What was the first bbs

Developed in the s, bulletin board systems, consisting of PCs, modems and the telephone line, were in many ways a precursor to the modern form of the World Wide Web, social networks, internet forums, and other aspects of the Internet. It allows anyone with access to a teletype or video terminal to dial into the system and utilize functions of uploading and downloading software and data, reading news and bulletins, exchanging messages.

Low-cost, high-performance modems drove the use of online services and BBSes through the early s until the commercialization of the Internet in the mids when thousands of BBSs seemed to vanish almost overnight. Early dial-up BBSs were typically localized because local phone calls were free and unlimited while calls to another city or state were charged according to duration, distance, and time of day. Because of the complexity, limitations and slowness of BBS, the early system was largely populated by computer enthusiasts willing to shell out big bucks for the fastest modems.

Given the audience, it's hardly surprising that — like the early web that came after it — early BBSs often consisted of very technical postings, software downloads and primitive online games. But you can also thank the BBS for some of the world's first flame wars, as enthusiasts traded barbs battling over the superiority of Ataris to Amigas. Eventually, the early world wide web supplanted the bulletin boards, but even today the humble BBS isn't completely gone.

In fact, BBSs thrive in Taiwan, where it's an extremely popular form of communication for young people. But every mass extinction has its holdouts.

Even today, a small community of people still run and call BBSes. Many are set up to be accessible via internet-connected tools like Telnet, a text-based remote-login protocol originally designed for mainframes.

And of those, only a handful have been running non-stop since the mids. These are the true dinosaurs walking among us. Who dares to run such antique systems, and why? Have any of them been left running by accident like the BBS in my dream?

I had to find out. The first day of my virtual travels, I plugged the built-in modem of a vintage MS-DOS laptop into a phone jack in the corner of my den. Today, the media often calls BBSes an internet-before-the-internet. But that is a grossly inaccurate characterization. The internet is a global network of billions of computers, across which data flows like water.

BBSes are like remote Pacific islands, each populated with pocket civilizations that communicate reluctantly via message-in-a-bottle. Over a telephone line, bandwidth is lean and every bit counts. It has supposedly been running in various forms since After that, the typical login or registration process. After signing up or logging in, the service might present a list of bulletins—messages from the sysop—or else go straight to a main menu.

Visiting an old BBS still running today feels like strolling through a community frozen in time, Pompeii-style. The message threads are incomplete, with discussions left hanging. How fitting, I thought, that a rugged individualist-type would still be running a dial-up only BBS no Telnet out in the middle of Texas.

I dialed-in, looked around, and found a bare-bones FidoNet messaging center with no apparent games and no local message activity to speak of. It was a Texas ghost town. FidoNet is the most popular inter-BBS message network, with about 2, listed nodes or connected systems worldwide. That might be a stretch; recent attempts to verify that number by actually connecting to the services have come far short of 2, A few BBSes still pass along networked messages the old way, by doing dial-up call-outs to other BBSes multiple times a day, trading packets of emails and message posts like ships handing off mail bags when they reach a port.

Brazos Valley Hub seems to be one of these systems—a true digital island touched only indirectly by the internet. And because there is a variety of dial-up BBS software in use, once potential users learn the dial-up number, they may find that they need to obtain different software packages to access the different systems of interest.

The mainstreaming of the Internet—notably through the introduction of graphical web browsers—provided solutions to these and other problems with the discrete BBSs. On the Internet, a single connection with an Internet service provider and a single software tool a browser enable access to literally millions of sites with a few keystrokes and mouse clicks.

Finding what information is available from whom is also much easier on the Internet thanks to search engines and other online directories. Internet searchers are also aided by the user-friendly naming conventions for Internet domains, making site addresses easy to guess e.

Moreover, for BBS operators a simple Internet site can be easier to build and maintain versus a comparable dial-up system, and web sites tend to be more portable across different hosting computers, permitting inexpensive outsourcing to commercial web hosting services. Operators can also expect much greater traffic on the Internet, which is usually an advantage. The emergence of the Internet, not surprisingly, severely curtailed demand for and interest in conventional BBS services and software.

One leading vendor of BBS software saw its BBS product sales drop off by more than two-thirds from to alone. Most serious BBS operators either abandoned the dial-up paradigm entirely and moved their content to web sites, or at least linked their systems to the Internet.

Makers of BBS software have assisted the migration by providing dual-use software that enables traditional dial-up functionalities alongside Internet browsing from within the same application suite. BBSs aren't completely dead, but they have been significantly transformed.