Before the popularity of the Internet supplanted BBSs (bulletin board systems) there were lots of local and national BBS systems from which a person could download GIFs, shareware and whatnot. After I got on the Internet in late 1994 I virtually abandoned the BBSs and in less than a year it seemed that most of them had disappeared when, for curiosity’s sake, I decided to see if they were still there. Does anybody know if any BBS sites still exist? If so, can they be accessed from the Internet (perhaps via Telnet) or do they still require dialing in?
BBSes, for the uninitiated, are in this context computers with modems attached that allow others to dial in directly and access files on a (hopefully secure) filesystem. Typically, they would allow uploading and downloading, and would serve as a primitive non-Internet system of exchanging software and messages. They were common before ISPs made the Internet (originally a little government project called the ARPANet) commonly accessable outside Universities and Defense Department labs.
I don’t know of any BBSes that are still in existence, but there is no reason that they wouldn’t still be (aside from lack of interest and knowledge). But you would still have to access them directly, old-style, because the only network they would be connected to would be the phone system.
(As an interesting aside, there’s nothing forcing a BBS to use standard TCP/IP protocol, which means BBSes wouldn’t necessarily be able to be linked directly to the Internet. You could set it up to use any kind of networking (and then hope someone else has a machine that can understand it). I don’t know what standards were in place during the heyday of BBSes.)
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- Airpower BBS used to be dial-up a couple years ago. Airpower was a shooting sports/enthusiast site with mostly a mailserver/newsgroup sort of system on it. Apparently it still is avilable as such, but it has parallel web feed of some sort now. - DougC
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Most of the old-school BBSs were local-only, too. By that I mean they didn’t have toll-free numbers or anything like that for access; you called one number, and that was it. And they weren’t multiuser, either. 
It’s a little bit difficult to fathom why any BBS with any vitality to it wouldn’t have migrated to the Web by now.
Actually, BBS’s had mutated into quite large ‘portals’ before their demise. I used to develop software for a BBS system called ‘The Major BBS’. It could handle 64 incoming lines, and could act as an internet gateway for mini-ISPs. In fact, I ran a company for a while that used the MajorBBS to give the public E-mail and newsgroup access before there were widespread public dialup connections. Back then, your options were basically BBS’s, CompuServe, The Source, The Well, and a very fledgeling AOL.
Almost all the BBS companies are now out of business. That industry used to be huge. I used rent a booth at the annual BBS trade show, called “One BBScon”. It was a large enough show to bring people from around North America and Europe. Several thousand people would attend.
That whole industry was wiped out in the space of maybe three years by the rise of the internet.
Apparently, there are still quite a few around. There’s a list that contains about 500 BBSes with telnet access.
I used to run a WWIV board in Baltimore in 91-92. I ended up taking it down because I kept the (single) line busy from being on the internet.
well… crap.
fixed link
WWIV! You mean Watch While I Vomit? 
Is not telnet what BBs used to be? Haven’t they just changed the name?
I am thinking of resurrecting a local 12 line Amiga BBS system that was very popular locally.
I miss BBSing. It had a better “feel” than the Internet, if that makes any sense.
There is one in KC that has been going nonstop since 1984, and supports 23 lines or so. It runs off of an Amiga. :eek:
We could have 64 phone lines coming into an IBM 286. That was back when software was still efficient. (-:
At one time we had a stack of 24 2400 baud modems, because rackmounts weren’t available. We had fans set up to blow across them, but we still burned one out probably once a month or so.
The very earliest system we had consisted of a $8,000 card for the XT that contained 16 single-chip 1200 baud modems. These things also overheated, and I had to solder new ones onto the board once a month or so. Eventually, they just started failing so fast that the boards were scrapped. We went through two of those…
Reeder: No. Telnet is a protocol that sits on top of the larger TCP/IP protocol, which is what the Internet is. BBSes are just computers with access to the phone system and the ability to take incoming calls from other computers. The BBS ‘network’ is really just the phone network, and is not accessable from the Internet. Telnet, like Usenet, email, and the world wide web, is just one of the protocols implemented with the basic packet-switching technology that makes up the TCP/IP protocol. Any computer with Internet access can access a Telnet machine (really, just a machine that accepts input of a certain format on a certain port).
So BBSes and Telnet are two different things.
Funny, I used to write The Major BBS.
(I’m the “New File Libraries with 6.2” fellow. e-mail me if you like)
Funny you should ask. I’m logged in to a BBS right now.
There are tons of BBSes out there – the challenge is finding one that’s free and offers what you’re looking for. I essentially am looking for games (such as Usurper, The Pit, Tradewars, Legend of the Red Dragon, and so on). If you’re looking for games, I could recommend a few choice BBSes, but the best thing is just to start looking – through Google, BBS related web rings, and so on.
If you like Usurper (my personal favorite), feel free to join me at either of the following free BBSes:
fluiddruid: I’m aware that different things call themselves BBSes these days, but the BBSes we’re talking about cannot be reached through the Internet unless someone has set up a gateway to dial in automatically and feed the BBS’s output to the Internet. Therefore, the places you link to (well, almost) cannot, by definition, be BBSes in the current context.
Thank you for the information, and feel free to correct me.
A dialup BBS and a telnet-based BBS are pretty much the same thing, looks and usability wise except for one very important thing:
telnet does not support file transfer!
So, while you can read g-files thru telnet, you can’t actually download any binary files.
ISCA (Iowa Student Computer Association) at one time was very popular, with more than 1000 users logged in at one time via telnet and even had a queue. These days, hardly more than 100 at any given time. Such is life…
telnet: whip.isca.uiowa.edu
There were some interesting systems back in the day. Locally, we had Citadel, DTJ, WWIV, and a few others (Atari ones too, believe it or not).