October 15, 2004

BBS Baby! Gather 'round kids . . . Let me tell you about a magical time . . a time before the Internet . . when g33kz gathered in each other's homes remotely via a Bulletin Board System . . .

This documentary site has some good information if you *weren't* there, and some nostalgia if you were. Where were you?

posted by pete_best 20 years ago
  • I was in Lawton, Oklahoma. My primary social site was a BBS run by a guy who called himself MacWe$, who was big in the local Mac user group scenes. We would occasionally gather around with our original Macs and Mac 512s for a LAN party about 15 years before it was fashionable, or even heard of. Localtalk was cool. I had a Racal Vadic 1200 Baud modem that was designed to work with mini-computers, and it had no Hayes-compatible command set, which meant no autodial or any fancy-schmancy features like that. I had to dial the numbers by hand, then hit the connect button when I heard the right noise. If I wanted to connect at 1200 baud, I had to hold down the High Speed button, then hit the connect button. But I loved it, and I loved it even more when I finally got a good modem. There were some more when I moved to Florida, but that's what I always think of when I think BBSs. Oh, and it was funny when I went to college and all the kids started learning about BBSs. They were all like "Trade wars is so cool!" They did the same thing when they first started playing with speech synthesizers. It was like reliving my childhood all over again.
  • So this is where we fossils can reminisce about the good ol' days? OK. I'm not able to go back as far as many, but I did some of the BBS stuff with my first 'puter, a Mac Plus with 1MB of RAM and a 20MB hard drive. The 300 baud modem I got at a garage sale, but I soon upgraded to 1200 baud. Woo-hoo!
  • 2400 baud modem babeeee. Los Angeles bbs known as Annex. I lost my virginity to someone I met through a bbs. That's the original internet dating. Ahhhh. Those were the days. I have lots and lots and lots of fond memories of bbsing. That's how I got started with my internet obsession.
  • That guy is clueless about the artscene: He hasn't interviewed David Turgeon / Haadler aka Eerie. He was pretty much the only person in that scene that could: a) think clearly. b) write. c) draw. All at the same time. But not all the time. Last time I heard of the guy, he was running No Type Drones.
  • i remember thinking having a modem would be so great. i remember thinking the internet at last. i remember when the bubble meant we were back to a real meritocracy, the real old days. oops
  • Okay, you've guessed it, I was in the artscene. I drew ANSI. And he seems to be swallowing the ACiD/iCE point of view hook, line & sinker. However, a lot of the significant stuff happened in smaller groups, and the best rag we had (Eerie's Undergrown) was specifically about new groups. The pattern was this: - Newcomer enters the scene, sucks. - Draws, draws, join a small group - Draws some more, gets better - Joins ACiD or iCE - Draws 1 piece a year. Not everybody followed it, but there were quite a few examples of that. Of course, I never reached that level: I only drew logos in the style of The Night Angel and did one half-decent comic rip. My favorite Ansi group ever is Samsara, the last group Eerie founded (I'm a fanboy). Numb's work in these packs (available here, windows viewer here) are simply fantastic.
  • 612 area code. Minneapolis. 1992. 1200 baud. Citadel-86. That is all.
  • My dad had a bbs for his local Lions club that also hosted lots of gamesin the early 90s. He had lots of fun with it (and so did I) until people started being super jerky about it, so he closed the site. I also used to dial up to a cool bbs called the Nine Hells... one of my best friends met her first husband there :)
  • Ah, nickdanger was my original BBS handle! Hadn't used it for over a decade before MoFi came along. Don't exactly know why I decided to pick it up again... I remember a game where you maneuvered around a house, picked up weapons and tried to kill fellow players before your set # of turns ran out for the day. And, of course, Tradewars, Tradewars, Tradewars... Die Hooman!
  • Lordy, but it all makes me feel so young. The web has been in existence for over half my life; I was still a child when Netscape was born, and by the time I had a computer of my own, it was already dying. I cannot remember a time without Google. That so many key words in my regular vocabulary, flames and trolls and suchlike, date from this period is just... weird. I was alive then, and yet it's ancient history. I dunno. It's sort of like being 600 years old, but not having got into Shakespeare until 1897. Only, maybe, a bit less so.
  • You know, you can still get some of that retro, old-stylee internets lovin' at echo (and the Well).
  • Where I woz -- trying to finagle an old Coomodore and its Pacman-crazed owner into interwebberry. /from: Department of Limited Success