Many are set up to be accessible via internet-connected tools like Telnet, a text-based remote-login protocol originally designed for mainframes.ĭid any direct-access, telephone-dial-up BBSes survive the internet’s proverbial asteroid? Sure enough, there are about 20 known dial-up BBSes in North America. Many seek the digital intimacy they lost years ago 373 BBSes still operate, according to the Telnet BBS Guide, mostly in the United States. Even today, a small community of people still run and call BBSes. Once the web arrived in the mid-1990s, it seemed inevitable that the BBS would die off.īut every mass extinction has its holdouts. Even today, the internet is so overwhelmingly intertwined that it doesn't have the same intimate feel.
That personal connection was sorely missing on big-name online subscription services of the time-Prodigy, CompuServe, and AOL. My best friend is someone I first met when he called my BBS in 1993.
Sometimes strong personal relationships were built. Long before texting and Slacking and Facebook messaging became the norm for interchange, BBS chats felt like being with someone in person. The sysops might initiate one-on-one chat at any time. It was a gentle, pleasant form of surveillance. Everything users did scrolled by on their screen, and they soaked in the joy of someone else using their computer. Maybe it was because the system operators (sysops) that ran each BBS were always watching. Visiting an old BBS still running today feels like strolling through a community frozen in time, Pompeii-style. Although every BBS displayed walls of text-menus, options, and prompts-those characters somehow translated, in my brain, into a casual walk through a cozy living room or a stroll in a grassy yard. BBS hosts had converted a PC-often their only PC-into a digital playground for strangers’ amusement.įor an 11-year-old exploring online spaces for the first time, my mental model for these electronic connections was physical. To call a BBS was to visit the private residence of a fellow computer fan electronically. It was the intimacy of direct, computer-to-computer connection that did it. He visited five or six local boards, with names like “Octopus’s Garden,” “Southern Pride,” and “Online's Place.” I followed in his footsteps the next summer, spending hundreds of glorious hours online.ĭialing into a BBS felt like whole-body teleportation. They facilitated file transfers, inter-BBS messaging networks, multi-node chat, and popular text-based games. The BBS concept was a digital version of a push-pin bulletin board that might flank a grocery store entrance or a college student union hallway.īy the time dad brought home the modem, BBSes had grown dramatically in scope. People could, in theory, call BBSes anywhere, but since they'd have to pay for long-distance, they tended to stay local. The resulting software, called CBBS, allowed personal-computer owners with modems to dial-in to a dedicated system and leave messages that others would see later, when they, in turn, dialed up the BBS. The author’s computer connecting to BBS in 1996 (Benj Edwards) The same scenario repeated itself on thousands of computers across the country until, one by one, the brightest lights of the BBS world blinked out of existence. My system was one of the casualties, a victim of the desire to devote all my online time to the internet.
Like a comet to the dinosaurs, it upended the natural order of things and wiped BBSes out. Then the internet came along in the mid-1990s. Anyone with a modem and a home computer could dial-in, often for free, and interact with other callers in their area code. These mostly text-based, hobbyist-run services played a huge part in the online landscape of the 1980s and ‘90s. To my astonishment, it never shut down after all.īBSes once numbered in the tens of thousands in North America. It’s my old computer, still running my 1990s-era bulletin board system (BBS, for short), “The Cave.” I thought I had shut it down ages ago, but it’s been chugging away this whole time without me realizing it-people continued calling my BBS to play games, post messages, and upload files. In the back corner, I hear a faint humming. I climb the stairs in my parents’ house to see my old bedroom.
0 kommentar(er)
