An old photo of a large BBS (2022) (rachelbythebay.com)

Would these machines have been networked with CAT-3? Daisy chained phone cords?

I am surprised by the assumption that each box could only handle one modem. I seem to remember that some DOS BBS packages could handle multiple modems/users concurrently and only needed multitasking operating systems for “door” programs. Am I misremembering?

And the follow-up article: https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2022/01/27/scale/

The real question is: Was the turbo button pressed?

Higher resolution photo https://web.archive.org/web/20230531042903im_/https://static...

I can recall people being very impressed at unix systems being able to handle many clients, and being personally confused at the idea of a computer only being able to handle a single user.

Looks like the shelves were custom-built for those machines. I wonder what the monitors were hooked up to, or if they were just spares.

My first thought was that this was built someone who clearly cared about the system they were running.

I remember thinking that I would reach absolute peak-coolkid if I could start and run a BBS. I even installed WWIV and DesqView to fuel the fantasy and prepare. But my parents didn't understand technology and couldn't grasp why I wanted to hook up (and pay for) a second phone line for the house. So, unfortunately I would remain a mere luser until I went off to University where the Internet was just getting popular and 10-Base-T ethernet drops to the dorm rooms were standard, and I very quickly forgot all about BBSing.

By the early 90s didn’t most BBS software support multi-line setups on a single pc?

The OS that was running on these is irrelevant, the important part is the BBS software.

And these usually ran quite a few lines per box, sometimes they would use external racks of modems, but I'm not seeing that here so maybe these were using internal modem cards, so maybe 6 per box, but if they were using external modems it could easily be 12 or more, with the PC cards hosting multiple serial ports, 4, 6 or even 8 per card.

Typically a card would have a single large connector at the back and then a pigtail with a DB9 or DB25 (yes, I know) for every modem.

Office chair technology also has really advanced since then (looking at the chair on the picture, which is commonly seen near computers in photos of this era)

I remember trying to set up a bbs on my pc in the 80s and I didn’t have a separate phone line so I just put it on while I slept. Then people started calling and annoying my parents with daytime modem calls, because I was like 10 and I didn’t think through any of this.

Would love a technical explanation of how all that stuff worked by someone who did that kind of stuff in those days. In the old days I personally never saw anything bigger than a four line BBS. But I remember reading about that one in shareware README.TXT files

Wouldn't mind hearing war stories from the cdrom.com guys as well.

In the 90’s we had microsystems, in the 2020s we have microservices.

If they were really badass, they had a rack of Telebit modems. (Telebit made 68020 based modems that did 56+ Kbps long before a 56K standard, and literally had more compute power than most of the computers they were connected to.)

(2022)

Some more discussion then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30096565

Those were the days. I still believe nothing replaces the camraderie of the small, local BBSs. The large ones were good too, but these tended to resemble the modern Internet forums a bit more.

I miss BBSs and that's why I featured them in the story of my sci-fi game! If you are interested: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3040110/Outsider/

For a similar nostalgic hit:

Related:

Ask HN: Remember Fidonet?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47321760

I used to dial into that BBS... long distance. It had a huge library of shareware.

https://groups.google.com/g/bit.listserv.games-l/c/1tg85kGBH...

Ahh BBS's: where I learned the difference between a local call and a "local toll call" (parents were not happy)

> do you think "wow, cool, they got to wrangle all of that", or do you think "OMG they had to wrangle all of that"?

I touch on similar point of view discussing digital audio work I do for fun. I use CSound, which I've heard described as "assembly language for audio", and I think that's accurate.

Anyway, when I first, FIRST started, and got a tiny bit familiar, I thought "Wow, I can do anything!" but quickly realized I was also responsible for everything. No free lunch.

Wow, I used to dial into BBS for around 3-4 years. good time!!

> It's possible they managed to do some rudimentary multitasking with DESQview (or worse...) and so supported two whole users with each box. Does that mean they had to be at least 386s to do protected mode? Or was it virtual 8086 mode? I (fortunately) have forgotten the finer points of how that stuff used to work. I DO remember how damn crashy a box became when you ran it "under DV". Constant system freezes. Yep.

I don't recall DESQview to be all that crashy. I was aware of a number multi-line BBSes that used it (just in the 416). Some BBS software called out its use specifically:

* https://www.synchro.net/docs/multnode_config.html

* http://software.bbsdocumentary.com/IBM/DOS/OMEGA/

Also, a comment from someone whose uncle co-founded the company Quarterdeck:

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29396561#unv_29400530

Also, also, if anyone wants to simulate the old-school DESQview experience, perhaps try out "twin":

* https://opensource.com/article/20/1/multiple-consoles-twin

* https://github.com/cosmos72/twin

Does BBS still have a usage nowadays? I feel HN is not too different -- and actually offer less than a BBS -- back then there are a lot of goods on a large BBS. And it's easier to mix a pic with text, but I could be wrong.

Also thinking it's a lot environmental easier to host a BBS than a Discord server.