access required knowing the phone numbers, protocols and software required to access the BBS and was mostly through word of mouth. Generally if you could get access you must have some connection to existing users and so you were in. Most had time limits so that you couldn’t tie up the line all day.

Some communities that has special access to computers or telecom gear tended to be larger. ISCABBS, for example, was a fairly large BBS because of the access to TTY terminals and donated computing power (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISCABBS)

For BBS system operator (sysop), he typically bought a high-end modem like US Robotics for $500 to $1000. A dedicated computer with expensive harddrives. Some paid for commercial BBS software such as PCBoard. There were monthly costs for dedicated phone landlines.

For most users, they just bought a modem and re-used their existing voice landline.

>How similar was it to current social media networks

In terms of participation, the dial-up BBS scene seems somewhat analagous to today's Mastodon instances that are run by altruistic admins who foot the costs themselves. BBSs typically had 1 or 2 phone lines which means only 1 or 2 people could be "logged in" at a time. Some BBS had discussion forums but unlike Mastodon, each bulletin board run by a homeowner was very local/regional because extra charges for long-distance phone calls was still a thing. So 99% of the regular users of a particular BBS would be in the same area code.

There were some commercial BBSs with multiple phone lines that had paid memberships. The attraction there was larger harddrives with more things to download (shareware, etc).

>How big the industry around it actually become

The BBS community was very small because it was mostly computer enthusiasts. A very niche communications platform like CB radio for truckers or ham radio. The dialup modem service that attracted more non-computer folks was AOL.

Soon after that happened, we signed up for a traditional ISP with unlimited hours.

Typically the ratio was around 4:1 downloads vs. uploads. In other words, to download 4 megabytes, you were required to first upload a megabyte.

Since disk space was expensive, sysops on high-quality boards kept a close eye on uploads and verified them. If you uploaded junk, you'd probably get banned.

Where does a 13-year-old go find something to upload? There were a few older kids in my school who were connected to the "scene". I would sometimes try begging them with a floppy disk in hand. I don't recall it working often.

Upload ratios motivated me to create something of my own that would be decent enough to upload and not get me banned. That strategy didn't pay immediate dividends either, but it set me on a career path that has been mostly fulfilling and interesting.

I was about 15, in 1993, when I managed to convince my parents to buy me a modem. I used to use it out of hours when phone calls were cheaper. Nevertheless, I think I managed to rack up a £200 phone bill in the first month or so.

Eventually I started running my own BBS, which would only become available at 8pm and come offline at 8am. If I remember correctly, I called it "The Graveyard". I had a steady stream of callers on the single line that it shared with the home phone. I would often chat to them via "Sysop Chat" whilst simultaneously talking to friends nearby over CB radio.

When I wasn't doing that, I was calling into all sorts of odd places - hacker boards (one of which I was thrown off for asking if there was a non-colour version, "l4mer", me on my Commodore PC20-III) - some cyberpunk boards (including the CyberCafe in London), and "Ooh!", on which I remember being repeatedly propositioned on various insalubrious chat groups, when I wasn't reading posts about Babylon 5 on Fidonet. On another I learned about raves happening vaguely nearby.

The whole thing was a wonderful, glorious chaotic mess. It felt like exploring a mysterious universe which was growing and mutating every day, full of infinite possibilities, and of course it was much better than what we have these days.

It was a tighter knit community: you got to know people locally, people you never would've met otherwise. That is something I really miss from the old BBS days: the local community aspect.

Most of the barrier to entry was finding the boards in the first place. They weren't directly connected to each other, there was no search engine you could ask for phone numbers of every BBS. Generally, the good BBS's that were "advertised" in ZIP file archives or whatever were invite-only, and the rest of the advertised boards weren't worth spending time on; the sweet spot were the good boards that didn't do a lot of outreach, where you could reasonably expect to apply and get in.

Expenses were low, even (or maybe especially) to run a board; a modem and an extra phone line.

The first thing you'd notice coming back to boards after using things like Reddit and HN would be the busy signals; you'd spend a lot of time telling your terminal program to poll a BBS phone number waiting for your chance to get in (obviously this was made worse by the fact that those lines were usually tied up with someone downloading some huge series of files).

Most BBSs had only one or two phone lines. You'd live-chat people, but the most typical way that'd happen would be you talking to the sysop; they were mostly 1:1 conversations. For someone getting into the "hacking" scene at the time, the huge amazing win of finding an Internet connection (usually through university dialup, less commonly through X.25; dial-up ISPs were not yet common) was that IRC was a group chat.

BBS's that specialized in file downloads had upload/download ratios, and there was a weird cat-and-mouse of people uploading garbage files to fix their ratios.

Some BBS's were linked with a protocol called FidoNet (there was also a FidoNet net called FidoNet). FidoNet was a little like NNTP and replicated message board posts across multiple BBSs. The win with FidoNet was that you could dial a local BBS and talk to people around the country, because the BBS's were taking on the long-distance call burden. I remember the big deal about getting FidoNet connections was that the software to do it was a nightmare (since these are all modem connections, each attempt with a configuration took a couple minutes, and required participation from the other end of the connection --- or, more typically, the other end would be automated, would try your board a couple times, and then give up for the day).

I'd say the experience of posting on BBS message boards was pretty similar to that of posting on Usenet or on a subreddit, just usually with a more close-knit community of people. The BBS's in my town would throw parties. Several BBS operators went on to start dial-up ISPs.

I was lucky enough to be a middle schooler when BMUG [2] was going strong. And even attended a few of the Thursday night meet ups they had. I remember one person talking about "encryption" for the first time for me. And how they were thinking about maybe one day computers would need to find more "entropy." E.g., use the random variations in the hardware to seed/salt communication. That was a 'hmm, interesting' experience for me that drew me more towards technology.

I also remember getting access to BBSes via friends of friends that specialized in 'software'. And having handles / trying to come up with badass handles. And other mischievous things.

But it was fun - and with Macintosh software - freeware, shareware, etc., I variously remember different BMUG catalogs - with CDs full of shareware in the backs of paperback books per year or per season, etc. Funny how things have changed and yet the most advanced stuff that was going on then is more or less what's just normal now (higher quality videos, bandwidth, etc.). People have been chatting and posting online for a minute.

UPDATE. These icons are a throwback: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FirstClass#/media/File:FirstCl...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FirstClass

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_Macintosh_Users_Group

Some of these hobbyist systems were underground "HPAVC" boards, focusing on pirated software and viruses and the like, usually invite-only, and everyone using pseudonyms. Others were clean systems, sometimes requiring real names, usually an adult SysOp. Most hobby systems were somewhere in between the two, at least in my area.

But there were also larger systems with 10-50+ phone lines, running more expensive software (usually MajorBBS/Worldgroup, costing several thousand dollars). These were usually pay-to-use. Sometimes membership also included dial-up internet access; as the BBS scene waned, some of these transitioned to become regional ISPs.

Most boards had local message subs, meaning different discussion topic areas you could post in. Some boards also participated in message networks, such as FidoNet, where you could converse with people across the country or globe -- it just took a day or more for your message to reach all BBSes in the network.

It wasn't a utopia. There were still trolls and ignorant people. I suppose the difference in the dial-up days was that those trolls tended to live in the same region as you, which arguably isn't an improvement.

At its peak, in relative terms there was definitely a bit of a real industry built up around the BBS scene: a few small to medium sized companies, several hundred independent developers of BBS software and games, publications such as BoardWatch, industry conferences such as ONE BBS CON, etc. Compared to the modern software industry, it was absolutely tiny; but the software and computing landscape as a whole was much smaller then.

I started using dial-up BBSes in 1993 (Philly area), and later developed a couple BBS games from 1999-2003 -- by which point most boards had moved to telnet, allowing them to have many concurrent users instead of being limited to physical phone lines. My games took advantage of this by being highly multi-player, and one of those games became relatively popular for that time period, running on several hundred boards at its peak. Developing BBS games was an interesting experience, definitely a mix of positive and negative though.