What happened to BBSes?

Jonathan Strickland. Dust machine is niched for a finger, pokin ont mitten grabbin, It's easy schnapping the spring work blow and fuels in ont popping corkin Mitch spits and sparking. Its niched for verkin by dust doom coffin, dust robin nickensight zerin keeping hands in dust pockets, reluxant ont vatch dust blinking lights. I love dust blinken lights. Shouldn't that be de blinken lights. Well, I'm sorry that's the way it was written. I know on what we are about

to talk about. UM, we have a little listener mail. This listener mail comes from Patch, actually comes from several people, but Patch wrote the first one. Hi, I found your podcast a few days ago and really like it, and I was wondering if you could do one on the old b b s S. I'm building one myself. Thanks, Well, Patch, we're going to talk about bbs is. And indeed, that quote was not from a movie, It was not from

a song. That was a text file that was uploaded to BBSs and made its way through various bbs is in the in the eighties. Of course that was fake German. It's not real German. Yeah, I remember frong leis And yeah, anyway, I don't know what you would call it English, English, Deutsch, in English, dout English, I don't know anyway. Um, Yeah, And it's funny because the old bbs is, what ever

happened to those? They're still around, not all of them, but yeah, Patch is apparently trying to build an old BBS, but then would be a new BBS. Just confused, that's

a good question. It stands for bulletin board System and it really is sort of the computer version of the old bulletin boards that you would see in dormitories or office buildings or even homes where people would just put up a little note and for other people to see, maybe they had something that they wanted to sell or they were looking to buy, or just a cute joke or something you just want to pop it up there on the bulletin board. Same sort of thing, except in

this case it's all going to be located on a computer. Now, the important thing to remember is this is taking place that the era of the BBS is takes place before the public era of the internet. Right, So, uh, taking it down to bare bones, basically, what you've got is a computer running a piece of software. They will allow you to post and read messages. That's that's the simplest form of what a BBS is. You have had one more element. It allows you allows remote users to post

and read message. I was going to add that, I mean without without the modem attached to it and a phone line. Yeah, it would just it's essentially yeah, I mean it's a bulletin board for one person, which is kind of silly. But the BBS, Uh, yeah, you had a computer that you could dial into so and and the BBS is that I think of our sort of if you will, hyperlocal. Yes, they didn't necessarily have to be, but you know it would be you know, Bob's computer

over here. Remember Bob. We talked about Bob before. He's very generous with the you know, allowing us to use this.

I've been told that I have to call him Robert. Now, yeah, okay, So Robert has this computer and he's got a modem and a phone line that you can use and h Robert hosts messages about I don't know, role playing games for example, and uh, well it's good because you have your community that the people he wants to play with, you know, and get together on Saturday night and spend a couple of hours playing Dungeons and Dragons or uh,

ponds are blitz. That's not role playing game, but you know, you could get people around the table to actually put Yeah, that kind of thing. You have a group of people who enthusiasts who want to play these games with you, and you want to share tactics or messages about it or body jokes. Right, dial up, We're not even there yet, let's keep going anyway. So that's the thing he's got.

Roberts got this computer with a modem, and so uh, Jeff and Steve want to hook up well on onto the bulletin board, so they Jeff calls in the number for the modem on Robert's computer, so he dials in and he can see anything that Steve or Robert have posted on their Jeff is reading messages. Uh wants to comment on something. You post a comment on there and hangs up the modem and then you know, whomever else is in this group can dial up and see what's

on the bulletin board and post messages. However, Uh, generally speaking, I would I think you probably agree with me. Generally speaking, we're talking one person at a time, Yeah, especially the early bbs is where they were limited to a single user at a time. So yeah, again, this is a precursor to the Internet, so you don't have any Internet

that you can log into. Uh, this was kind of these these regional networks really, and not even a network, because you're talking about just a one single machine that you could dial into. So I guess you could call it a network of two machines at any given time. Yeah, because you have the one that is programmed to receive the call. It's the host. Yeah, the host, which you know, the client calls in and and and logs in with

the user name and password. Um, I'm assuming that you would want to do that anyway, despite the fact that as people aren't going to know how to do this, you know how to do this let alone that. But they're not gonna necessarily know where the BBS is and what phone number to call to get there and have the equipment to do it. But you still, you know, have the client log into the host and check and post most messages to it and in some cases files. Yeah.

Do you know when the very first Bolton board system launched or who did it? I do? I don't. Okay, So I asked you a question, and I drop a bomb on you and you have no way of answering it. That's an awesome co host, Jonathan Um, I'm thinking it probably now that I've actually looked at my notes, would be in Yes, that's correct. Ward Christensen and Randy Seuss built the first Bolton Board system as the computerized bolletin Board System. They created it out of Chicago. Well they

built they took down Chicago and built a bulletin board system. Well, I mean, if you're gonna replace Chicago with some then anyway, the Bolton Board System, well you know it's there, used a smaller city to build a BBS anyway, Well they tried. Never mind, I can't make jokes about that city anymore. I was told not to. Uh. The so Chicago. Heck of a town. Uh. The the these guys. What they did was they built up the system. They designed a

program using assembly language actually eight assembly language. They designed this program where it was it would allow people to come in and post and read messages and that's essentially all it could do when it first launched, and it launched it was built in nineteen seventy eight, but it launched in publicly in nineteen seventy nine, and um, well there was. They did announce what they had done in the UH and BITE magazine in November. Um so they

you know, Bite was. If you're not familiar with Bite, how would you describe by I would say it's a computer enthusiast magazine, but it was really um for serious computer enthusiast. These are people who are interested in programming and hacking in the classical I think these are the same people who would order computer building kits that they would build their own personal computers. Yeah. Sorry, I didn't

mean interruption. Go ahead, but it's not like, for example, a PC world would be where you're reading about software and things. These are people who would want to make their own software and build their own It was it was written by and four hackers. That's what you can say. And we're talking about hackers in the sense of people who programmed, not necessarily people who are trying to break

into security systems or create malware. UM. That's a that was something that hacker came to be known for UM later on. But originally hackers were programmers. There are guys who were trying to end women, trying to figure out how to make a computer program do a certain task. And UM, they often weren't really worried about how pretty it looked at the end of the day. So the c b b S, which was the the Computer bulletin Board System, UM, it launches it and and people users

think it's really cool, but it's it's in Chicago. It's using you have to dial in, right, so unless you're local to Chicago, it's a long distance call, so you can't you know, you can't just call in and not and not worry about charges. Uh. And it wasn't distributed. It was just that, you know, they talked about how they did it, and some people read it and thought, hey, this is a great idea, and they attempted their own version.

And among those was a guy named Bill Blue. He wrote a b B S really which one I don't know. He wrote a b B S ABS and it was it was kind of followed. It followed along with the c BBS system. But he built it so that anyone who had an Apple too, and anyone who had the d C. Hayes m M modem very specif think, could

could run the the program. So the CBBS one was particular to Chicago, but Bills was one that if you got that code and you had an Apple computer and you had this modem, you could run this and create your own Bolton board system. And so people started to do that. And uh, back in the day, you know what the fastest or what was considered a fast modem back then, right, Yeah, three D bad. If you don't know what bad is, that means that it could transmit

three hundred symbols in a second. That's not fast people, It's yeah, it's you can't and you can't easily translate BAWD to bits per second. It it's not it's not it's not analogous exactly. It's not analogous. But by the by the time of the well actually that I guess technically literally, the standard is still the same the fastest. About the fastest you can go on a phone line in the United States is uh yeah, is it fifty two? Yeah, because it was supposed to be fifty six, But there

is a legal limitation. I was about to say technical specification,

but it's not the actual speed. But yeah, when I started using a dial up modems the standard and then shortly after that, uh, back back when they stopped being as common, probably in the late nineties early two thousand's, modems hit a practical limitation that there's a limit to the amount of bandwidth you can send over phone line because it's using audio to do this rather than the bandwidth on the other side of the audio space in a phone line. So um, yeah, due to practical limitations.

But yeah, three bod that can you imagine trying to transfer something like a YouTube video or a flash animation at three You might not want to have anything scheduled for the next year. It would take you a very long time the and and that kind of brings us to one of the reasons one of the limitations, or if you will, one of the features of bbs is

they were text based. Yes, they had usually some sort of file structure system that you can navigate so that you could read things that are similar to today's message boards on internet UH sites, websites, UM. So you had the message boards where you could converse with other people who would visit this BBS again, not in real time, but for the most part, because usually at least for the smaller bbs is, you're the only one on that system. You might be on at the same time as the

system operator that's the owner uh systems. That's where sissop comes from. If you've heard that term. It comes from the old BBS days. Actually, a lot of the acronyms and that we see online they have their origin back in the old bbs is. So yeah, you you normally would be having asynchronous conversations, right you would post something, you would log off the BBS. You might check the next day and see that someone's replied to you. It wouldn't be this instant message uh that that we've become

used to on the internet. And now. Some bbs is did eventually get to the point where they had multiple phone lines. So if you would called one and got a busy signal, you could call the next phone line for the same BBS and connect to it and they could actually have multiple users online at the same time, but that that was not the case for your average BBS because you know, if it was just some guy running it out of his um, you know, his his den, it may be that there's just one phone line that

he could even dedicate to it. And of course, if if he's not there at the time, there's always the chance that the BBS would crash. You would call, you couldn't connect, and you know, you you'd be stuck without that BBS until he came back home and fixed it or she. I shouldn't just say he. I mean I always say he because I think that's probably the majority of the users, but it wasn't total all male. Uh. And on these bbs is you could find things besides

the message boards. You could find other things like you you mentioned files. That was That was a little later, but not by much. We talked about shareware and how that that model developed and how games used to spread that way. Um. But yeah, I think that's true. I mean, we're talking about again, we're talking about physical limitations, and in the nineteen eighties we're not talking about you know, gigabyte hard drives or terabyte hard drives. Hard drives. Yeah,

if there were hard drives at all. Um, so we're not talking about anything too particularly large. But people did, um, you know, share information and pirate software, pirate software uh to to a lesser extent. I think that probably, I think you're right. I think that was probably more along the lines of when these systems became more sophisticated. But you know the things that you do on for example, use net groups or I r C now or even back in the earlier days of public uh Internet, Um,

you know you didn't. You couldn't really do that because you just didn't have the hardware to make that happen. It was on a much smaller scale now. They didn't

have games. Um, there are a lot of games that you could play on a BBS Many of them had specific limitations on how long you could play, because you don't want to have one user dominate that phone line, right right, So most of the time these bbs is would have a as a timer, and once you exceeded the limit on that timer, you would get disconnected and someone else could call in sorry go ahead. Um No.

There were also turn based games, if I'm not mistaken, um, where you could you know, log in, play your turn, and log back out and wait for somebody else to the I mean chess was very popular on bbs is. But one of the games that is incredibly popular in bbs is And yes I did play this game, Legend of the Red Dragon, which was often known as just

Lord l O R d UM. It was created by Seth Robinson and it was It was a game where you created a character that um developed skills and prowess, and the goal was to defeat the Red Dragon that is terrorizing this one town. And the way the game worked was it would work in cycles. The game would start and everybody would be on equal ground, and all the people who are playing the game have the same goal. They want to be the one to defeat the dragon.

When a player got to the point where he or she could defeat the dragon and the dragons defeated, new game, I see and everyone starts again at the bottom. Uh. It had other features in it where you could challenge other players to fight, but they were um they were usually it was automated, so when you weren't online and someone else was playing, they could challenge your character to a duel and the computer would run your character as

if you know you were doing it. Uh. You could also flirt with other characters, and there were consequences to flirting, including things like you might be greeted with a child within the game. I won't go into any more detail on that. Yeah, So anyway, it was actually kind of interesting. I had a little bit of a complex social structure to it. Um And some of the other games were really cool too, like the Trade Wars twenty twenty two or two thousand two. That was a good one. Barren

Realms Elite was amazing, really. Yeah. Barren Realms Elite was a multiplayer strategy game and if you could have twenty five people playing this game, and the way the game worked was that would pitt bbs is against each other. Each BBS would essentially be a planet in a in a galaxy of planets, and so you were trying to have your planet come out on top of all the

other planets. So it was this neat competition between BBS is UM And I'm sorry, go ahead, I was gonna say just that that that was kind of interesting because you could you know, BBS is not like the Internet. You know, you log into the Internet. The Internet is one gigantic network you could visit as many bbs is as you liked. Uh, we were really only limited by your phone bill and the amount of time you had

at your disposal. Because each bbs was its own distinct thing with its own community, and some of the communities had multiple liked, some of the communities overlapped, right, and you would find the same people going to maybe three or four of the bbs is in their local area, but some of them would be more niche oriented, and you would really just see a certain group of people just stay there, like especially the ones that were centered

around a very specific topic like dungeons and dragons, right, and yeah, there are a lot of the bbs is that I was familiar with had a specific slant to them, like they were specifically geared toward a particular interest. Um. I know, I know there were plenty of general topic bbs is, but it's you know, the ones that I was familiar with. Now, I didn't I admit I never actually dialed into a bbs I was, um just I didn't really become aware of it until after I had

already started using the Internet or actually bitten net technically. Um, And you know, I was vaguely aware of it, but I didn't have a modem, so I didn't really participate for about five or six that I used to lug into pretty regularly. But um, yeah, I mean and in a lot of cases, I think this is this is sort of what evolved into the online service provider was, you know, the the gradual interest in people of logging

into these systems and they became more complex. Uh, we had lots more people than you have companies looking to uh develop something more robust like a CompuServe or in America online before you know, the Internet became more of a public sphere when it was still dominated by government and academic interests, and you also had at this point the technology for modems has evolved as well, so that you could include things like some graphics in your in your system, like as we said before with BBS, as

it was mostly text based or symbol based stuff because the well, for multiple reasons, One you have limited amount space on the computer that's hosting the BBS, but for another, it's just the limitation of how fast your modem can can conduct data through it. And at that speed you just couldn't do graphics. Um, that didn't stop people from creating as key art. They started doing that. They would use as key symbols to create uh uh sketches. Really I love as art. Well is interesting is they kind

of became a currency on bbs is. People would build a design and they could trade it for other designs or sometimes for other programs things like that. It was kind of interesting that that became currency on BBSs or magic beans or magic beans. I wanted to read a little bit or or refer a little bit to an interesting document I found at text files dot com, which is a it's an archive of BBS text files. This is a text file called what has Killed BBS Systems.

What I find interesting about this is that it was written in nineteen eighty two eight two What has Killed BBS Systems? That, keeping in mind the first public bbs is nineteen seventy nine. Yes, it did not take long to kill the bbs is according to this guy, Well, yes, but I I have a theory on this, but go

ahead and make here. So the points that he made was that he said that the uploading and downloading program was killing bbs is because people would just come in, get whatever they wanted, and go, and they wouldn't they wouldn't participate in the community. Um. They said that there was a retaliation that was getting very cliquish, and people were retaliating against folks who were there just to communicate

and to make friends and to exchange information. UH. He also blamed the proliferation of bbs is in a single area, in any given area. That was one of the things I talked about. How you could be on several bbs is, you know, you would go from one to the other. He he was saying that that's a problem. Um. He says that in places where there were only a couple

of bbs is, things were going great. UM. He said that the loss of anonymity was a big problem, which is interesting because that's something that you hear on internet forums where people are reluctant to tie their own name to an online handle. You know that there's a lot of that still going on today. UM. The anti hacker movement, he said, was a big problem, which was the whole idea of UH. The hacker in the sense of programmer, not in the sense of phone freaker or or malicious hacker.

He says that that whole uh turning the word hacker into something bad was part of what was killing BBS is. Uh, they said that the press is ignorance of the BBS community was a problem. Sissop ignorance, which he said that because it became so easy to host a BBS, people who had no business hosting them were doing so, and that was killing the BBS is. You could argue the same thing for web pages today. I would assume like web administrators would probably say the same sort of thing.

People who run really good websites might really complain about folks who don't run such great websites. Um. So, yeah, it's just interesting to see that these complaints came out as early as a D two and and his his text file is much longer than what I've indicated. But um, bbs is of course kept on going throughout the eighties and into the nineties, and as we've said, they're still out there today. It's just there're no what we're near as prevalent as they used to be right now. Uh. True,

BBS is not on the Internet. It's not you know there there are there are approximations. I mean, you can think about this that the Internet is basically a gigantic form of this. But because they're all kinds of message boards that you can post too, in places to upload and download files from and and online communities. But uh, you know, a BBS itself is a very limited uh world, if you will, if you'll accept that as a term there, and um, yeah, I think that for for the poster

of that post, Um, it's obviously something. It was obviously something very special. He liked that community, uh, and that particular environment. And the more people it's like you you have your uh, your band, your favorite indie band, and then they finally get you complain that nobody ever likes them in everyone likes and they totally sold out exactly. Super Chunk was on NPR. What is up with that? Dude? I saw super Chunk in nineteen nine. Okay, I'm getting

a little ahead of it. Yeah, I'm getting off topic anyhow, But yeah, it's it was. It was that kind of loyalty and interest in the BBS world that I think inspired that, and I mean causes a lot of people now to think back on it, uh favorably. In fact, Um, you know, Jason Scott, did you see this the BBS documentary called the documentary? I saw that it was, Um, I saw the website for it. Of course, don't have

access to the documentary, so I didn't get to watch it. Yeah, they they, I think, get into much more granular detail on bbs IS and and the whole culture. Eight different episodes, right, Yeah, it's on several so you know, I'm sure it would be fascinating. I just didn't have time to check it out before. But but yeah, I mean, so there's there's

a lot to it, but those are those are the basics. Yeah, and and some of the people who are really doing important work in technology today, we're big into bbs IS back in the eighties. So for example, well, I mean there's the laws. Yes, Wozniak he uh, Steve Wozniac he one of the founders of Apple. He was a big proponent of bbs IS back in the day. And of course he even used it to help people figure out how to phone freak. He may remember our phone freaking

episode from several months back. But also there was a guy who wrote a document on bbs as that got

spread around quite a bit. The document called the Bill of Rights Light l i t E. Which was a rephrased bill of rights that were It was designed to kind of point out the issues that were surrounding um computer, uh technology and how that relates to constitutional it's and how it's a complicated issue, kind of really looking ahead to see how the digital age is conflicting with basic rights and and like how does it fit and where does it not fit and where do we need to

tweak it so that it works properly. Was written by a guy named John Perry Barlow. UH. Barlow is one of the founders of the Electronic Freedom Foundation the e F. Yes, so the e F continues today to try and and shape public policy so that internet freedoms, things like net neutrality remain untouched. They advocate for uh for net neutrality, among other policies. So, uh, some people who are really you know, movers and shakers in the technology world, we're

big into bbs IS back in the day. Yeah, that's uh, that's definitely true, and um, you know, and and other people knew it too as well, because the government of the federal government in the United States had its I on bbs IS And we're watching to see who was on the different uh bulletin boards. I know that Steve Jackson Games, which is an office favorite among uh some

gamers here at how stuffworks dot com. Their offices were rated because they were hosting a bbs and the Secret Service thought there was some illicit material on there about hacking in computer networks. As it turns out there wasn't. Yeah, but but BBSs did. Yeah, BBSs did provide some people the ability to to either share tips on how to pirate software or actually would include pirated software as a download. Um, there were hackers specific bbs is. Uh. In fact, a

lot of the early ones were hackers specific. We're not just not just hackers as in programmers, but hackers asn't the people who enjoy breaking into systems, learning how they work than exploiting them. So yeah about them, Yeah I should Hey wait a minute, anyway, Yeah, there there were there were some kind of shady bbs is out there, and even some of the general purpose bbs has had some material on it that probably wasn't appropriate for all eyes.

I can actually, I won't say maybe definitely. I was a kid and I was on those bbs is, and I know that there was material A lot of them actually had. UM, had ways of of making you talk. No, they had ways to to guard against that. You had to use a like a credit card to um access certain parts of the BBS. And it wasn't necessarily that they would charge you, but they wanted the credit card to to prove that you're an adult. Right, if you're old enough to have a credit card, then you're old

enough to get access to this material. And uh, you know, some of them followed that and some didn't. And yes, you can build your own BBS even to this day. You can either use a dial up modem and have people call in physically to that machine and explore your BBS, or you can use a tell net client and have people tell net into it. Um. But the you know,

the era of the BBS is is. I mean, there's still a few out there that are still that still have their die hard fans who who contribute and are big into that community, but the Internet is really um

appropriated a lot of that. Yeah. It's kind of ironic too in a way that as popular as electronic communication is now, the BBS surged in popularity and has now receded to the point where people like the one you quoted a few minutes ago are probably happy again because just the you know, they're still back to the original

little communities of people little pockets of people. Yeah maybe, um yeah, because I I often will think of a BBS as if you it's sort of similar to what would happen if you grabbed a web server and then you severed its connection to the rest of the Internet, so you could connect directly to the at web server, but you could not connect to any other web page, like you couldn't go outside the boundaries of that server, say somewhere kind of things. And again we're talking about

you know, text based stuff, right and and interesting askey art. Okay, well that wraps up this discussion on bulletin board Systems b b S. I hope you enjoyed it this little walk down Internet memory lane or network memory lane, body memory lane. To bring back that joke. If you have any topics you would specifically like us to cover, you can let us know on Facebook or Twitter are handle there is tech stuff HS double you or you can

shoot us an email. That address is tech stuff at how stuff Works dot com and Chris and I will talk to you again really soon for more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff Works dot com. So learn more about the podcast click on the podcast icon in the upper right corner of our homepage. The House Shtufforks iPhone app has arrived. Download it today on iTunes, brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera. It's ready, are you