Do You Miss BBS's?
Dec 22, 2008 at 10:35PM 4 Comments I do. Give me a break from the browser. The last BBS I remember using was BMUG's First Class in 1995, having tinkered around with various BBS's since 1986 (never a hardcore user since I preferred MUD's at the time), most notably being the only way (my amber monochrome 286 clone via 9600 baud dialup) my college roomates and I got current news on Desert Storm since we didn't have a TV. I kinda miss the whole phone number to handshake dialup experience, too (when information was still measured in bytes). There was a certain non-commercial innocence to online experience then. Do you know what I am talking about? Is Facebook the modern BBS? If you're my generation and work in design+tech, don't you get burned out of the fact that every pixel of reality must be branded and designed to death? I would argue that any of these weren't all that "usable" per se...they just "were".
Design, Society, Technology
Reader Comments (4)
Gone are the days … I remember the excitement of a successful connection, and the sense of mystery and wonder of the system at the other end of the line. Who was there? How did they do it? How on earth did a 12 year old kid (me) find the number for this BBS? How on earth did he know how to use a modem?
Those were the days of BBSs and GW Basic programming. And scouring through some random host's collection of smutty BMPs and GIFs.
Ah thank you for this. A nice trip down memory lane. I totally miss BBSs. my introduction to an online world. a virtual community of like-minded nerds... I remember going to "meet ups" that consisted of BBS users meeting at parks and BBQs, things like this. Great guys, all of them. I remember following the trend of file download protocols. X, Y, and Zmodem protocols got faster and faster with each iteration. eventually, you could watch images render, line by line, as they downloaded. This was the crude beginnings of the internet.
I do remember being a consistent BBS user right around the time the Internet started to emerge. People were assigned awkward email addresses through their ISP. They were nonsensical. Then there was FTP, which was a way to connect to remote machines to grab files and what not. IRC, for chatting globally with people all over the world. Then more and more, Telnet and shells powered with text-based browsers such as Lynx began to pop up, and a new platform for sharing information began to blossom.
Then, of course, came Netscape. The world changed forever, then. it was a great wave to ride.
I've been working on building a few Facebook games, and notice how similar FB is to the old BBS and campus Unix systems.
Though BBS's may be largely forgotten, they are not gone. Hundreds are accessible over telnet (minus the squeky scratchy modem handshake)
http://www.telnetbbsguide.com/
BBS's are still around. I am the Sysop of "The Realms of Blue BBS". Google for a telnet program like syncterm and then set it up to telnet to blues.zapto.org.