What was it like on the bbs underground back in the day? reddit / bbs ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Paco_Smithereens · 2016-02-04 07:47 Well, much as with ratios on trackers today, pirated games were basically currency. Sometimes you needed a reference to get on these -- this is different from a tracker invite in that the person offering it to you was expected to sort of vouch for you. You'd sometimes even be asked that during the application process -- who do you know? One of the things, especially about single line boards in the 80s, was if you were spending a lot of time on the system, you were tying it up for other people. So leeching and ratios were heavily policed (where not enforced by the software itself.) One day a guy from a big Commodore pirating group called FBR dialed into my board (guy named Oahawhool). My board was really discussion- heavy; politics and stuff. Lots of people using real names. He dug what I was doing and I think I broke into chat with him. We talked awhile and I was really impressed he was from FBR but explained as much I liked games, I didn't have anything new enough to breathe that rareified air. We rode our bikes to meet -- he was in the next town over (that surprised me), and he gave me a bunch of disks with basically 0 day games on them, along with a bunch of leech credits on his board. The closest thing to compare it to would be given access to a topsite. Another thing he did was invited me along on an Alliance Teleconference which were these international voice party lines (conference calls) where pirate and demo sceners would get together for a big international chat. We take that for granted now - *big fucking deal in those days* given the cost of long distance on land lines, and especially international teleconferences over copper. I remember being in awe of everyone on it. Guys from really famous groups like [TRIAD](http://www.triad.se/) were on, all European accents and all. This was *mindblowing.* I don't know what happened to Oahawhool or why he was so nice to me, but...thanks for the memories (and all the FBR cracks -- anyone with a Commodore had at least one, as well.) Out of my league, all those guys, but cool as hell to get invited in for a peek. Speaking of which, another kind of big deal were codes -- "phreaking" as a term generally covered these although phreaking was actually different -- that was manipulation of phone lines with tones. Phreaks tended to look down, justifiably, on coders. Phreaking was real hacking and exploring the world's telephone networks. Codes were just stealing phone calls. But for a lot of us, all we wanted were free phone calls anyway -- mainly to call boards out of state or overseas just to see what the rest of the world was like. Codes were sort of like calling cards. People would set up their systems to hammer on systems like Metrofone (Metrophone?) which took six digit codes (950-xxxx). Once you had that code you could dial out from that account long distance, where it would be billed back to the poor account holder (I'm sure they were never forced to pay those bills. God I hope not, anyway.) Instead, people would set their code hackers - similar to wardialers, really - to just try them at random until one got through. Often this was left to run overnight and while you were at school. You'd come home and have maybe half a dozen to a dozen, and you could trade lists of working codes for other things online. Carding is also pretty old but most people I knew stayed away from it. If you were 15 or 16 years old, the question was always where were you going to send shit to once you ordered it with your card. A lot of people just really needed a [Lt. Kernal](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lt._Kernal) or a [1581](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_1581) and risked sending it right to their own house. Of all of the illegal activity on boards back then, carding was the riskiest, and I knew several people who got caught doing it -- All sysops! Hardware was not cheap. Coding could get you caught, as could wardialing (dialing random numbers in an exchange to look for computers, as in Wargames.) Whether you got caught wardialing depended in some sense on what phone company you had and whether they had processes running to detect it. I did this inconsiderately, without mercy, and routinely in my area and never had a problem although to be honest I regret doing it just in terms of all of the people it bothered. The other thing which might be of interest was platform partisanship. It was almost like biker gangs, where Apple, Commodore, and Atari people sort of had their own boards, and often talked shit about other platforms. Sometimes this would turn into stupid adolescent wars. To some extent, this was because of competing character sets (PETSCII, ANSI, ATASCII). While almost all software could support plain ASCII to allow people to call from any platform, a lot of effort went into the color and graphics of a board. This "platformism" became less important over time as it became clear that everything was going to die except for IBM compatibles and Macs. But for awhile, it was a pretty stupid way of dividing ourselves up into factions. Of course, one of the most fondly remembered cultural expressions of the time was the g-phile or text file. The best archive of these is still available for browsing at Jason Scott's excellent [textfiles.com](http://textfiles.com). The value of these could not be overstated for a few reasons. First - at least to me - Unix systems were esoteric and mysterious. These, along with networks of the time (like TELENET -- this has nothing to do with TELNET) and peculiar systems of the time, were inscrutable unless you could get some information on how to get around. Text files often provided this information to people used to 8 bit computers with bitty, barely adequate operating systems. But beyond that -- you're 15 or 16 years old. You live on a cul de sac in a subdivision in the suburbs (in fact you may well have looked exactly like the kid in the [Subdivisions](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYYdQB0mkEU) video.) It's summer and everyone else is at camp. All the boards are busy. You feel like you need something to take the edge off the summer. I'm talking about *BOMBS AND HOMEMADE INCENDIARY DEVICES MADE WITH FUCKING DISH SOAP AND TURPENTINE AND SHIT.* It is amazing just how much time was spent writing up Anarchist Cookbook-like recipes for mayhem (with, as you might predict, similar safety and reliability.) The Poor Man's James Bond. Jolly Roger. Transcribing anything you could order from Delta Press (and everyone I knew got the eagerly awaited Delta Press catalog.) I distinctly remember a warm summer day in New Jersey by the Delaware River. It was the sort of day when you eat a lot of popsicles, and the fireflies come out, and you notice you can see more stars than usual. Around you is the smell of grills and cut grass. So of course you gotta make yourself some **FUCKING NAPALM.** And that's what we did. We'd use spoons to fling it across the yard. To our horror, it was nearly impossible to extinguish. Also I remember fucking around inside cable boxes to try to get The Playboy Channel. Methods and techniques for doing this could be found on your favorite local BBS that specialized in aggregating these files. But all in all -- most of it was pretty adolescent. The current underground scene on the Internet - the Silk Road set and people into Bitcoin and crypto, would eat the underground BBS scene for lunch. The stakes are higher. You could post a fake story about a corporation you hated on a BBS and it wouldn't have any effect. Today smart people can use the Internet to pump-and-dump. Which actually reminds me -- another thing -- computers were still this niche thing only professionals and hobbyists understood. Though people liked to talk in paranoid tones about the FBI and the like, in point of fact most of these were unmonitored playgrounds. Everyone knows how to get on the Internet. Very few people, comparatively, could load a term program and dial a modem. So you could get away with saying or doing just about anything -- remembering, of course, the limitations of the time. Pornography, for example, was impractical at that time, as was serious encryption. I guess you could sell weed online or something but I never saw that. As such, the [Four Horsemen of the Infocalypse](https://en.wikipedia.o rg/wiki/Four_Horsemen_of_the_Infocalypse) didn't really have a battlefield. There were no cryptocurrencies, no VPNs, nor darknets. Even if law enforcement had been fully aware and knowledgeable about the mischief online, I doubt it would have been much of a priority. [Until, of course, one day...it was.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Sundevil). 1990 is an excellent year for when everything changed. As people began migrating off of their 80s-era 8 bits to PCs, lots of things became possible: high resolution graphics (porn), multiline chat systems -- themselves always possible but unaffordable. However by 1990 the first generation of BBSers had graduated college and had incomes to install multiple phone lines and the modems to handle them. I got on the Internet in 1991. I had set up my second BBS in college and I remember the constant stress -- as I could still only afford a single phone line -- of wanting to keep the board up so people could call, but also wanting to use my shell account to use the Net. What I'd wind up doing is just going to one of the libraries at Rutgers and doing my Internet stuff from there to preserve board uptime. Anyway these are my subjective memories and undoubtedly others will have different ones. I loved BBSing and get really nostalgic for a few of the things I think we've lost since that period, but I admit I think I get my nostalgia for being that age and it all being so new and exciting, mixed up with the actual tech and the systems. BBSing was a solar system. The Internet is a galaxy. Wouldn't ever go back. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- nero1984 · 2016-02-04 08:52 Thanks for the info I was born in 84 so missed out, I don't think my family even had a PC until 99 funny thing is I think I found the guy who wrote the jolly Rogers cookbook I googled it one day found a site that had people writing there usernames from the BBS days. A guy named jeff kidwell said he ran the BBS and I think has a company now called star city computers if I remember correctly. This was all in the mid 2000s when I got curious about who wrote it I found the website he had and the contact page I asked for jeff I got an email saying this is him what do u want I asked about the cookbook and did he ever do anything he wrote about. Guess he's paranoid never heard back after that lol. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- ShooterJennings · 2016-02-04 10:26 /u/changetip 2 beers. Well written! ---------------------------------------------------------------------- changetip · 2016-02-04 10:27 *Paco_Smithereens* received a tip for 2 beers (18,636 bits/$7.18). -- [^^what ^^is ^^ChangeTip?](https://www.reddit.com/r/changetip/wiki/tipping-on- reddit) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- trylleklovn · 2016-02-04 10:59 Great post! I was born in 87 so I also missed out, but since my parents couldn't afford shiny new hardware I got a lot of old used stuff from friends and family, C64, NES, Atari clone and later old IBM machines from banks, industry, etc. At school we transitioned pretty late from win 3.11 to win 95. I remember one of my friends having a pc, and his cousin came around with floppys and he was like a wizard to me, obviously got his stuff from bbs's and seemed to know everything. The only thing I would've liked more is to be born 10 years earlier. It's great to have been able to experience a lot of this stuff at it's early development, understanding why and how it developed. But I think it's not entirely about nostalgia. It's also, for me at least, about loving technology and systems. It was about meeting people half way, building a system that could be understood, but for a long time it was on the premises of the system. For a long time a computer was a complicated machine, it was expected that you learned how to program it. The technology was visible and I like technology. Today technology is hidden away and it's merely used to facilitate ordinary users to do what matters to them with as little effort as possible. We hardly even dial up numbers on the phone anymore, we just push the name of the person we want. I like using a keyboard. I like typing commands. I've set up a PBX in my home, programmed it with commands, services and games, mostly because I like picking up the handset on my western electric 2500 and pushing the buttons. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Sysop_2400 · 2016-02-04 14:32 This is an amazing post and brings back all sorts of memories, thanks for taking the time to write this all out! ---------------------------------------------------------------------- sunshine-x · 2016-02-04 14:44 I was there too and that's a great description. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Paco_Smithereens · 2016-02-04 15:34 Very cool and thanks much. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Mylaptopisburningme · 2016-02-04 15:55 My favorite memory of 84-85 was a BBS called the Dark Domain in San Gabriel, CA, it wasn't a pirate board, but once a month we would meet up at usually the sysops house, everyone brought their Commodore and Apples and we spent all day copying each others games. Usually around 20-30+ people. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- NuSkooler · 2016-02-04 16:23 I agree with the others: This is an excellent post! It's amazing how similar our memories are. Only the names and boards change :D ---------------------------------------------------------------------- mbrady · 2016-02-04 16:57 Man, that sure brings back memories (although I never made napalm!) I ran a BBS in the late 80's off an Atari 800XL with 2 floppy drives and a 300 baud modem. Atari forever, Commodore sucks! I mean, Commode- Door! ha! der! ---------------------------------------------------------------------- larsoncc · 2016-02-04 19:01 Wow does that bring me back. It's funny too, because at some point, I realized that a couple boutique bookstores in town were selling 411 and 2600, basically right next to the comics. I made redboxes, wardialed, I made a worm for Apple computers, and made things I won't mention, and at one point knew everything there was to know about PROCOMM. I had handles and alts. When I got to college, all the dorms were wired for 10baseT Internet, which blew me away - connectivity like that was unheard of. I picked up uuencode/decode pretty damn fast because of that. Everything is so easy now. Eternal September. Fuck me, I want to live long enough to witness another information age revolution. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- serious-oy · 2016-02-04 21:13 950's were great. My brother made a program to generate one at random and we'd do it by hand. Until, I believe, ANI D (automatic number identification D) came along and you could get traced easily. At least that was the story we knew. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- TensionMask · 2016-02-04 21:37 BBSes (boards) in general were underground in a way, in that most people had no idea they existed, so it's easy to be nostalgic for them, even though obviously the Internet does everything BBSes did, only much better. But yes, the BBS scene, which on the surface were friendly places to chit-chat and download freeware/shareware, had an underground side, in which more illegal materials were traded: warez, hacking/phreaking resources, and porn, though porn boards were more of its own branch which I wasn't really into much. (online porn was not impressive then to say the least, how does 15 minutes to download one picture sound? even as a kid I was more interested in downloading Mortal Kombat 2 than that bullshit). All that illegal stuff sounds pretty tame nowadays. Anyway, this underground scene was the rabbit hole where, if you fell down it, changed you from 'hey, BBSes are a fun diversion' to 'I must spend every waking minute calling BBSes'. In my travels, there were typically two types of underground boards. 1. a open-access board, openly promoted, that looked squeaky-clean to the general public, but had a 'dark' area that only selected people had access to. 2. a board that was an outright warez board / textfile board, with no pretense, but closed to the public and didn't appear in BBS lists that were circulated. the best boards you really wanted to get on were of this type WIth the first type, the way you would get access to the good stuff was to have someone vouch for you. In some cases, you could get access simply by contacting the sysop and uploading some warez (to prove you weren't a cop, haha) With the second type, usually you would fill out an application and the existing users would vote on whether you would be allowed to join! The application might ask you 'references' (people who could vouch for you), boards you'd contributed to, and you might get quizzed on your knowledge of underground jargon. Oh, the voting process was excruciating if you were the one trying to join, and at the same time, oh so fun to vote on other people once you got in. The funny thing was if you dialed in to the board while they were voting, it would show you how the votes were going before hanging up on you, so of course you'd be obsessively dialing in and checking the numbers. In some cases you'd need to know a password (NUP) just to fill out the application in the first place. The whole thing was very political and there definitely is a point where building up your status in the scene becomes more important to you than the actual software you're getting access to. Most people stuck to the boards in their area code, and that was more than enough to keep you busy - I think I had around 200 boards in my dialing directory, and probably 170+ were in my area code). But if you aspired to go higher, to get to the really elite stuff, you sought to get on to the 'national' boards, though that's when long- distance charges start to become an obstacle. But the national boards made your local kings look small-time with their massive archives and true 0-day files. Any questions, I could talk about this stuff all day! ---------------------------------------------------------------------- DosGuru · 2016-02-05 04:14 Thank you for this giant response. I can tell writing it was a labor of love. Brings back so many memories.. Yes the internet is better.. But I miss those days so much. It was a much smaller more intimate world.. As a kid it felt great knowing about this stuff when adults did not. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- au1977 · 2016-02-09 20:53 My interest in the underground boards had less to do with wanting to do illegal things, and more to do with meeting interesting people. The shareware boards had a family-friendly feel, and I enjoyed them as well, but the good underground boards had a bunch of smart kids having good discussions. I met a whole spectrum of people - some decent, some a little shady. Some people did some pretty dumb things. As others have pointed out however, back then if you wanted to get on a Unix system you probably had to do something illegal. I remember the first time one of us got one of the PC unixes working. “This is so rad! I have a root prompt!” Others have brought up new user voting and those questionnaires, wow! You would have to answer like thirty acronyms and questions. Worth it though! Things have changed a lot. I love the internet, but dearly miss the BBS days as well, and wish that we could strike a balance. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- evilcounsel · 2016-02-19 01:45 Wow... your post brought back so many memories. I totally forgot about the chat feature on BBSs and getting credit cards. Those were the days when kids would jump in dumpsters behind stores to find the [carbon copies](http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/members/kebosabi-albums-emv- stuff-picture9146-old-school-credit-card-machine.jpg) of credit card receipts. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- evilcounsel · 2016-02-19 01:51 I was always jealous when I had a commode-door and saw others starting to put welcome screens with color on their BBSs. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- evilcounsel · 2016-02-19 01:53 Something that makes the internet look like BBSs do now? I couldn't have fathomed the internet back in BBS days. I can't imagine what's next. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- triscious · 2016-02-25 17:03 Thanks so much for this comment, it brought back a lot of happy memories. :) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- drunkenpinecone · 2016-03-02 07:09 FUCK MAN. That was my life too. I started hacking System75s to setup pbx's to setup Alliance Teleconferences. All those crazy euros I had to call. People don't understand now, but get 10-20 people on, go to bed without hanging up the phone and waking up to the same shenanigans. GREAT TIMES. I was also hacking 9500488 (as 9500266 wasn't availbe near me). Fucked Beyond Repair were one of the best cracking groups (next to OGs ESI). RIP Candyman/FBR. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- drunkenpinecone · 2016-03-02 07:11 Yep, pretty spot on. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- drunkenpinecone · 2016-03-02 07:13 ANI was always around (good for calling one from a pbx or 950xxxx to see if your # came up) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Blood_And_Fire · 2016-03-06 16:03 Here's something I posted earlier https://www.reddit.com/r/bbs/comment s/497tpv/i_ran_a_bbs_in_from_around_19841989_ultimately_on/