Are any BBSs still around?

Factual Questions
21

Tedster wrote:

Those were the bad old days, when they started hitting a thousand. When I was first on there in '90, it was friendlier. It became colder and full of jerks and RUMORFs as the population grew. There are still a good number of DOC BBSes around, and me and the old gang still hang out at them. A number of them were created specifically as a place to get away from the bullshit on ISCABBS – Heinous, for example. And a number of them have arisen as places to get away from the bullshit on Heinous.

22

There used to be dozens of very popular Gay BBS’s in the LA area in the early 90’s…mostly local prefix, which made it really easy to hook up with people fast - I once met someone on line who lived in my same apartment building!
Too bad they have gone by the wayside…but I do recall discovering on those boards that, in reading profiles, I was apparently the only guy in all of LA whose endowment was under a foot long.
When the internet first started taking over, a lot of those boards were allowing access through internet “doors” in an attempt to remain active. The problem was, now people were logging in from thousands of miles away and the hope for meeting someone the same night stated to dwindle. Then GeoCities started allowing everybody to create their own little webs of desire and I think a lot of the BBS’s started to die off afterwards. It would be interesting to know if a little niche BBS could still make it in today’s market.

23

I used to frequent a lot of local BBS until about 1995. After that, I got internet access and while I still used some of the good local BBS, I think all of them went away. I used to get the numbers from a free computing magazine that had a section that listed the various BBS in the state. But that section no longer exists, so if any of them exist here anymore, I wouldn’t even know how to find them.

24

Isn’t AOL and its ilk essentially a BBS on a grand scale? Of course, the ambiance is totally different, but it’s still a computer system that you dial into for services.

25

Chronos: Not even close. AOL (an Internet Content Provider instead of just being an Internet Service Provider, but we’ll gloss over that for now) and other ISPs sell access to a massive TCP/IP network called the Internet. What is TCP/IP? A protocol that sends information around in discrete units called ‘packets’. You can implement various protocols (such as SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) or Telnet or the World Wide Web) on top of the TCP/IP network by varying the form of the packets you send, and which ‘ports’ (listening holes, essentially) on the machine you send them to.

TCP/IP allows communications to be commingled in a single endless stream of undifferentiated packets because each packet has its own routing information. Think of it like the post office: Each packet is a letter with an address and a return address. Routers are like post offices, in that they read the information on the packets and get them heading in the right direction. The software that implements TCP/IP neither knows nor cares what the packets actually say as long as the basic information is correct. Each packet is an individual event, just one piece of information from one machine to another through a complex routing path. It’s up to the machines on the respective ends to keep things straight, which means that one machine can contact multiple machines at the same time (and one person can carry on correspondence with multiple people at the same time).

Of course, this is nothing like the phone system. Whereas the Internet allows multiple communications streams (by simply not caring :)), the phone is strictly two-way, one conversation at a time. Whereas the Internet allows you to hop from machine to machine in a more or less random way (especially with the World Wide Web’s hypertext system), the phone makes you talk to the same person as long as the connection is in place. In other words, the Internet is stateless (it doesn’t care about the future or the past), whereas the phone is stateful (it does).

So, basically, AOL sells access to a bunch of computers shifting packets around, whereas a BBS is just the phone lines. Tremendous advantages can be had from the former, which is why AOL makes money and BBSes are dying.

26

All that post and I screw up the last line:

AOL sells the ability for your computer to shift packets around itself, joining the Internet. Your machine becomes an active part of the system.

27

“Bow to my godly wang!” - Derleth
See what I mean…everybody’s got a big one on the BBS.

28

Derleth: You’re drawing a distinction that probably doesn’t matter. A BBS is not defined by how you connect to it, or what it connects to. A BBS was/is the term for a collection of software that allows you to manage bulletin boards and file downloads. BBS’s later on migrated out to serve as ISPs, gateways to distributed message networks like Fidonet, etc.

How you connect is irrelevant. Back in the early days, CompuServe, The Source, and AOL were just very big BBSes. They ran on their own computers, had dial-up lines (and later, connections to packet switched networks), etc.

Look at CompuServe. It originally started as a large, self-contained BBS. Then it expanded nationwide by leasing bandwidth on commercial packet-switched networks with local dial-up lines in each city. Back then, to connect to CompuServe you had to have a modem and dial in directly, paying long distance charges, or you could use your modem to dial into a packet network gateway and pay the hourly packet charges (about $8/hr back then).

When the internet started to become commercially available instead of being restricted to academia, both BBS’s and large services like CompuServe and AOL started offering limited access to it in a variety of ways. The first was E-mail - you could send E-mail through many BBS’s and have it route through the internet to the destination you wanted. Then soon after, these services started adding limited newsgroup access. Web browsing didn’t come until much later.

As the web appeared and started becoming popular, BBS’s started to mutate to survive. Some were modified to act as dial-up hosts for newsgroup and mail access. Later, limited web browsing became available through them. Going the other way, BBS’s started offering Telnet access so you could log in through the internet, and eventually many of these products mutated into web servers.

The final nail in the coffin for BBSes as an industry was the release of free, high-quality web servers like Microsoft IIS and Apache, plus free programs for doing things like text indexing and FTP transfers. It became really hard to justify spending $400 for a BBS package when you could get the stuff for free.

Today, I think a BBS should be defined more as a collection of people. For example, the Straight Dope board is exactly like a BBS, except that you connect through the internet instead of dialing up. It has a community, software to bring them together, and a way for them all to connect and communicate. That’s what a BBS is. We just don’t call them that any more.

29

DMark: Well, when your wang is godly, you must advertise the fact.

:smiley:

Sam Stone: Fair enough. I just want the distinction between traditional dialup BBSes and Internet BBSes to be clear in everyone’s minds.

30

Well, a rose by any other name…

They look the same and act the same, and (most importantly to me) run the same software and doors. File transfers don’t work (as was said) but otherwise they are very similar, at least from a user-end standpoint. I’m not a big expert but I have been on a lot of BBSes in my day, both via telnet and dial-in. Both types are still around in pretty decent quantities.

31

Correction: The death of the BBS industry was caused by the obsolescence of its revenue model. It had nothing to do with the availability of free server software.

In the late 1980s, commercial BBSes offered limited usage through monthly subscriptions or unlimited usage through per-minute charges, in addition to any long-distance connection fee levied by the phone company. It was a very expensive hobby which could easily cost US$30 - $100 or more per month depending on your proximity to the systems you most enjoyed using and the time you spent online.

In the early 90s, AOL and dialup ISPs began to appear in the major markets, both of which had advantages commercial BBSes couldn’t compete with. AOL charged by the hour ($3 I think), had vastly more content than any local system could provide, and provided local access numbers that eliminated long-distance connection charges for the majority of its customers. Dialup ISPs provided flat rate, all-you-can-eat access to the Internet but dropped you to a decidedly unfriendly Unix command prompt requiring you to sink or swim on your own.

A few years later, SLIP connections to the dialup ISPs became widely available along with Windows GUI clients for protocols such as POP, FTP, NNTP, Telnet, Gopher, WAIS and the nascent WWW. People began migrating to the Internet in droves by this point, and both the BBS industry and AOL were forced to “internetize” their services to whatever degree they could to stem the hemorrhage of customers. BBSes were actually somewhat better at this than AOL, offering e-mail, news and telnet connections at the very least, but the long-distance charges made them inferior substitutes for the local ISPs.

By 1995, SLIP/PPP support had migrated to the operating system and WWW emerged as the “killer app” of the Internet. New ISPs were sprouting up everywhere, and lowering connection costs for customers by operating multiple points-of-presence. AOL upgraded its services to provide access to the Web and adopted the flat-rate revenue model of its ISP competitors. BBSes became less and less relevant until, by 1998, they were all but extinct.

32

“I miss BBSing. It had a better “feel” than the Internet, if that makes any sense.” Joey G

It sure does to me. Unfortunately I don’t seem to have any
local ones left.