As others said, originally, 1200-baud modems connected by a serial port. You got to recognize the noise made by a modem “sync’ing up”; the commands turned off the noise once a connection was made.
CompuServe originally had drops in most major cities; if you lived too far away, it was a long distance call to the nearest drop. Then they signed up various data networks (DATAPAC in Canada) so they could take advantage of the more numerous drops, CompuServe became a local call, but DATAPAC charged their own fee; friend of mine’s son racked up $200 data fees in one month before he was cut off compuserve.
As for other BBS’s - they maybe had a setup where they had one or more modems hooked to a PC and a BBS program. Some were “anyone welcome”. some you had to sign up for. They were much like private websites and filesharing sites today, but menu-driven text-based.Toward the end they got hooked up to the “internet”, usenet feeds and exchanges with other BBS’s, often taking advantage of local university or other interconnected networks.
Back before digital cameras, before scanners were common, there were all sorts of picture archives available and traded. (A classic case of the time that I read about was (IIRC) Adult Action BBS, where the owners in California were indicted and convicted in Kentucky for violating the local standards.)
Only because the market has expanded and because mobile computing is bigger. There are as many enthusiasts now as there’s ever been, but now there are a bunch of computer users who just buy the latest Macbook and throw it away when it’s out of date or it breaks. It wouldn’t surprise me if in a few years the average computer user won’t even know what USB is, given that many people have only ever used a tablet.
Good times. A local free paper called California Computer News had a list on the back page of all the local BBSes. As you say, some were subscription but many were free. I remember dialing up just about the entire list to find the good free ones.
I remember that one. Not sure if it was in the CCN list or not, but I definitely ran into it. Maybe advertised on the other BBSes.
Information from TOTSE. That’s Temple Of The Screaming Electron. This is a website, formerly a BBS primarily about storing and sharing text files, or files full of text. Text files got shared quite a bit in the BBS Era; a local board run out of a bedroom with text files and discussion fora would have been right at home in the 1988 era.
Textfiles.com, a huge repository of BBS Era information; mostly text files, but not entirely. Jason Scott, the person responsible for that, Goatse-ing MySpace, sketching cows, and saving Geocities, now works for Archive.org, which just collects everything it can fit on a hard drive. It literally has machines dedicated to providing a petabyte of storage. I strongly suggest going through the Textfiles.com stuff to get some feel for the era.
Cutting to the chase: he bought a modem. Someone showed him or told him how to connect the modem. He brought home a free Cumpuserve disk (from a shop, or a show, or off a magazine: perhaps the Star or Tribune ran an insert). He ran the software on the Cumpuserve disk, and it connected him to Compuserv. After he worked out how much it was costing him, perhaps he quit, or perhaps he got better software, which enabled him to work offline and connect briefly to upload and download.
Possibly after getting a rather rude awakening upon accessing the Internet for the first time, at some point in the 1990s, and searching for Cumpuserve on AltaVista or Dogpile.
The internal modem cards in 1988 would have had a 8250 UART chipset and been unreliable at higher speeds. The 2400 and beyond speeds possible with the 16450 and 16550 UART sets didn’t happen until the 1990s, at leqast as I remember it.
I agree that most people in 1988 would have an external modem, connected via the RS-232 port (DB-9 or DB-25).
No need for a Compuserve disk. The original service was all text-based and all you needed was a terminal emulator that could connect to your modem and issue an ATDT. (I am deeply ashamed by how much of the AT command set I remember.)
Later (some time in the 90s) Compuserve added a simple GUI over the service, but the underlying protocol was all text-based. You could connect via raw terminal and modem up to the very end of the service.
I started off with external modems, then moved to internal which were cheaper and less clunky. They were pretty vulnerable to the elements. Even with surge protectors, lightning could still fry them.
BBSes were single lines that couldn’t accommodate more than one user at a time. When you connected, you’d hear fax machine type honks and beeps, then a ring if the line was open, busy signal if not. Each user had a time limit as well.
This was also the era when you formed a cue for downloading pictures (with no previews, you just went by one-line descriptions) and went to bed. You woke up the next morning to view them, assuming the connection didn’t drop during the night.
BBSes didn’t have much in the way of pictures decorating their login screens, because they took forever to load. If there were any graphics, they were usually made of ASCII codes. The most advanced image would usually be the name of the board enclosed in a colored frame. Even that would take a couple seconds to load.
User forums weren’t as subdivided as they are on SDMB. Usually, you were just configured to read only new messages, regardless of thread, because there were so few threads.
There were some popular text-only games, such as Trade Wars, which was chock full of exploitable bugs. There was also Pit Fighter. You’d fight monsters in an ASCII field. The Beholder was represented by @. When you shot an arrow, you’d get blinky dashes that traveled to your target.
Nah, BBSes could accommodate as many users as phone lines at the Sysop’s house. Most of my local boards had one line, several had 2, and the BIG board had 12!
It was all sorts of special when you logged in and someone else was logged in at the same time and the two of you could chat. Almost as special as being called in to chat with the Sysop, but not quite as scary.
Internal (what would eventually be called “ISA”) modems were available, but rarer. They also sometimes needed fiddling to adjust I/O ports and interrupts to not conflict with the built-in serial port, although the defaults usually worked. And then configuration in the terminal program to match.
9600 bps was available in a modem in 1988 (US Robotics Courier HST), but quite expensive unless you were a BBS sysop (who got discounts), and I don’t recall on-line services offering in-dial access at that speed, so if the story is focused on services like CompuServ, 2400 bps is probably as fast as it would go.
Ah, that vendor. (Whom I’m not naming out of respect for the spoiler block.)
I still have one of their keyboards. Nigh-unto indestructible. Frankly, still the best keyboard I own, or ever have. (That’s the line of business they started in, and then just grew into the rest of their product line.)
I mentioned Prodigy in my earlier post. I forget exactly how much the initial sign-up fee was but it included a Hayes external modem. It actually looked like a power adapter, it didn’t go next to the computer, it just plugged directly into the wall AC outlet. Had a serial cable that went to your computer and an RJ11 cable that plugged into the phone jack.
9600 bps modems were available in 1990, but compuserve was still 2400 in '91. That was the end of the 2400 era, so all the 2400 modems for sale had at least MNP5 compression to get better-than-2400 throughput for text.
New computers at that time had high-speed UARTs with I/O queues, but there were still many people using older modems and older computers.
Ah, kids today with their double-anal donkey punching, they’ll never know the exquisite heights of pleasure and pain achievable by downloading your porn in picture form, interlaced line by interlaced line. Drawn on the screen before you, as you watched, riveted, praying, “Nipples… c’mon, nipples… c’mon, nippl-BATHING SUIT! WTF! Who posts bathing suit pictures on Usenet?! …actually, she’s pretty hot, I’ll let this one finish downloading…”
I was a co-starter for a BBS many years ago. It serviced our school and local community. We ran software on a server; it was the first GUI software that was available for a BBS service. Local businesses donated money for our servers and several stations around the school. The phone company donated phone lines, and we as administrators donated our time, and interfaced with our consumers (teachers, students, and community members)
To get service with our BBS, a user had to fill out an application, and we would send them an account information with password, account number and tutorials - either by snail mail or personal contact face to face.
One of my jobs was to set up computers with the installation of modem cards. All of our efforts were strictly voluntary done on our free time.
It all was a great success, and has lived on through a number of changes to the extent that it cannot be called a BBS. The current network is used by the school for records and such, and connections into each classroom for attendence, grades, homework and so forth. And of course it is tied into, and is part of the “web”
That brought me back! And, as usual, I made a beeline to Cringely. My copy of Accidental Empires is in a bizarre place for me: in clear view and not buried under a lot of other shit.
1983–Hewlett Packard 2647A “intelligent terminal.” External 300 baud modem with no instructions that I had to figure out on my own, though I had barely heard of modems and BBSs. Finally reached a BBS and found its users so nasty that I quit BBSing for a couple years.
