Back in the olden days, before some of you were even in double digits, and before many of you had even used a modem, the Internet wasn’t on the lips and minds of so many of the world’s citizens.
There was no DSL, no cable modems, no high-speed access of any kind. You dialed up and connected to a bulletin board, and there could never be more than one of you on the board at the same time.
I’m talking, of course, of the mid- to late-1980s.
BBS usage was huge in my area at the time. I don’t mean for professionals who used telecommunication to do their jobs. I mean for relatively normal people who used it more for recreation. Anyway, the whole world was a lot smaller then; you could see someone on a message board and go over to their house that same day. Tougher to do now, isn’t it?
So. Were any of you around back then? The geographical area of which I speak is southern New Jersey, and the BBSs I called operated either Citadel or DTJ (Does The Job, I think) software.
I began in July 1985 and was on there for many years. But as time passed, people drifted away, and I haven’t seen most of that gang in a long time. So I’m just curious if anyone else who’s on here now was around back then, although I don’t expect to find any people I knew back then!
Ah, I remember the good ol’ BBS days too, though I was in Dallas, TX. BBSs always had cool names (at least to other 12 year old boys): Dragon’s Lair, The Dungeon, etc.! What seems a little hazy is how we ever survived using 300 baud modems… of course some out there may remember when 300 baud was an improvement. But I don’t remember it taking appreciably longer to access content than it does now. Of course, we weren’t being forced to download annoying pop-up ads either.
Also, BBSs were cool because the content was so “marginalized.” Everyone (including my parents) is on the internet today, but BBSs had a much smaller audience. The BBSs I frequented had a heavy hacker/phreaking/pirate/genreally anti-social emphasis. It was almost cult-like.
300 baud modems. Learning where the pause key was so screens wouldn’t scroll by too fast when I got a 1200 baud modem, since I still read at 300 baud. “Instant messaging” (with the guy running the board only because he had only one phone line) that showed how slow your friend typed because every keystroke came up in real time. Forty-five minute downloads of dirty pictures that, as they were in the colors and resolution available to the computers of the day, were only recognizably “dirty” because you knew they were. Forty-five minute downloads of dirty pictures that failed at the forty-fourth minute. Modems so slow and system requirements so low that a workable BBS could be written in interpreted BASIC for a one-megahertz computer with 32k of RAM and one 180k floppy drive.
Yes… I started out on BBS’s. There were about 30 or 40 around Kalamazoo in 1988, of which I only frequented about 6. They ranged from Citadel 86 discussion boards to Wildcat BBS systems. In fact, that is where I first started using “Dragwyr” as my username.
I was one of the few that could connect at 1200 BPS. Ah to remember the days of 30k downloads taking 45 minutes using such download protocols as Kermit, Y-Modem and the ever popular Z-modem.
Yeah, and those 1200-baud modems were THE thing, weren’t they? Heck, I went years before I bothered to get one.
Kids, back in the day, modems weren’t internal, as most are now.
There really was a strong sense of community on those old boards, much like we have here only with far fewer people. And, of course, back then they were populated by either older engineer types or young hackers trying to change their grades in school.
Oh, and precious few females. Sheesh, who’d want to be female on there! There were so few of you that we’d be beating each other up to talk to you… Hey wait, it’s like real life, isn’t it?
Had some GREAT “rooms” to post in, too. A staple was Free Association, which contained only one- or two-word posts. On one board, we had an elaborate, creative story, populated by many people, ongoing for months…
IIRC, that Citadel 86 was written and modified by guys out in Minneapolis whose names escape me right now. When I was in South Jersey, the hot spots for Cit86 were NJ, Minneapolis, and Seattle. Later, Cit86 was adapted for the Commodore 128 (Citadel-128), and then was bastardized even further after that.
Ah yes, the days when a 1200 baud modem and 10MB hard drive were stylin’. Yee hah.
dan, the first BBS I frequented was back in 1989. Terrapin Station was the name - I think it was out of Broomall, PA. There were a number of Dead Dial-ups in the NYC area, most offering song lyrics and cheesey GIFs.
I was there, and I was even female! Not only the BBS’s - I had an account at UC Berkeley, because I was taking classes there in HS. I remember ‘talk’, with the screen cut in half so you could see the other guy’s typing and your own at the same time. (I spent a lot of time on that, because it was cheaper than phoning my cross-country boyfriend). I remember having to route emails through different servers depending on which net they were on (and what a pain it was to get mail through to bitnet). (Nowadays even a lot of geeks have never seen an email address with a ‘%’ in it).
I remember reading my Computer Shopper Magazine, and they used to provide a list of BBS’s. They also had their own BBS for specific files, etc. I couldn’t understand why I had to start using the Internet to access their site. I shelled out a hundred bucks or so for my first 2400 baud modem. Yep, back then SysOp meant something!
I kind of remember that one, DW. But I religiously avoided making toll calls; I lived at home. But luckily for me, there were hundreds and hundreds of BBSs in my local calling area, and I lived in the boondocks!
My wife misses that 300 Baud modem, I’d start a Download, we’d have sex. 2400 Baud brought shorter sex, or the need to find larger downloads. She hated 14.4 hehe.
Hue, Jr. ran a bbs appropriately called “Citadel-86 Test System” in Minneapolis. I started in the Citadel community around 1988 or so, put up my own board in 1991, and then took it down in 1995 when I left the state for college. I took the computer with me, and over the next four years, I’d occasionally boot up the bbs and log in. It felt like walking through a ghost town.
I still call one of my old haunts in the Minneapolis area - Greylien. It used to be a great place for writers and creative folk of all stripes, but now there’s nothing there but the sysop, one or two folks from years back, and a pack of trolls. Feels like visiting a dying friend in the hospital…
And every Christmas! We’d prepare ourselves for a rash of new users as another crop of kids got a modem under the Christmas tree. Nostalgia, nostalgia.
Anyway. One of the regulars in the Mpls Citadel scene whipped up a web-driven message board in the style of Citadel - http://www.edsroom.com/ - and every now and then I think about restoring my old bbs in that manner.
Hey, I spent a lot of time on Dallas-area BBS’s, too, back in the olden times, mostly ca. 1988 to 1992 with my most nerdly activity ca. 1990-1. Let’s see… my first was the “Death Zone”, run by some kid that went to St. Marks’ and frequented by some guy that worked at KRLD who went by “Smi2le”. And later, I mostly hung around the WWIV boards (several of them, I can’t recall any names) and called myself “Yossarian” and spent most of my Saturdays playing softball with my fellow BBSers.
Funny, how it used to be that the bulletin board communities I used to participate in were mostly people that lived–at the furthest–across town, and now I don’t think there’s a one of you less than 250 miles from me!
And what was the name of that on-line game I used to play on the BBS’s where you’d go from this base where you could buy stuff, gamble, etc., then go out into this wilderness and camp, fight people and monsters, camp, you’d fight by slamming on the space bar as it’d zig back and forth…
