It was fragmented. Remember long distance phone calls were a separate additional charge. Hours long bbs sessions over long distance were a mistake you’d probably only make once. except for phone phreaks with a captain crunch whistle. (There was a cereal box giveaway that accidental emitted the operator admin tone of 2600hz . Once emitted you could use touch tones to override standard billing routines. People doing that from home went to prison. I never did it but I subscribed to the hacker magazine of the same name for a while it was small format like 8.5/11 folded in half and stapled)

You’d go on for a few hours in the evening, often late into the night. Connection speed were slow as balls. 14.4kbps it could take all evening to download an image or a game. I remember prince of Persia which was a game with animation ahead of its time had copy protection built in. “Go to the fourth page of the manual and read the second sentence. Drink the potion equal to the number of letters in the third word” all the other potions killed you. I didn’t buy the game and never made it past that screen.

I was coming online at the end of that era. I used an internet enabled version called hotline. I’d dial up my local internet exchange provided by the university in town, make sure my tcpip extension was loaded and connect out from there.

Once on it was a sort of Message board. Not everyone present at the same time, dms with people on at the same time as you. Pirated software. Hotline had a tracker service for server discovery.

Conversions were weird geeky posturing stuff. Childish irritating fuck-heads were the norm. (At least in my circles)

2) sometimes there would be ads in magazines, once on any given BBS, there would usually be text files available for download with listings of other BBSs and dail up numbers, usually by city / area code.

3) both. there were a small handful of dominant big name BBSs, usually with some limited free access and paid access beyond that with lots of dialin lines, lots of up to date stuff available for download, etc., basically run as a business like an ISP and with fulltime staff. Then there would be smaller, hobbyist BBSs with one or a few dialin lines, probably free or very cheap, but less stuff available for download, updated less often, or maybe just a part-time operation instead of 24 hours. various schools, clubs, magazines, etc. also operated their own niche BBSs for users too/members too.

4) mostly just like usenet group, mailing list, forum, etc. it's not that different from, say, reddit or stack overflow or something like that, other than being all text, shorter messages, and generally people would be posting using their real name / identity, and often discussions on BBSs would lead to meetups in person and vice versa, maybe you'd recommend your school friends to use or try a certain BBS. to me, that was the big difference vs the internet today where it is mostly anonymous and discussions never really lead to meetups or ongoing friendships.

5) a lot of the discussion was just about where to buy hardware, prices, buying/selling gear, and hardware / products themselves. a big part of it was just about distributing files too - software, shareware, images, adult content, etc.

2) I had a Commodore 64 and 300 baud modem cartridge. The modem came with an intro package for CompuServe, so I got my parents to let me try it out, - this was in 1984. The calls cost ~$15/Hr for the long distance phone call to Ohio, and ~$12/hr for CompuServe (total of $84/Hr in todays dollars), so I didn't poke around too much! But I was amazed that my computer was actually talking to a computer several states away. I did find a list of local BBSs in my local phone area though. Interestingly, the modem was so cheap (typical Commodore) that it didn't have a dialer - you had to dial the number on the phone, and when the other end answered, plug the cord to the handset into the modem. No war games dialing possible!

3) I think the BBSs in my area were small - mostly one phone line in AFIK. There were some BBSs that had pirate C64 games, but I didn't ever get access to those. I did find that there were a lot of CP/M BBSs, so I bought the C64 CP/M cartridge (a whole separate CPU), and was able to download lots of free/open source programs & programming tools for it - I do remember getting an assembler and a Pascal compiler.

4) Honestly being a young nerd, I didn't post many messages, but read and learned a lot. Where the local BBSs are, what the popular software was, what "good" computer equipment was.. I read about these "play by mail" games that really intrigued me, but never did it.

5) not a lot of programming talk - a lot more about hardware and the BBS scene, file "sharing", etc..

Years later, I thought I'd start my own BBS. I had obtained a DOS PC, and my plan was to get a ~600MB drive for it at a cost of ~$1500. I ordered this from a company I found in Computer Shopper magazine, but they never shipped the drive. I reversed the charges on my credit card, and that $1500 became a substantial part of the down payment on my first house (with a morgage at 8% interest, btw..)

2) I discovered LOIS from an IRL friend BlackDragon, RIP. The sister site in northern California was TREX.

3) LOIS was used by many people in the county. The operator / owner Pete a.k.a. Communicator had phone lines in multiple NPA/NSX that forwarded to a bank of lines in his room. He had multi split-66 blocks in his room with LED indicators that the line was ringing or in use. He did a good job of keeping the wiring neat or neater than I imagined it would be. IIRC there was something like 30 phone lines into the system. RIP Pete and many others from that time. After some time the site was connected to the internet via telnetd but I don't know it's current state other than the domain and its associated DNS NS domain appear to still exist but telnetd is down and the A records are gone. At least half of my IRL friends from that site have since passed away. Prior to that I was in a CB radio club called the Greybeards and needless to say most of them passed away long long ago.

4) The vibe varied day to day. People talked about whatever was on their minds. Long running D&D games were popular. Social and sexual topics were popular. Relationship issues were popular. But really it was whatever people were dealing with at the time. Hanging out at places that served coffee all day were popular.

5) There was not much discussion of programming. It was a social platform and we had gatherings at pizza places all the time. Pizza places with beer was a mandatory requirement.

For some idea of the overall vibe just watch all 4 seasons of Stranger Things minus the supernatural bits. It's surprisingly spot on.

2) local phone numbers, that use of the word "server" would have been unknown to me

3) again, what's a server?

4) limited discussion, games was the focus, my memory is probably wrong

5) the abbreviated word "tech" would not appear until at least a decade later. Programming was offline in books, class and classmates; not online. It was limited, flaky chat, no "topics" except games

I wasn't, but I didn't...beyond trying to connect a few times unsuccessfully and connecting once or twice and not knowing what to do.

Which is to say the era of BBS's was very much unlike the internet because only a very very small handful of people ever actively participated in BBS's in a meaningful way...remember the famous BBS's like The Well were a long distance phone call for most people...and there was no Google to tell you about BBS's you could call toll free...and long distance was expensive.

If a person was online, it was probably Compuserve or later AOL.

The commercial internet changed everything. For the better.

2) The phone numbers were in a little ad box in the newspaper one time.

3) Most people seemed to bounce around to each BBS but there were communities within each that also seemed to stick there. I expect that was partially due to relationships that people had with the sysops.

4) It was a small East Texas town, so people were generally friendly. We were just kids, like 12 years old, having political discussions with adults. People would also trade or offer up gear they had. I remember inviting a high school guy over to my (parent's) house to install a 28.8k modem for FREE because he had upgraded to 56k. He just gave it to me for nothing. As far as I knew people just treated each other like people. I don't recall ever knowing I was being excluded from something because of my age. For a while there were monthly meetups at a local pizza place.

5) I wasn't interested in programming back then. I remember a lot of talk of hardware, mostly modems, one guy trying to convince every Amiga was the future, file sharing/warez (I downloaded Duke Nukem 3D from a BBS in 5MB zip files), chess and other games over FidoNet.

Another good place for BBS phone numbers was on a warez crack screen.

Quite some time later also ran an OS/2 BBS for a while that I started with a younger highschooler. By then there were lots more BBSes and online services but not much for OS/2 so that made sense. I recall getting an amazing discount on a US Robotics Courier modem (the large flat black one, Dual Standard I think it was) it was so much faster. At that time I also had a job and the office used Telebit Trailblazer modems that had a fast proprietary protocol for communication between offices. I once did tech support from Toronto to Vancouver to recover corrupted OS/2 drives at an IBM office, I sent Norton Utility over the modem and a series of things to enter at the DOS prompt to reconstruct/undelete the OS/2 HPFS filesystem. This part doesn't have much to do with BBSes but that's what it was like around those times. Laplink was another super popular file transfer utility that could directly connect two computers using a printer/parallel, serial cable, or remotely via modem. BBSes were possibly how I also found the VESA VGA driver for OS/2 1.3 that a summer student had made at an IBM office--it was incredible being able to run high-res (800x600 or 1024x768) graphics on a PC clone and ATI VGA card (overclocked 11 MHz ISA bus) running OS/2.

2) We got a small list of boards from the family friend who helped install our modem, and after you had the first few boards most of the logout screens had a long list of others. There were also lists (by area code) that you could sometimes download from the files section, or some of the grey area ones were traded (usually required NUP/NUV anyway -- new user password/new user voting).

3) Both. Some 20+ node boards were legendary. Some boards were so empty that the sysop would break in after barely giving you time to login because they were so happy to finally see a caller.

4) Drama seemed to matter a lot more. Today it's mostly just drive-by arguing on X or something, and after you exchange unplesantries you move on with your life. On early boards (and into IRC) the communities felt more insular and drama really could divide an entire community and leave lasting marks. Topics were all over the place. Flirting seemed more open, and plenty of fights were just over girls because at the time the female side of tech was extremely unrepresented.

5) How to troubleshoot/fix computers was common. Discussing specific programming languages really bloomed with Usenet and IRC. The t-files on boards that were most interesting to me were about making computers do things they weren't meant to do. Fravia/ORC+ reversing tutorials, or phrack, etc etc.

1 - When I started I'd call every couple of days. By the time I got into high school (the twilight of local BBSing in my area as dial-up ISPs moved-in) I was calling boards every day. We had a reasonably lively BBS community (for the population) and had real-life meetups, too. Missing a day sometimes meant missing a lot. I know of at least one married couple that met on the boards in their late teens. It was a pretty neat scene.

I used a lot of "Procomm Plus", but "Telix" and "Qmodem" were popular on the PC platform, too.

"Offline reader" software was really, really helpful. This was software that let you download a "packet" of message boards and email, read and reply offline, then upload your responses. (I was of the "Silly Little Mail Reader" religion.)

Once I got Windows 3.1 and could multitask I'd dial-in to a board, download an email "packet", then queue up and file downloads or uploads while I read messages, and maybe even got my reply upload prepared.

2 - The guy who sold me my first (used) modem gave me a couple local board numbers. BBS ads and lists downloaded from boards gave me a few. Word-of-mouth was how I got into the "underground" BBS scene.

3 - Locally there were just small single-line boards. Because some boards straddled two local calling areas they were more popular, but none of them were big. I recall a 40 user board being large. I called some Cleveland, OH-area boards, and there were definitely some bigger multi-line systems there with hundreds of users.

4 - Politics, humor, local issues, computers and tech, gaming, hacking, and "in joke" local board culture stuff are the things I remember. I stayed out of the political stuff, for the most part.

5 - Personal computing software and hardware were the main technical topics on most boards. There was a local board that had a fair amount of amateur radio discussion, too. I don't remember a lot of local BBS programming discussion. There were forums in the big online services (CompuServ, Prodigy, GEnie, etc) where programming was more seriously discussed. On the "underground" side cracking copy protection, hacking, phone phreaking, and virus writing were the more technical discussions (and, of course, there was the trash talking).

Some companies would put up a board to support their own software and, obviously, that dominated the discussion there.

Or would your PC just download a local copy?

Downloading files might also be limited by an upload/download ratio restriction, too.

A friend of mine wrote an external program for a particular BBS (what were colloquially known as "door" programs-- software adjunct to the BBS that remote callers could interact with) that allowed you to "bank" your quota time.

I was on most evenings and most of the weekends except when riding with Ward to the computer club in Chicago.

When cell phones came out they offered free call forwarding which I used the heck out of to get into Chinet, then InterAccess when commercial Internet became a thing.

Later on, on Windows machines it was CrossPoint. Again, I can't really remember the name of the interactive terminal software, but I think it was HyperTerminal.

2) Basically, via word-of-mouth from fellow local geeks. In the usual lingo, they wouldn't have been called servers at that time, though, but BBS (or "mailbox" in some places)

3) There were local hubs, but generally it was pretty fragmented and decentralised. To this day, I find it absolutely fascinating how local BBS regularly connected to regional hubs, which in turn connected to continental hubs, from which data then got exchanged with the rest of the world via the Internet and TCP/IP. An email from Europe to the US or a newsgroup post could still take a few hours to arrive at its destination.

4) In general, I want to say it used to be both kinder and more sophisticated than on most online sites and social media (figures ...) today, but to some extent that might be nostalgia talking. However, I particularly remember dedicated politics newsgroups where actual discourse about delicate and controversial subjects was possible - with people even agreeing with you, if your argument was conclusive - can you believe it?

That doesn't mean it was all nice and civilised. Trolls and very vocal people with extreme positions existed at that time already.

5) Some things I remember: Amiga vs. ... (Atari, Mac, later on PC); the future of the Amiga; RISC chips

Another fond memory that just came up is playing VGA Planets, which was a play-by-mail, multi-player turn-based strategy game. While technically you could actually play it via snailmail (what the cool kids used to call traditional physical delivery of letters at the time). the most common way of exchanging the data updates for each turn was via BBS.

Might've been either NComm or Term. Another piece the puzzle I just remembered was compression utilities such as LHA (and later LZW).

Typically every couple days, but that all depended on how much free time (and available telephone time) one had.

> What program would you use?

Typically, a "terminal program". Qmodem (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qmodem) and ProComm (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Procomm, link is what comes up on Wikipedia) were two popular favorites.

> 2) How did you even discover servers in the first place when you first started out?

Magazines and/or word of mouth.

> 3) Were there big popular servers that everyone used or was it fragmented?

Some of both, but way more fragmented than centralized (running a "big server" was also a "big expense" on the part of the Sysop, so most were small hobbyist endeavors that supported one to some small number (usually single digits) of concurrent users).

> 4) What was the general vibe of discussions like back then? How was it different than now?

As most were small (one or two phone lines to the BBS) and because toll (long distance phone) calls were charged by the minute, most were small isolated islands within a local calling area (which 'local' calls were usually unmetered [not charged a per minute charge]). So one usually ended up discussing with the same group of other users of that bbs rather than never encountering the same user again as is the case today. I.e. it was more a "remote access social club" for geographically "near" individuals.

At the same time, no one had the ability to broadcast to the world (in the same manner as FB, Twitter, Youtube, Tiktok, etc.) so there was (sometimes) less "politics" and/or if there was "politics" being discussed it was often local instead of national.

2) I'm honestly not sure how I found my first. Possible I found some number at the local library, possible a friend in high school gave me one. Once you found one, you could learn about others from that one. There was a real culture of different sysops trying to get you to use their board (but only up to a point because it used phone lines)

3) It's really difficult to know. There was no equivalent to web search or a way to see what everyone else was doing. I'd expect the popularity followed some kind of power law, but everyone used a different subset of boards.

4) It's difficult for me to remember. Probably much shorter messages that would seem "simple" by today's standards.

Amiga bbs were 3l373 and PC bbses were for n00bs. However, Amiga bbses were all ASCII while PC bbses had way better ANSI graphics.

My bbs alias was "interrupt". I had no idea what it meant but I thought interrupt handlers were cool (they are!).

Someone wrote there wasn't politics but as I recall there was lots of bickering and quibbling. Things like "X banned me from his bbs for Y. He is a turd! Spread the message." Some people registered under others names and acted as pricks. I used the "sysop assistance" paging feature to wake up sysops in the middle of the night. Got me banned from more than a few bbses. :p

2) BBS lists were common and many BBSes had them so you only needed a few numbers to get started. Computer stores usually had them too.

3) A city would have dozens or even hundreds of BBSes in larger markets. Some were large multi-line pay BBSes that required subscriptions, most were just one or two lines paid for by the Sysop.

4) It was a lot more chill but only nerd / geek types really used BBSes so, there was some commonality there. More of a sense of overall community.

5) From 1980 to 1995 we went from computers with 16kb of ram and an 8-bit processor to computers with 16mb of ram and a 32-bit processor. There was always some new tech to talk about. It was a very exciting time!

1. I used to go to local computer stores to get a locally produced "magazine" - printed on news print - that was focused exclusively on computing in and around Orange County (where I lived). The back pages were all listings for locally run BBSes with their phone numbers.

We didn't have a lot of money, so most of my equipment was hand me downs. Back then, the phone company charged you by "zones" - the further from your "zone", by area code and first three digits of the phone number, the more it cost per minute to call. If they were in your same zone, it was free.

I'd sit down with the magazine and the phone book and figure out which numbers were in my zone and circle them. Then, each evening when my mother was asleep or otherwise no longer using the phone, I'd dial into each one to see what they were about.

I eventually landed on about five I'd check regularly, once a night. I played doors (online games) and participated in the online forums.

Eventually, I convinced my mom to spend the money to let me run my own BBS, which rang up as busy when I did my nightly rounds to the other systems.

2. The back pages of that magazine. I want to say it was called "OC Computing", but probably not.

3. Fragmented as hell - see my explanation for the zone system above. If you count Compuserve, Prodigy, and GEnie as BBSes - and we probably should - those were the only "big" games in town. I met folks from around the country on them.

But, otherwise, it was all local due to calling costs. We occasionally met in person at local pizza parlors so we could put faces to the handle. That was AWESOME.

4. BBSes were self limiting by location and by technical capability. In my experience, few of the discussions were especially technical. It was really a place where the BBS owners could promote their other interests or build community. Everyone looked out for each other and, over time, got to know each other pretty well. As one of the youngest in the community, they tended to especially look out for me and want to help me on my computer journey. It was an overwhelmingly positive experience.

I was a very lonely kid due to things beyond my control (I lived a 30 minute drive from where I went to school, so I never had any of those after school friendships others had. We moved a lot, so I never really had friends near me, either). When I finally went to high school near where I actually lived, I gained a group of tight friends. I slowly let the BBS go since I was getting my social life organically.

5. It was the first place I ever learned about "open source" - I'm not even sure the term was popular yet. BBSes had a lot of file download sections - usually pictures and, um... pr0n... but occasionally shareware applications. When I was learning Pascal, I found a helicopter side shooter game someone else had written and compiled in Pascal. I asked if they would share the source with me so I could learn, and they just... let me have it. It was incredible.

But that's all I remember technically. Not sure if that was just because I never focused on those things or hung out in those forums, or whether they just weren't a part of my BBS experience. I remember the BBSes being less about technology and more about community - finding friends online to meet up with offline, getting exposed to new ways of thinking, learning about cool things happening in my area...

All of that experience has inspired me to try and build a similar experience on top of the ActivityPub protocol. I just released the first version for my local community - https://sociallyconcord.com - and am actively improving it so more people will want to get on. To simulate the zone thing, joining is invite only, and you can only get an invitation code from an existing member.

I intend on eventually opening another instance for a wider community of friends and colleagues who don't live in my town.

BBSes were what social networking promised us. That we ceded control to a bunch of money-pilled perverts is the problem, not the social network itself.

I'm curious what was the age range of most people at these meetups back then?

Also was it like all "nerds" at that point

I should also note - the person who handed most of his equipment down to me was also active on local BBSes, primarily focused on the gay community at a time and in a place where that was not a topic people were really allowed to discuss at all. He was a good friend of my mother's, and I didn't learn that about him until much later. He used to hang out on a BBS called "The Strawberry Patch", which was for those who were attracted to gay, red-headed men.

Yet another example where online communities can help people find "the others" to build their communities and find support.

https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://www.bbsdocumentary.com...

https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://software.bbsdocumentar...

https://archive.org/details/bbs_documentary

https://archive.org/details/BBS_Documentary_DVD_Set

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nO5vjmDFZaI

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41848656

BBS: The Documentary (2005) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38746221 - December 2023 (65 comments)

Enjoyed Jason Scott’s BBS documentary - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31740247 - June 2022 (39 comments)

Ask HN: What was it like to use BBS? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29140217 - November 2021 (230 comments)

The Full BBS Documentary Interviews Are Going Online - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16221915 - Jan 2018 (1 comment)

BBS the Documentary (2013) [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9521867 - May 2015 (23 comments)

Others?