gemini.git

09c76dc8b9ebbfbe765106d5982eddcfccc731b7 - Matthew Ernisse - 1675806271
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+---
+Title: About BBSes
+Date: 02/07/2023 16:45
+
+## Background
+I ran across an article (<s6en3m$pmge$1@tilde.club>) on the tilde NNTP
+server in the tilde.text newsgroup and found myself amused by the inferences
+made by someone looking at the modern BBS landscape having clearly never
+used a BBS in its natural time.
+
+=> /~mernisse/files/s6en3m$pmge$1@tilde.club.txt The original post
+
+## My Story
+To contextualize my experience with BBSes I was particularly active in the
+local BBS scene for a handful of years in the early to late 1990s.  I ran
+several small single-line BBSes of my own including one that ended up being
+a FidoNet node and co-sysoped the BBS run by my high school.  I continued to
+tinker with telnet based BBSes into the early 2000s.
+
+The BBS was a truly unique phenomenon.  Prior to their creation there were
+various reasons for computers to call each other over the phone.  In many cases
+it was for large computers to exchange batches of information.  USENET and
+e-mail started out as computers calling each other in the dead of night when
+long distance phone calls were cheap.  Later you started to see modems being
+marketed to people who needed to use a computer when they couldn't be in the
+office.  I have memories of my father doing this late at night with what would
+become my first modem, a 2400 baud Hayes SmartModem.  This was much like
+connecting to a modern-day Linux system via a terminal emulator.  You had a
+command line you could use to access the remote computer with.  It was often
+expensive so it was usually limited to important computing tasks.  The BBS was
+different, it was a single computer calling into another computer, typically
+a single-user home computer affair on both ends.  Now this was not
+dial-up like early Internet connections, though the hardware was the same and
+the dialing and warbles of handshaking were similar, this was a binary serial
+link over a phone line bereft of a higher level protocol like SLIP or PPP that
+could be routed to the larger Internet.  You essentially replaced the monitor
+and keyboard of the remote computer with your own via the magic of a phone
+line.
+
+Personally I had an IBM PC clone running MS-DOS so I found myself
+defaulted into the world of DOS BBSes, though I do recall the Apple II BBS
+scene was pretty big in my area as well.  It probably seems these days but
+none of the popular home computer systems of the day were even remotely
+compatible with each other.  Commodore had a text encoding called PETSCII,
+Apple used ASCII but the Apple II only had uppercase letters, and the IBM
+PC had 'extended ASCII' which under featured a swappable block of characters
+using the 128 characters encodable in a single byte (ASCII is 7-bit, extended
+ASCII is 8).   On systems running DOS this defaulted to 'Code page 437' which
+provided a host of drawing characters that sysops and artists put to good use
+(and thanks to their inclusion in Unicode are still being used to this day). 
+Since all of these ways of representing text are incompatible, you ended up
+only calling BBSes running the same hardware and operating system as what
+you had.  It's also key to note that none of these systems had multi-user
+operating systems (BSD or UNIX) or GUI operating systems.  Windows 3.1
+released on the PC in 1992 but I didn't know anyone who got into Windows
+until 95 came out (in 1996) and even then most of use kept using DOS to
+call BBSes until we moved to the Internet.  Since we didn't have graphical
+consoles we also were limited to the text modes of the day, so the PC had
+a luxurious 80 column by 25 row screen.  The Apple and Commodore hardware
+both were stuck with 40 column displays being much older architectures with
+much less memory.  
+
+The other thing worth keeping in mind is that we're talking about very very
+slow connections.  Early on I had a 2,400 baud modem, capable of transmitting
+around 240 characters per second.  It would take just under 10 seconds to
+completely fill a 80x25 screen so the menu interfaces were generally optimized
+quite heavily and monochrome.  I remember upgrading to a 14,400 baud modem
+which at 1,440 characters per second would refresh a screen fast enough that
+I could happily turn on the ANSI color menus!  The entire thing was built into
+the constraints of the day.  When I started moving to the Internet in the late
+1990s state-of-the-art BBSes had several phone lines, were made up of networked
+PCs running something like Netware and had several hundred megabyte to single
+gigabyte hard drives.  The maximum speed was 33,600 baud which meant a file
+transfer speed of around 3KB/sec so downloading a file repository of a gigabyte
+would have taken around 4 days.  Assuming your phone call didn't get dropped.
+Some BBSes had CD-ROM changers with a collection of CDs full of files that you
+could browse.  Your average home user though still had a PC with a 200 - 500
+megabyte hard drive though so you had to pick and choose.
+
+The last thing I think that might not be obvious to folks looking back is that
+since all of this took place as phone calls over the land-line phone network
+is that these were very local affairs.  I used to go to meet-ups with local BBS
+user groups because long distance toll charges were a thing.  It could easily
+cost dollars per minute to make a long-distance phone call and with the modem
+speeds we had just downloading new messages to read could take several minutes.
+Since local calls were generally free this naturally limited the geographic
+area you tended to participate in.  While networks like FidoNet would allow
+you to exchange messages with people far and wide, the minimum message delay
+was 2 days since they only transferred mail to the broader network once at
+night so you ended up messaging local users much more often.  Eventually with
+multi-line BBSes you got real-time chat, which further strengthened the bonds
+of the individual BBS' user community.  Similar to IRC but without the ability
+to network, and often with only a single room, this as much as anything else
+is the stand out memory I have of the BBS days.  Sitting up, late into the night
+typing into a 80x25 screen, talking to a handful of other people that I from
+all over town.
+
+Once home Internet access became widely accessible in the very late 1990s and
+early 2000s most of us moved to IRC or IM networks like AOL or ICQ.  Our story
+became the early World Wide Web and the world moved on.  Some BBSes were
+supported by organizations and businesses (several video game companies had
+BBSes for support and distribution of software) and morphed into forums and
+websites but by and large BBSes were run by hobbyists and were simply shuttered.
+The few that made the jump to the Internet became the precursor to the 'modern'
+telnet BBS.
+
+Hopefully this can shed some light on the context of the day and can help
+you understand why these things are the way they are.  Truly we were operating
+at the cutting edge of some technologies that unbeknownst to us were about to
+change the way the world communicated and were very much constrained by the
+capabilities of the hardware of the day.
diff --git a/users/mernisse/files/s6en3m$pmge$1@tilde.club.txt b/users/mernisse/files/s6en3m$pmge$1@tilde.club.txt
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+From lkosov@tilde.town Tue Feb  7 14:43:29 2023
+Path: news.tilde.club!.POSTED.tilde.town!not-for-mail
+From: ""lkosov"" <lkosov@tilde.town>
+Newsgroups: tilde.text
+Subject: Two very old, interesting, BBSes - and their UIs
+Date: Thu, 29 Apr 2021 16:32:56 -0000 (UTC)
+Organization: tilde.club
+Message-ID: <s6en3m$pmge$1@tilde.club>
+Injection-Date: Thu, 29 Apr 2021 16:32:56 -0000 (UTC)
+Injection-Info: tilde.club; posting-host="tilde.town:2604:a880:cad:d0::c6f:d001";
+	logging-data="842254"; mail-complaints-to="news@tilde.club"
+User-Agent: tin/2.4.4-20191224 ("Millburn")  (Linux/5.4.0-26-generic (x86_64))
+Xref: news.tilde.club tilde.text:105
+
+If you go on a modern BBS (Vertrauen, Pharcyde, etc) running one of the
+popular, currently-developed systems, the user interface is generally fairly
+similar. For all the primitiveness of it, the fact it's text-based, for all
+the nigh-inevitable ANSI prettiness, it's pretty simple,
+user/beginner-friendly, and straightforward.
+
+Software like Synchronet actually gives the option to let users choose their
+UI (though not all BBSes support this), and typically the options are all
+clones of mid-1990s BBS software, which probably makes sense given the
+prevailing demographics of the BBS community today.
+
+If you play around with these options, you'll likely be struck by how
+similar they all are. It makes sense, in a way, I guess; the original
+programs were all competing against one another, and likely "borrowed"
+inspiration from each other. (Or at least the suggestions of users, who
+would have been exposed to a plethora of choices.)
+
+I don't *think* that BBS users back in the heyday of the 1990s would have
+that kind of choice of UIs on a single system (save perhaps a full menu and
+an abbreviated "expert mode", in some cases) but I could be wrong.
+
+Poking around online recently, I found two still-active Internet BBSes from
+the '90s, each running what is essentially a custom system. One is
+Mono/Monochrome (telnet mono.org); the other is the Iowa Student Computing
+Alumni (ISCA) BBS (telnet bbs.iscabbs.com). Both allow guest logins that you
+can poke around with.
+
+They're both very different from the kind of tidy, streamlined, ANSI-rich
+BBSes that seem to have prevailed in the dialup era. The UIs are brutally
+minimalist, trying to be simple and unobtrusive rather than pretty.
+
+I don't know what either looked like 25 years ago, so I can't say how much
+they've changed. But they definitely haven't been influenced much if at all
+by, say, Synchronet or WWIV. With ISCABBS, I feel like there may have been
+some influence from MU*s of yore, particularly in the help system.
+
+There's a message board on ISCABBS for nostalgia, memories/anecdotes of the
+early years of the system, and reading it gave me an interesting insight.
+When we talk about BBSes we usually refer to dial-up systems that people
+accessed from computer in their home, probably typically something with a
+GUI (be it Win 3.1 / early MacOS / etc). I feel like that probably
+influenced the look and feel of the software, in an attempt to feel familiar
+to people.
+
+ISCABBS was on the 'net, not dial-up; in its early years it was
+overwhelmingly accessed from VT100 dumb terminals connected to
+shell/terminal servers. It was designed, I think, for (and by) people
+familiar, comfortable, with the command line.
+
+I don't know for certain but I think Mono's early years were similar. And so
+with that kind of context, the seeming weirdness of both systems, the
+initally daunting UI (I've poked around on Mono a bit, and I think, only
+half-jokingly, that no part of the system is ever more than about thirty
+keystrokes away...), make perfect sense. For people used to a CLI, to the
+*user-friendly commands* of emacs or Pine, who perhaps had experience with
+the cryptic commands and statuses of IRC or a MOO, it's all reasonably
+intuitive and simple enough to remember and use.
+
+Anyway, both are interesting systems with fairly active users, and worth
+checking out in their own rights, but I think they'd also be fascinating to
+a lot of people here because they offer not only a glimpse of an Internet
+free from the influences of 20 years of Web design but very possibly one
+never meaningfully influenced by even desktop GUIs.
+
+
+
+-- 
+Inanities: gopher://tilde.town:70/1/~lkosov/ (with netmail address & GPG key)
+He/him/them/they/whatever. If in doubt, assume the above post contains sarcasm
+