Before the ‘net’ really took off, we had the poor man’s net. Exchange files. Message boards. System mail.
Sometimes I remember these things very fondly. Other times, not very fondly at all. For the sake of this thread, let’s recall the good things about old school BBS.
ZMODEM
Fido Net
Offline mail readers like Blue Wave.
Upgrading to 2400 baud and realizing you can download a floppy’s worth of data in an HOUR instead of the 2 hours it took at 1200!
I don’t know what other people’s experiences were, but my friends and I only went on local boards. So I fondly remember how you had a reasonable expectation of being able to meet anyone you befriended online. You might even already know them, in fact, or if you didn’t, someone you knew probably did.
It was a closer knit community. Not everyone was online then. BBS’s were a quiet Sunday afternoon bbq whereas the internet is a noisy Saturday night danceclub.
Ahhh… memories! There used to be a handfull of WWIV boards in North Dallas and Richardson I’d hang out at back when I used to live there. We’d meet on most Sunday afternoons at some park off of Floyd (Heights?) to play softball and continue the nerdly discussions (Rush v. Led Zep, IBM v. Mac, you know the drill).
Then I moved, couldn’t afford the LD to BBS, and sometime later the internet finally showed up!
One of my best experiences was with a message only (no files) all alias (change your username at will) WWIV board in the 504 area code called World Serpent Inn.
In the end, I recall seeing very few WWIV boards and many, many Celerity boards. (and even WWIV was after the commie64 boards).
Yeah I miss local boards. Less rampant insulting when there is a good chance of someone dousing your lights at the next party. And there were some great parties.
Even here in rural VT… yeah, I didn’t even have a modem, but a friend did, and I’d log on from his place. Just local BBS’s. Games, file trasnfers… ah, the good ol’ days.
Ah, BBSing… The good old days… There used to be MANY good BBS’s here in Atlanta, GA. Playing such classic door games like Trade Wars 2002, Yankee Trader, Galactic Warzone, Murder Motel, Land Of Devestation, Global War, and many others.
One of the best BBS communities in Atlanta was Faster Than Light BBS. It was through that board that I first got onto the Internet. The Sysop of that board, and many people from it (including my brother) Still meet at least once a year for DragonCon where they staff the computer gaming section.
It’s too bad that BBS’s have pretty much died out now.
Is it even possible to get any of those old door games anymore? I’m interested in playing some, just for the heck of it. Like LORD and Tradewars and whatnot.
However, if anyone has an interest in door-games, they should check out some of the PBEM (play by email) games out there. VGA-Planets is particularly good.
I started BBSing in 1985. Here’s how much the world has changed:
I was the only person I knew with a computer.
I was the only person I knew who knew what a BBS was.
I was the only person I knew who had gotten busted for accidentally racking up $300 in zone calls in one month.
That sucked…it was in Detroit, and for a lot of zone calls you didn’t have to dial a “1”…so I thought I was making local calls but I was wrong wrong wrong.
None of my friends understood what was so fascinating about plain words on a screen.
If anyone else was in Detroit back then I was pretty active on Amusers, Inc. and the Stardock BBS. My handle was…Hamadryad.
I spent the early 90s all over WWIV boards. A large chunk of the Richmond scene ended up revolving around a BBS which was run by people…hrm. People with whom I did not get along at all. That board is actually still up, and has 'net access now. The door games are still there, the forums are still there, but no one ever uses them; there’s never anyone on there except scripts people are running in MajorMud.
I do wish there were still local computer groups like that. Since anyone can get on the net now, you’re not really guaranteed the same class of geek you used to get. Damnit.
I started in 1985, too. The old Citadels, mostly. I used to have actual print outs from BBS sessions in the late eighties, but I think they finally disintegrated…
Man, those were the days. I started BBSing in 1983 and stopped when I moved to Illinois in 1993. I was in New Orleans, which apparently was very different from many other areas, in that our alias BBSes were true alias - sysops didn’t ask for any real information. When I told people in Baton Rouge this they flipped out. “But that would be anarchy! What would stop people from doing all sorts of heinous things?” I don’t know what stopped them, but I do know that we didn’t have that many major problems.
I hated the door games - a waste of time, and it irked me that I couldn’t get on the board because someone was playing “Food Fight” until their eyes bled. I enjoyed the discussions and the story boards, where we wrote group fiction - everyone would take a character in the story and extend the story as a whole from that character’s point of view. It was cool, episodic writing.
I had many aliases in New Orleans, but the two biggest were Eric the Penguin and The Rainmaker.
Incidentally, BBS Fans should check out this fairly new site: www.bbsmates.com
All-Alias BBSes were really great. So much creativity. And it wasn’t anarchy.
More fond memories
FILE_ID.DIZ
The draw (ansi art) [fondly remembered in hindsight. At the time I was like TOO SLOW TOO SLOW!]
Speed dialing into popular BBSes at all sorts of weird hours just to get in and answer the 100 messages posted from the last time I was logged in.
Started at 1200 baud, then 2400, then the quad leap to 9600…I remember having many a phone conversation with a sysop of a board that had just started using 9600 baud and us trying to figure out the best settings for it.
I mainly hung out on the WWIV boards, met a lot of cool local people, had many a BBS party, but now I haven’t seen those ppl in years since the advent of the Internet. I even hosted a BBS for a time, when the sysop of Theatre of Vampires moved and let me take it over. I ran it for about a year then closed it down on Halloween.
I was hot and heavy into Trade Wars and VGA Planets. Even took part in a VGA Planet-only BBS, and all the players would meet once a month at Fuddrucker’s to gloat, cuss at and badger each other. I’ve played a little bit over the web, but it’s just not the same without that personal interaction. I was never that good anyway.
I played VGA planets locally as well. It wasn’t even that long ago. Maybe 1994 or so. Great game. Never played it against ‘strangers’. To much fun to see people in person for taunting and gloating.
BTW: I still have a 300 baud acoustic coupler! I couldn’t bring myself to throw it away. And the machine I did all this BBSing from was a Compaq ‘luggable’ 8088 computer WITH HARD DISK OPTION! flex It was an amber screen computer.
It had wordstar, zork, and some modem software. That was about it.
Heck, just having a multiuser system was nothing short of revolutionary. I used to get in trouble all the time for being on the BBS, posting messages, thereby hogging it from everyone else…
I was on the BBS scene from 1987-1990, then again in 1992-1993. Big change during that time. Started out on a 300 baud with a C64 then went to a 600, then settle on a 1200 for hte duration.
Remember the thrill you’d get when you finally got a ring.
Mostly posting on boards and file transfer. It took forever just for text to come through.
I had my first real-time computer text chat via modem with a local sysop late, late one night in 1991. The world has changed so much since then…
And hey, remember those ascii graphics? I still have some cool ones saved in a file on my HD, including some surprisingly good renditions of naked women…
