An old photo of a large BBS (2022)(rachelbythebay.com) |
An old photo of a large BBS (2022)(rachelbythebay.com) |
There's a site called textfiles.com that's kind of a museum, and a documentary you can find on YouTube. There's stuff on archive.org too.
It wasn't actually that long of an era. The first modern BBS was probably CBBS in Chicago in 1978, though there's other claimants depending on how you define BBS. When the Internet started to go mainstream in the middle 1990s, the BBS scene died shockingly quickly. So it lasted a little under 20 years, probably 17 or 18.
The glory days of it were probably from about 1985 until 1995. By 1985 you started to have PCs and modems good enough to make it a pleasure to use and cheap enough (and with a used after-market) to achieve significant penetration and enable less wealthy and kids to get online. By 1995 the Internet was starting to kill it.
I read a lot of rosy stuff about how people behaved so much better back then, and some of that is BS. There were trolls, weirdos, creeps, racists, black hat hackers that would mess with you, and malware that would mess up your machine. There were flame wars and sectarian splits where a bunch of users on a BBS would leave for a different one. There was junk content, filler, and nasty stuff like CSAM around.
I would, however, say that the signal to noise ratio was a lot better than modern social media and the modern SEO-trashed web. The big difference is that these systems did not have algorithms biasing things in this direction. You didn't have an algorithmic feed preferentially surfacing the most idiotic or inflammatory content to get you to get angry about it and "maximize engagement." You didn't have algorithms incentivizing endless amounts of chum to game the rankings. It was easy to just ignore the trolls and morons and creeps and go for the good stuff.
Much of the same can be said of the early pre-socials pre-SEO web.
You also didn't have a lot of money involved, and while money can create productive incentives in a lot of areas it seems to create mostly perverse incentives in media, especially if the money is coming from advertisers rather than consumers of the media.
The original sin is really the time-on-site/time-on-app KPI. It is literally destroying civilization. I don't think that's much of an exaggeration.
All in all it was good times, and I miss the ethos and community and sense of discovery of it.
Related:
Ask HN: Remember Fidonet?
Some BBS servers also supported multiple instances by connecting to a master server, which supplied dynamic content such as chat, forum messages and e-mails or door game data to all of the other machines. In large markets a BBS having dozens of lines was not uncommon.
https://web.archive.org/web/20220207120422/https://rachelbyt...
I remember dialing up to a BBS in the area in 1990 that had 4 phone lines. That was amazing at the time when most BBS only had 1 line.
But I do remember downloading text files FILE.IDZ about other BBS, and reading some magazines that mentioned other BBS systems that had 32 and more phone lines but you had to pay. That seemed like it was just on another level in another part of the world that seemed like fantasy compared to the area I was in.
Everything is chugging on, and connects to another system further up the chain at 2 am for network traffic. Except he's on a new phone number, on a new exchange in the state. A 914 exchange. Only the phone company's updates haven't reached all of the telephone switching centers in the sate. Somehow, it was re-routed to 911 services, and I had the police and fire department at the front door responding to a 'silent call'. They went away unhappy. I wasn't very happy either.
It's a very good point. Like, I have some stuff that eats up RAM like a, a very hungry thing, so I went online to see if I could buy some old server blade with a couple TB of RAM from ebay. I found a few, refurbished, not in a horrible condition, not prohibitively expensive (I'm not currently funded, as such) and I remember this distinct feeling, like a frisson of excitement at the thought of having access to ~20 times more POWER than I usually have...
... and then I cooled down, didn't buy a server, and instead rented one with "only" 256 GB RAM until I could fix my stuff so that it now runs with up to 8GB on my laptop. Still expensive, but we're getting there.
Morale of the story: don't know. I prefer to find ways to make software go faster than rely on hardware? I get the feeling I'm very alone on this, seeing as everyone's talking about putting nuclear-powered server farms in space and whatnot.
Definitely in the "wow, cool, they got to wrangle all of that" camp!
I remember dialing up to this BBS quite a bit, and I also remember downloading tons of demos from other BBSs that originally came from SCBBS!
Not really, plenty of BBS systems would allow several connections on one machine. It was more a limitation of the amount of modems you could cram into the box than anything having to do with the OS. Judging by the 4 stickers on each one (on the right) under the floppy drive, I'm guessing each had 4 lines.
There were even hypervisors available, such as VM/386:
My first modem was a Supra 2400 baud, then thinking about all the speed I would have with my new 56.6. My first hard drive was a 20 meg, new it was $320. 20 megs $320 kids, imagine that.
That was for my wonderful brand new Amiga 500. Those were the days.
Wouldn't mind hearing war stories from the cdrom.com guys as well.
Also thinking it's a lot environmental easier to host a BBS than a Discord server.
My first thought was that this was built someone who clearly cared about the system they were running.
Some more discussion then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30096565
IBM had a network that ran over phone cords that were daisycbained from one node to the next.
I never worked with DOS BBS systems, so I can't say about this photo specifically, but the ones I did work with had between one and four dialup modems hooked up to each machine, depending on its capabilities. They did "networking" through a store-and-forward messaging system. It wasn't networking as we'd recognize it today.
But I also kept one extra line just for my PC because it was always a pain to dial out to another BBS or chat room when my mother wanted to use the phone to talk to her long distance boyfriend.
In the alcove on the right, I think I'm seeing 66-blocks, breaking out the phone lines that must be routed to each machine. Two blocks stacked, each with a fanout of wire on the right side.
The blur does interesting things.
Absolutely. The blog post goes to great lengths about why it's stupid to run a cluster, and I run a NAS in my house that has more horsepower than anything from the 90s, but there's a part of me that's still a teenager who wants to run a monster multi-node BBS
The hot car that we all lusted after was maybe something like a SGI Indy or an O2.
https://nitter.privacyredirect.com/ScottApogee/status/159372... Scott Miller - Apogee/3D Realms Founder :
>BBS's (bulletin board systems) were the backbone of the online world before the Internet came along in 1995. Apogee teamed up with Dan Linton's BBS, called Software Creations, and we poured $200k+ into it to grow it to nearly 140 call-in nodes with a T3 (high bandwidth) line.
maybe i'm a bot.
anyway i used to call into BBSs back in the early 90s and the thing I'm remembering is that they survived mostly on donations, and now that I am seeing the infrastructure that supported those systems and recalling the price of hardware back then I'm starting to second guess everything I thought I knew.
And to keep better time, https://beeline.org/beeline/?view=c0a8000daa11ca
It was later upgraded to a 486 https://beeline.org/beeline/?view=188870d0bbc894
Over time the BBS grew into us being a local dialup ISP as my Dad dug deeper into self employeement in the computer age.
Top comment about this photo is ( and the poster) Scott Miller - Apogee/3D Realms Founder @ScottApogee BBS's (bulletin board systems) were the backbone of the online world before the Internet came along in 1995. Apogee teamed up with Dan Linton's BBS, called Software Creations, and we poured $200k+ into it to grow it to nearly 140 call-in nodes with a T3 (high bandwidth) line.
I miss BBSs and that's why I featured them in the story of my sci-fi game! If you are interested: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3040110/Outsider/
Nothing quite replaces the drama level and drama complexity of the small, local BBSs. Especially when the denizens met in the big room with the blue ceiling.
https://www.wired.com/2001/12/sexchart-degrees-of-separation
I was user #12 on the Bloom County BBS and, eventually, got the coveted sysop perms.
It felt far more of an "adult" accomplishment than (much later) when I got my driver's license.
An acrid air, stingy for the first few seconds but then somewhat enjoyable because of the ozon. The smell of stale coffee and cigarettes lingering. The smell of wood for cabinets (instead of pressed and glued materials).
This is how I remember the university where my father worked (more coffee), the teachers room from my moms school (more cigarettes) and the IT department of the university (very strong in the 'IT-smell', but also hard on coffee and sigarettes).
You don't find those smells like that anymore. I'll leave the description of the sound in this room to the next one. This was a loud room!
They were able to set up a 7 x 300baud modems in real-time chat system on an Apple ][ . The original marketing called it a CB (Citizens Band) Simulator. They were able to run up to 1200baud, but I never saw one of those functioning.
As if 7 people chatting through a single 6502 wasn't impressive enough, many of them dedicated one or two of their lines to interlinking with other D-dials.
Talk about an esoteric memory.
- https://www.ddial.com/ - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diversi-Dial
Our ddial was a few towns away so we bought a line in the exchange in between that would forward to the ddial. This way we would not pay a bunch on long distance calls.
“And never again have to pay for a service that would be dirt cheap, if it weren’t run by a bunch of profiteering gluttons!”
- Razor & Blade
Also, it was unusual at the time for a local phone company to receive a request for 25 lines (or more) to be installed in the basement of a residence. They would generally push back thinking you were running a bookie operation or some such.
Side note: virtual 8086 mode was protected mode, or rather, implied protected mode. A task could run in virtual 8086 mode where to the task it was (mostly) looking like it was running in real mode, when in actuality the kernel was running in full protected mode.
Note that the "kernel" was never DOS. It could often actually be a so called "memory manager", like EMM386, and the actual DOS OS (the entire thing, including apps, not just the DOS "kernel") would run as a sole vm86 task, without any other tasks. The memory manager was then serving DOS with a lot of the 386 32 bit goodness through a straw, effectively.
It's very bizarre from today's (or even back then's) OS standards, and evolved that way because compatibility.
You can have a second computer once you've shown you know how to use the first one.
-- Paul Barham, quoted in the COST paper
_Stand still laddie!_
Theres also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirra_chair. (wikipedia has a page for "list of chairs", but not all of them have a dedicated article)
I don't recall DESQview to be all that crashy. I was aware of a number multi-line BBSes that used it (just in the 416). Some BBS software called out its use specifically:
* https://www.synchro.net/docs/multnode_config.html
* http://software.bbsdocumentary.com/IBM/DOS/OMEGA/
Also, a comment from someone whose uncle co-founded the company Quarterdeck:
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29396561#unv_29400530
Also, also, if anyone wants to simulate the old-school DESQview experience, perhaps try out "twin":
* https://opensource.com/article/20/1/multiple-consoles-twin
ASCII windows may not have been everyone's cup of tea but I loved it.
I remember running Win3.11 with-in a DESQview window (and IIRC there was a full-screen mode as well).
--------------
A 286 used around 3 Watts of power, while a current generation PC PCU uses upwards of 150 W. That's a factor of fifty. That's not even factoring in the GPU's, which these computers would have lacked.
This room was neither quiet or cool. While the CPU's were comparatively low power back then, all the other stuff (modems in particular) would have put out a lot more heat than their modern equivalents. However, this room could realistically have been in somebody's residential home basement without any exotic A/C measures. Maybe a wall-mounted unit or two. It would not have pumped out nearly as much heat or consumed as much power as modern gear of equivalent volume.
An IBM AT was capable of consuming nearly 200W [1]. Of course a typical machine would not consume as much, because it did not have its RAM and disk slots maxed out. The CPU indeed consumed around 3W, and normally even lacked a radiator.
A modern PC can consume large amounts of power, mostly determined by the appetites of the GPU. But here is plenty of desktop CPUs with 65W and even 45W TDP, and a typical recent Intel or AMD CPU would consume 3-5W when idle. A quite powerful ARM A7 based system, such as an Orange Pi 5, would draw < 15W under maximum load, likely providing more compute and I/O than that whole room on the photo.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Personal_Computer_AT#Power...
The pictured room is not full of high-performance computing machines, even for the day. (HPC was ruled by mainframes back then, although if this picture was taken well into the obsolescence of the room, high-end workstations (e.g. Silicon Graphics and Sun) may have been gaining on them for some applications.) This room was built for getting a couple hundred callers networked into a BBS where they could access the same files, text chat, and perhaps even MUD a little. This was a fundamentally different beast.
But oddly, at the same time, I was running a WBBS (wave to Mr. W. Conrad, the author) as a local dual 360K floppy PC-XT BBS, I don't recall my OWN phone number for it.
https://groups.google.com/g/bit.listserv.games-l/c/1tg85kGBH...
She had no idea who these people were or why they were upset. I don’t think I copped to it, it was not an easy thing to explain but I did not do that again.
After those 2 weeks, my parents decided to get me my own phone line in my room. That's also week I started running my own BBS. I ran it for several years.
Those were strange and interesting times.
"If you are sticking with the 2022 equivalent of MS-DOS and machines that do exactly one thing at a time, then yeah, you are going to have a whole fleet of systems all sitting there busy-waiting on something stupid."
"Don't recreate the basement full of PCs when the problem can actually be solved with a single box sitting in a cabinet somewhere."
If they really were just PCs to act as a modem-to-network bridge, this seems to be remarkably cost-inefficient. I remember around 1997 helping the university chuck out a few serial line concentrators (no idea what they were actually called), each of which had 32x RS-232 ports that worked up to 19200 baud and a 10Mbit coax network connection at the back. The on-board computer (wouldn't be at all surprised if it was much more than a 68000 or two) interfaced with all the serial ports and translated it to telnet on a remote machine. You could also send it an escape code and then via a primitive command line connect to any arbitrary IP address and port over TCP. I remember in my student days (so maybe 1995) using finger and SMTP directly from these text terminals without actually logging on.
No idea when these became available, but we were chucking them out in 1997 or 1998 as we were upgrading the labs of text terminals to PCs, so they probably at least a decade old by then.
And these usually ran quite a few lines per box, sometimes they would use external racks of modems, but I'm not seeing that here so maybe these were using internal modem cards, so maybe 6 per box, but if they were using external modems it could easily be 12 or more, with the PC cards hosting multiple serial ports, 4, 6 or even 8 per card.
Typically a card would have a single large connector at the back and then a pigtail with a DB9 or DB25 (yes, I know) for every modem.
I touch on similar point of view discussing digital audio work I do for fun. I use CSound, which I've heard described as "assembly language for audio", and I think that's accurate.
Anyway, when I first, FIRST started, and got a tiny bit familiar, I thought "Wow, I can do anything!" but quickly realized I was also responsible for everything. No free lunch.
That seems odd to me, too, because before DOS and the Commodore 64/Apple ][ era, multi-user systems were everywhere.
Not just mainframes and minicomputers, but there were many dozens of multi-user systems based on CP/M, MP/M, and other operating systems. Even Tandy had them.
The revolutionary part of the "personal computer" era was that it was your "personal" computer. You finally didn't have to share it with anyone.
It wasn't as secure or as easy, but you could certainly do multi-user systems without protected mode and within very small RAM amounts.
Boardwatch was the magazine for BBS ( I do not know of any others)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boardwatch
Some all? on internet archive https://archive.org/details/boardwatchmagazine I recall buyingthe magazine back inthe day...
Edit: Ugh... I'm gonna have to go back to floppy images to find it. There's a "MUBBS" for Mac from 1992 showing up in search engine results but that's not the one I'm thinking of. It was more like 1989 or 1990.
“as modems got faster, supporting 16 modems on a single machine became impossible, and it was often cheaper to buy a new commodity desktop PC rather than a much more expensive machine with a 16-port serial card capable of handling the IO.”
I wrote the software for a breakout box that could handle 128 serial ports. It was an ISA backplane with an industrial 286 computer and multi-port serial cards. This was our solution for a MajorBBS system.
The BBS software would have to timeslice between all the cards handling each IRQ, then poll the card details to see which ports needed service.
GalactiComm eventually came out with their own around 1993 that could go out to 255 serial ports and did not require the 286 processor.
By the mid-90’s, Livingston PortMasters were the preferred way to aggregate serial connections, which quickly gave way to USR TotalControl.
[^1]: e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diversi-Dial
I knew a couple of local DOS BBSes that ran multiple lines with PCBoard under DESQview.
I couldn’t afford a second machine in those days and having to sacrifice my one and only PC for the full-time BBS wasn’t fun :)
Access to knowledge, equipment, and budget varied dramatically prior to widespread internet access. Someone setting up a BBS might not even know about multi-line modem cards or serial port expansions. Even if they knew about them they may not have been able to reasonably obtain them. Or they may have been operating on donations, surplus, or discount equipment. Or they simply may not have had the luxury of time to research all of that as user demand meant they were too busy laying tracks in front of the train.
Many BBSes ran on 1-2 lines per PC because that's what they understood how to build or the hardware they had access to. You might be surprised at just how many lines some BBSes setup this way had!
People forget there was a time that anything outside the standard PC was extremely expensive, often had flaky or nonexistent software support, locked you into a fly-by-night vendor that might go out of business tomorrow, was only available via a distributor who wanted to have you talk to a "sales consultant" before they'd sell you something, etc. Many many people chose sub-optimal implementations because it was an off-the-shelf PC they could replace at any time with trivially simple software requiring no special CONFIG.SYS drivers or TSRs to fiddle with. Especially if you'd ever been burned previously.
That said, I have no idea how a multi-node BBS would work, in terms of keeping state synchronized.
Earlier: one PC per user, shared file system using a Novell network. Later: multitasking OS (Desqview, OS/2) or BBS software that natively supported multiple users (like MajorBBS.)
I ran a BBS on an Amiga for a while. The OS natively supported multitasking, but I only had one line. At least I could log in the same time as a user...
That's quite the assumption.
There were a lot of different BBS hosting programs. They wildly varied in what they supported and how they were implemented. Further even within a given piece of software the ways you could configure them and the consequences also varied. Even if a given software supported concurrent users on a single PC for various reasons a BBS might choose not to host that way.
Assuming that the parent commenter is right and that they are using internal line cards, I wonder if the external modems were being added to support higher speeds.
However, the fact that we can see at least 2 (but I think four) 66 blocks means they had 50 to 100 phone lines for the machines visible, which would make sense that the external modems are the primary connection and no internal modems are being used, based on the number of modems visible and the fact that each 66 block can handle 25 lines.
The black cable underneath looked like the shadow of an oval frame
Cars had vents that would blow outside air right were it was needed without using the heater/fan system, or wing windows that you could direct "relatively quiet" air at you.
Now if your car's a/c fails, you get to roll the window down and that's about it.
I've got a nas and a relatively powerful mini-pc for most of my home lab server stuff... but all the same, juggling about 6 BBS related projects I'm hoping I can bring all together later in the year.
That's because she doesn't know what she's talking about.
Even with multiple PCs you would also have similar "shared filesystem" issues. You'd need some sort of fileserver and a shared, network drive. Novell was popular at the time.
So I would say that almost definitely, they are using 1 (or 2 for some on the right side of the photo) external modem per PC connected to the 66 block, those analog phone blocks tied back to the channel bank/multiplexer, and the carrier's T3 tied in there.
No internal modems used at all.
And the person who posted the photo on twitter is none other than Scott Miller, founder of Apogee Software, publisher of some of the most revolutionary games of the late 80's and early 90's, and this BBS (Software Creations) was the cornerstone of distributing the shareware versions of those games. Very cool bit of history, I remember dialing in to Software Creations to download Commander Keen!
PRI was a huge step. The "individual modem" days were a mess. Each modem had a serial cable, phone line, and power brick. I remember doing some maintenance in one of the POPs. There were at least 100 modems, stacked on a cheap plastic shelving unit. The shelving unit was sagging from the weight and heat of all the modems.
This early POP was haphazardly built, so no cable management. I remember a river of phone cables coming out of the wall. The power bricks were also crazy. We had power strips 2 or 3 levels deep, making it a hazard to even get behind the rack without tripping on something.
