From lkosov@tilde.town Tue Feb 7 14:43:29 2023 Path: news.tilde.club!.POSTED.tilde.town!not-for-mail From: ""lkosov"" 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: 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