The forerunners of Facebook: an ode to the BBS

I ran a BBS in the early 90s in Chicago called Mad Macs. It ran on a Mac in my bedroom running Hermes and then later on NovaLink Pro. NLP was one of the first systems to offer a GUI (special client software required). That's where I got my start designing visual interfaces for the web.

Wow this brings back memories (and really dates me).<p>I remember when I finally saved up enough lawn-cutting money to buy an AppleCat modem (for a Franklin Ace 1200) for my board "The Pirate Cove" (nothing to do with stealing software, I just thought it was a cool name)<p>I miss BoardWatch magazine :-)

The great thing about BBSs was they were really really local. Craigslist is the closest thing to it these days. For me, it was the gossip and teen angst back channel for all the in-the-know nerdy high school kids in the local calling range back in the early 90s.

It was through a BBS list I discovered on AOL or CompuServe that I learned about fascinating kinds of music (via .mod files), IRC, other ideas and philosophies, and the Internet. If my dad hadn't bought a modem for working from home, I doubt I would've survived my childhood with my sanity reasonably intact (or maybe I'd just be a boring average smart guy churning through the system, instead of a hacker entrepreneur). Props to everyone who ran a local BBS back in the day.

Oh the memories. I ran a Telegard BBS back in 1989-91 called "Circle of One". I still have it backed up though I would probably have to find some old hardware to run it on. It ran on a 20Mhz 286 at the time with 2 Meg RAM and a couple of MFM 40 Meg hard drives. Hail to the 16bit analog modem power!<p>Oi, just had a flashback of editing ANSI animated graphics. Your 'frame rate' depended on your modem speed.

I didn't really get into computers until after BBSes were already dead. My dad used to run a BBS, and he had a book called "Running a Perfect BBS" that I read all the way through. I thought that BBSes were the greatest thing ever, and wanted to run my own. Unfortunately, by then most of the BBS software packages were dead and no one knew how to connect to them anyway.

Amazing to watch awesome but forgotten technologies come back in newer, gigantically social ways. Like:<p>BBSes -&#62; Facebook (with games too!)<p>IM status updates -&#62; Twitter<p>The big one I'm waiting for is IRC, with Google+ heading down that path. I miss live chat rooms.

Last year I found a backup of my early 90s WWIV BBS on 20-ish 3.5" disks. I thought about trying to retrieve the data, but decided it wasn't worth the effort.. so I just tossed them. This article makes me a bit sad about the decision.

Oh the good old days of downloading the latest Focke's list and wardialing everything in my area code to check out all the BBSs I didn't know about.<p>One of my friends found his first wife that way.

I too once ran a bbs (614 area code). But the link between the bbs scene and today's Facebook is a bit tenuous, isn't it? Makes for an attractive headline though.

The man hours I've lost playing Doom and TradeWars on MBBSes could have fueled a few startups...

Good times, good times. I ran a BBS on my Amiga in 1994 and 1995. It was one of the more appreciated BBSs in the area due being more or less the only one with focus on the so-called demo scene, always having the latest demos and intros available. Back then, a 7mhz computer with 1mb of RAM, a 30mb hard drive and a 14k4 modem performed just fine for that task.

Ahh the days of Citadel, Wolf3d shareware and quite serious modem transmitted diseases inside dodgy TSRs.