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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
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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