Definitely get a nostalgia buzz thinking about the early 1990's BBS scene. Had a very vibrant community of BBS users in my city during that time.
It is ironic and somewhat interesting that the biggest aspects of the BBS scene that most people seem to miss (the community/local culture, meeting like-minded people in real life, some of the games, ANSI art, Echomail discussions), are all things borne from the technical limitations of the time. Slow modems and high long distance charges meant most people kept to their local boards. Games had to be designed in text with only a rudimentary colour scheme (sure, there was RoboBoard, RIP, NAPLPS and other graphical protocols - none which really caught on all that much) and still be compelling. Most were limited turn based (which meant being forced to only spend a couple hours a day playing, then having to wait). "World-wide" networks like FidoNet were dog-slow by today's standards (it was a toss-up whether a message would reach its recipient faster on an FTN network or via snail-mail), so discussion threads would last for days but only have several hundred messages in them to sort through.
I remember the years and work spent to try to improve on these limitations. Galacticomm and eSoft had their huge hackish ways to get past the non-multitasking nature of DOS and the IRQ limits of PCs to allow people to run huge multi-line boards on regular PCs. We saw Planet Connect dramatically lower the cost of distributing FidoNet packets via satellite downlink (still needed telephone uplink if you were sending, though). We saw big serial breakout boards and modem boxes (Galactibox?) come out. And of course, faster modems. Up to rip-roaring 33.6kbps speeds at the peak of the BBS era.
Ultimately, the internet and the "real" operating systems that are commonplace today overcame those limitations in ways that were pretty unfathomable to most of us common BBS users and sysops of the day. Unfortunately, BBS's today really only appeal to those of us who had lived through the struggle of configuring COM ports or QWK readers (or for many of us, a tosser/scanner, door game, FOSSIL driver, or getting DESQview working just right).
Reflecting, I feel like those limitations are what forced things to be good. With the limited toolkit, you had to focus on ux in a way that's not realistic to do today. So many classic games had excellent gameplay in spite of/because of those limitations. And waiting until midnight to play your turns on all those door games. It was compelling.
Contrast to a modern social media platform where you're just perpetually bombarded by mountains of shit... because they can.
I run a "modern" BBS, Xibalba. Something I find is actually quite a few "callers" visiting the board are new blood. Younger generation that never lived through or touched a BBS but usually fall into one of two camps: 1 - "I'm tired of the modern corporate Internet", 2 - I just want to learn about history.
People still login to play games (I'm writing a new one!), and chat. Downloads here and there when you have hard to find history items, etc. Certainly nothing like it's heyday, but enough to keep me happy anyway :D
BBS story... A local BBS had an issue where one of the features would cause it to crash when activated. The sysop worked around it by changing the main menu to read:
[T] Crash BBS
and just trusted people wouldn't ever try it more than once.
BBSes is one of those last places in the internet where you still can find your tribe without algorithms and, too much crying about politics. I’m glad it’s still hard UX entry to many as we don’t need many there. Just those enough few who get it
I think that if you are 40+ which is BBS target continually, then you should know all neighborhood nerds worth knowing, internet BBSes where you don’t lose time on idiocracy is exactly that neighborhood worth virtual saving. Post code doesn’t matter that much as the right mental model to survive and thrive there.
San Jose. My wife and I have lived in the same house for 10 years and know about 80% of the neighbors in a two block radius. We also probably know 50 additional families within a square mile as a result of our kids going to public schools here. This is essentially just like how it was when I grew up in the 80s, in a rural East Coast City of about 75k.
In the area where instead of Waymo, local taxi driver who still look like me and speaks my language drives the cabs and gives me discounts when we both have last ride back home from downtown. And we talk to each other more than sue each other
I'm ok with losing location bias. being from a small town and only having 50 ppl in our area code that werent long distance that knew about bbss meant 80% of them were crazy, old, or had weird/obscure interests. I did make a lot of friends during that era.
Yes, I miss those days. The late 80's through mid 90's was the golden age of BBSing. The transition from BBSes to ISPs was fun, but I still miss the community aspect of BBSes.
Interestingly, the FediVerse has that. Not in the big nodes that you've probably heard of, like Mastodon.Social. But there are loads of smaller nodes that definitely have moderate to strong degrees of locality.
> I’m glad it’s still hard UX entry to many as we don’t need many there. Just those enough few who get it
Of course, we can't forget the rampant elitism among sysops (and no, I'm not counting myself outside of that group - I was downright insufferable back in the day).
I tried getting into Telnet BBSs 20 years ago, but quickly got so sucked in that I was afraid it would turn unhealthy and I stopped doing it.
Tangentially, what do people use for telnet programs today? I used to just use the telnet command line on Windows, but that's gone for very obvious security reasons. Have most BBSes moved to ssh or similar?
It works well enough on several of the Telnet BBSes listed here, although BBSes are not what I wanted the tool for, and the operating systems I use it on actually retain either their original telnet client in base or a packaged one.
That's because I tested it against a handful of the Telnet BBSes listed here when I wrote it. (-:
There are a couple of well-supported Telnet programs you could use. A common one is SyncTerm which is purpose-built for the BBS scene (also is free). Zoc is another popular one, but it is more designed as a general-purpose terminal emulator (great for SSH-ing into servers). Zoc is commercial software.
Reminds me that I wanted to expose an old T.A.G. BBS to the web as a nostalgia project recently. Feel free to check it out, create an account, play some LORD, Trade Wars 2002, Usurper, Messages, etc. I just wanted the experience to live on as I remember it with nothing more than a modern web browser required. https://nightwatchbbs.com
Definitely get a nostalgia buzz thinking about the early 1990's BBS scene. Had a very vibrant community of BBS users in my city during that time.
It is ironic and somewhat interesting that the biggest aspects of the BBS scene that most people seem to miss (the community/local culture, meeting like-minded people in real life, some of the games, ANSI art, Echomail discussions), are all things borne from the technical limitations of the time. Slow modems and high long distance charges meant most people kept to their local boards. Games had to be designed in text with only a rudimentary colour scheme (sure, there was RoboBoard, RIP, NAPLPS and other graphical protocols - none which really caught on all that much) and still be compelling. Most were limited turn based (which meant being forced to only spend a couple hours a day playing, then having to wait). "World-wide" networks like FidoNet were dog-slow by today's standards (it was a toss-up whether a message would reach its recipient faster on an FTN network or via snail-mail), so discussion threads would last for days but only have several hundred messages in them to sort through.
I remember the years and work spent to try to improve on these limitations. Galacticomm and eSoft had their huge hackish ways to get past the non-multitasking nature of DOS and the IRQ limits of PCs to allow people to run huge multi-line boards on regular PCs. We saw Planet Connect dramatically lower the cost of distributing FidoNet packets via satellite downlink (still needed telephone uplink if you were sending, though). We saw big serial breakout boards and modem boxes (Galactibox?) come out. And of course, faster modems. Up to rip-roaring 33.6kbps speeds at the peak of the BBS era.
Ultimately, the internet and the "real" operating systems that are commonplace today overcame those limitations in ways that were pretty unfathomable to most of us common BBS users and sysops of the day. Unfortunately, BBS's today really only appeal to those of us who had lived through the struggle of configuring COM ports or QWK readers (or for many of us, a tosser/scanner, door game, FOSSIL driver, or getting DESQview working just right).
Reflecting, I feel like those limitations are what forced things to be good. With the limited toolkit, you had to focus on ux in a way that's not realistic to do today. So many classic games had excellent gameplay in spite of/because of those limitations. And waiting until midnight to play your turns on all those door games. It was compelling.
Contrast to a modern social media platform where you're just perpetually bombarded by mountains of shit... because they can.
I run a "modern" BBS, Xibalba. Something I find is actually quite a few "callers" visiting the board are new blood. Younger generation that never lived through or touched a BBS but usually fall into one of two camps: 1 - "I'm tired of the modern corporate Internet", 2 - I just want to learn about history.
People still login to play games (I'm writing a new one!), and chat. Downloads here and there when you have hard to find history items, etc. Certainly nothing like it's heyday, but enough to keep me happy anyway :D
BBS story... A local BBS had an issue where one of the features would cause it to crash when activated. The sysop worked around it by changing the main menu to read:
and just trusted people wouldn't ever try it more than once.BBSes is one of those last places in the internet where you still can find your tribe without algorithms and, too much crying about politics. I’m glad it’s still hard UX entry to many as we don’t need many there. Just those enough few who get it
Unfortunately it lost one of the most compelling features of the classic BBS culture: location bias.
I met many local people though BBSs. It was an amazing way to find like minded geeks near you.
I think that if you are 40+ which is BBS target continually, then you should know all neighborhood nerds worth knowing, internet BBSes where you don’t lose time on idiocracy is exactly that neighborhood worth virtual saving. Post code doesn’t matter that much as the right mental model to survive and thrive there.
Where do you live that you know the people in your neighborhood?
San Jose. My wife and I have lived in the same house for 10 years and know about 80% of the neighbors in a two block radius. We also probably know 50 additional families within a square mile as a result of our kids going to public schools here. This is essentially just like how it was when I grew up in the 80s, in a rural East Coast City of about 75k.
In the area where instead of Waymo, local taxi driver who still look like me and speaks my language drives the cabs and gives me discounts when we both have last ride back home from downtown. And we talk to each other more than sue each other
I'm ok with losing location bias. being from a small town and only having 50 ppl in our area code that werent long distance that knew about bbss meant 80% of them were crazy, old, or had weird/obscure interests. I did make a lot of friends during that era.
Yes, I miss those days. The late 80's through mid 90's was the golden age of BBSing. The transition from BBSes to ISPs was fun, but I still miss the community aspect of BBSes.
Interestingly, the FediVerse has that. Not in the big nodes that you've probably heard of, like Mastodon.Social. But there are loads of smaller nodes that definitely have moderate to strong degrees of locality.
> I’m glad it’s still hard UX entry to many as we don’t need many there. Just those enough few who get it
Of course, we can't forget the rampant elitism among sysops (and no, I'm not counting myself outside of that group - I was downright insufferable back in the day).
I think onion services are actually a really great way to make a BBS service. It's extremely easy to setup.
Here's a little demo forum I've been working on. Can runs on a potato.
https://gitlab.com/here_forawhile/torumplus/-/raw/main/Torum...
I was playing around with making a Pico-8 like fantasy console, but DOS inspired. Telnet support is on the list of todos.
I tried getting into Telnet BBSs 20 years ago, but quickly got so sucked in that I was afraid it would turn unhealthy and I stopped doing it.
Tangentially, what do people use for telnet programs today? I used to just use the telnet command line on Windows, but that's gone for very obvious security reasons. Have most BBSes moved to ssh or similar?
I'm probably a bit of an outlier in that I wrote my own.
* https://jdebp.uk/Softwares/nosh/guide/commands/nvt-client.xm...
It works well enough on several of the Telnet BBSes listed here, although BBSes are not what I wanted the tool for, and the operating systems I use it on actually retain either their original telnet client in base or a packaged one.
That's because I tested it against a handful of the Telnet BBSes listed here when I wrote it. (-:
People use Telnet, but generally SSH for "modern" BBSes. Look into the following terminals, they're all great:
- IcyTerm - SyncTERM - TERMinator - NetRunner
All support SSH. The top 3 support audio, sixel, RIP, and others as well. Even support for Amiga and C64 fonts/etc.
Enjoy!
There are a couple of well-supported Telnet programs you could use. A common one is SyncTerm which is purpose-built for the BBS scene (also is free). Zoc is another popular one, but it is more designed as a general-purpose terminal emulator (great for SSH-ing into servers). Zoc is commercial software.
SyncTerm: https://syncterm.bbsdev.net/ Zoc: https://www.emtec.com/zoc/index.html
It's still there if you want it, even in Windows 11, under the old Control Panel > Programs&Features > Turn Windows features on or off >
But Telnet Client has not been enabled by default for a while now.
https://www.laptopmag.com/how-to/enable-and-use-telnet-on-wi...
Reminds me that I wanted to expose an old T.A.G. BBS to the web as a nostalgia project recently. Feel free to check it out, create an account, play some LORD, Trade Wars 2002, Usurper, Messages, etc. I just wanted the experience to live on as I remember it with nothing more than a modern web browser required. https://nightwatchbbs.com