Remembering the BBS Days
- Filed under: Uncategorized
- Date: Mar 11,2009
Since this blog is populated mostly by Techie’s, I assume lots of you remember the days of the BBS’s. (Bulletin Board Systems) For those of you who don’t remember but are over 25, shame on you. 
The BBS Days were some of the best times of my life. I was a very young teenager at the time, but it has had a huge impact on my life and the way I handle certain things.
What is a BBS ?
Bbs’s were the predecessors to the internet. Before the internet was known or publicly available, techie’s like us used BBS’s. Basically, a BBS is a computer with software that enables people to call in via modem. Bbs’s were not connected to the internet, since there was no internet, so BBS’s had dedicated phone lines going into that computer in order to receive calls from people calling in with their modem’s. Most Bbs’s only had 1 line connected to it, which means there could only be one user on it at a time. The more popular Bbs’s had 2 or 3 dedicated phone lines. Doing this back in the day was complicated. There was no WINDOWS for multi tasking, and getting multiple modems and multiple “windows” of the bbs software to run on a single PC running DOS was not so simple.
About BBS’s :
The fact that most bbs’s only had 1 phone line wasn’t much of a problem because since you had to DIAL IN to these’s bbs’s, most users were local (Otherwise they would be paying long distance call charges). You didn’t have to worry about being able to have the whole world logging in like you do now days. There were a few BBS’s that were owned by large companies that had T1’s going into them, (Each T1 means about 23 users can connect at once) these sites were usually used for live chatting with other users, but they usually required you to pay in order to use the bbs. (Those T1’s cost thousands of dollars a month!) These BBS’s were very popular because chatting on a computer was a totally new concept for everyone. Remember, there was no IRC, MSN, or anything like that. (There basically wasn’t any internet !!! …. well there was, but it was too expensive and most people didn’t know it existed at the time)
What does a BBS do ? :
Bulletin Board System’s had more or less the same basic functions of the internet. You could send private messages to other users of the BBS, you had forums where you would talk about all sorts of random things, you had online games that you could play against the computer or other users of the BBS, and you had file transfers so you can share files with users of the board.
About File Transfers (and speeds) on Bulletin Board Systems :
File transfers worked differently on BBS’s compared to today’s internet. All users had to keep an upload/download ratio. So basically, for example, for every megabyte of files the user uploads to the BBS (That others can download later) that user gets the right to download 2 megabytes worth of files from the BBS. It’s important to remember that back in the day, BBS’s had 2400 Baud Modem and UP TO 33600 Baud modem as time went on. This means the maximum transfer speed was between 2.4kb/sec to 33.6 kb/sec. This is slower than most cell phone’s internet connections now days. Downloading (or uploading) a single image file could easily take an hour back then! (Right before the extinction of bbs’s, most boards that survived had upgraded to 56K modems which is as high as it gets on dial-up to this day. (Which is still VERY VERY slow compared to basic high speed internet)
Still don’t get the hype about Bbs’s? :
Most people I talk to about my BBS days don’t understand the point. I have trouble understanding that they don’t understand. ;) Anyone that uses the internet now, would have loved BBS’s back in the 90’s if they knew it existed. A BBS was the closest thing to the internet that existed back then. It was the only way to send a “digital” message to someone, the only way to play online games with multiple people, the only way to get pictures, programs, e-books, sound files, and random information ! Bbs’s were slow, only had local people calling in, but that’s all that was available at the time. BBS users and SysOps (SYStem OPeratorS - The owners of the Bbs’s) were basically the pioneers of the internet !
The Conclusion :
Even though the era of bbs’s is now finished, you can still find a few online that can be accessed via TelNet. There are even a few rogue dial-up bbs’s still up and running. Bbs’s taught me how to research things online, how to use a computer, and it’s basically where I learned to touch type. Being a SysOp of my own bbs taught me valuable business skills such as marketing, customer service, and negotiation that I use to this day in my work and the way I run my telecom business. For those of you who never got to know bbs’s but are internet addicts, you’ve missed out on the beginnings of the online world that we know today. For those of you who used to go on Bbs’s, I hope this article brought back a few good memories from the past ! (Feel free to share them in the comments!)
Thanks for reading and for visiting TechieNATION !
