O’ BBS, where art thou?

For a number of Internet denizens, the “Information Superhighway” as we used to call it has always been a part of reality. For others, there was a clean segue from an offline world to an online one. Large online services started popping up, and many people found a doorway from AOL onto the Internet.

Some of us, however, started out in the online world in a different way. We used Bulletin Board Systems (BBS), which were small to medium sized “online services” that someone would run on his or her computer. The software would sit there waiting for phone calls, and people would dial with their modems into various BBSes and send mail, post messages, download files, play online games, chat, etc.

It’s a technology that I still think about and miss quite a bit. I always try to put my finger on exactly what it is about the BBS that I miss, and why the Internet always comes up short for me, at least in regards to the feelings I had for this now ancient online technology.

I thin it’s a combination of things. First, I started using BBSes around age 12 – it was a time in my life that I was really getting seriously into PCs (I had only had a C64 up until then), and the whole x86 world was a strange new land with so much to learn. BBSes were a doorway to both see new ways of using this technology, as well as talk with people much more knowledgeable than I was at that age. The idea of going “online” was still a fairly unknown and “computer elitist” activity, only those really in the know got online. It wasn’t an activity the average person would perform, it was the stuff of movies and urban myth.

I think, however, the biggest piece of it was the kind of community that existed on the BBSes. While the Internet is amazing, allowing people to talk to anyone in the world instantly, there was a kind of close-knit, cozy atmosphere to a BBS. For the most part, to avoid long distance telephone charges, people only dialed BBSes in their local area code. Because of that reason, the people you saw online were people that lived close by to you in real life. There were only a handful of BBSes in the area, as opposed to millions of websites. Everyone knew each BBS and the person who ran it (The SysOp or System Operator), knew what kind of capabilities it had and the history of it. And everyone pretty much knew each other. Perhaps it was different in bigger cities, but in my area, we had maybe 12 BBSes at a time with an overall user base of perhaps 130 people. We didn’t all like each other, but we all knew about each other, had our friends and our inner groups. Hell, since we were all in the same area, we used to have cookouts and other meetups, sometimes getting together to go to a computer show or meeting at someones house. I met a lot of friends on the BBSes.

I think the technology itself also added to the atmosphere. On the Internet, you jump from website to website, basically looking at a page, posting text here and there, but for the most part it is a browsing experience, hence the term “Web Browser”. On a BBS, you connected to a BBS, you were “inside” of it, selecting different options and interacting every step of the way. If you chatted with someone, you could opt to see what they were typing as they were typing it, it was all very up close and personal, very connected. For whatever reason, with all its marvel and speed and ability, the Internet just hasn’t achieved that for me. I think a number of services like virtual worlds and whatnot might attempt at it, but the BBS provided this atmosphere without the need to recreate something, ala Second Life or MMORPGs.

While there are still a handful of BBSes out there, most run now as telnet services off the Internet, the era is gone. For me, the speed, efficiency, and abilities of the Internet have forever changed the way I look at online life, and I don’t think I could go back to BBSes, which is sad – I’m just too used to being able to Google anything I can possibly think of. I do hope, however, that I can find ways of recapturing those same feelings with the Internet that I felt on BBSes.

As a post script to this article, there was a great documentary released a couple years ago that is dedicated to the BBS and the life around it – you can purchase it off Amazon.

Anyone else out there a former BBS user? In memory of my little board, here is a screen shot of the welcome screen I’ve saved over all these years.

Handle: Orson

My BBS: The Pig Pen BBS, run from 92-94 in York, ME and Portsmouth, NH (207 and 603 area code, respectively)

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