A Little Something About the Magic of the Early '90s BBS (Patreon)

BBSes were cool. The networks of boards that sprung up in the 90s seemed magical during that time just prior to everyone getting Actual Internet Access and broadband connections. I'm thinking like 1990-91 for me, though I suppose the time frame probably varies depending on where you were.

The nice thing about a BBS is that, within reason, you could dial in with just about anything and still participate. I went from my C128 to an Amiga 500 and the best part about that particular upgrade was that I was finally using a reliable 80 column computer that could display hot ASCII art the way it was meant to be seen.

While a BBS could specialize in file transfers or having a library of textfiles (sometimes called T-Files or G-Files, depending on the software running said BBS), they were mainly message boards. The person (or people) running the board created a bunch of subs devoted to different topics. Ya know, "music" or "Area Code 707 Local Talk" or "type the word shit over and over again." The idiot crowd I fell in with was already running a few boards, mostly heavy on the "let's type curse words into the computer" thing since most of us were under 18. Since we were off in our own little corner, no one would ever know. You'd have to dial up the board to see any of that stupid shit. Meaningless, internecine drama would spring up all the time, though little of that ever went anywhere. Like, sure, you could go get in a fist fight with someone about BBS shit, but were you actually going to do that? No, almost certainly not.

The stakes got raised once the boards started joining networks. There were a bunch of big, nationwide networks, like FIDOnet or WWIVnet. But there were also smaller, local networks. I forget the name of the main network in Sonoma County and the surrounding areas, but it was run by a bunch of extremely boring old dudes. Like they might as well have been HAM radio dicks or something, such sticklers for their petty rules. We ended up creating own own local network so that our four or five boards could talk to each other, allowing us to send the word "fuck" over much greater distance than before.

I mostly started writing this because the way these boards networked with each other was pretty neat, for the time. Essentially, once per day, usually at night, one BBS would call another BBS in the network--usually the closest one to avoid long distance phone charges. The machines would talk to each other and exchange data bout the state of each message board. Messages would get posted, deleted, and so on. All the new stuff would be exchanged between the two boards, the call would end, and the new data would be integrated into the message boards. You could also send emails to other users across the network, which was neat.

Anyway, your local board would populate with messages from around the network on a daily basis, so every morning (in theory) you could call up and see what everyone else had to say about whatever dumb shit you were typing about yesterday. Or the day before... or even further back. In larger networks you might be communicating with boards that were four or five hops away, and depending on when you sent a message and when each board did its regular network call, things could take even longer. Impatient sysops would force multiple network calls a day, just to force their amazing messages out as fast as possible, though this was frowned upon in some networks since most boards only had one phone line and didn't want you jamming it up.

Back on our small, dumb little BBS network, a few of us just started running our own local instance of a private BBS. No one could call it, I would just login locally, post my shit, then spread it to the network by forcing a network call. It was pretty convenient and also very dumb!

The idea of an email that might take a week to work its way across the country and back again would vanish for all of us within the next year or so. I mean, again, depending on where you were, those days were already gone by 1991-92. College kids were getting shell accounts by then, and the world of BBSes fell away by 1995 or so. But it was all so small, and the idea that I could call up a friend's computer and use it to send unsolicited curse words to person in another part of the world was really something special.

I lost touch with a lot of big dummies I was Online Friends with. You know, the sort of people who have a party and you drive to their house, see everyone else in person and say "oh. Right. Yeah, we're idiots." So you take a picture of all of you brandishing firearms and looking very cool, and that was that.

Some of the boards I called made this list, which is a fun look at some very good and very bad board names. http://bbslist.textfiles.com/707/

I mean we couldn't all have names as cool as "& The Temple of the Screaming Electron."