Questions on how BBS’s worked? reddit / bbs ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Aventurion · 2018-05-09 20:59 A few questions for you old-timers: 1) How was a BBS kept on 24/7 if there weren’t cheap colocation centers back then? Were minicomputers/headless servers used? 2) What was the most popular operating system for BBS hosting in the 70’s, 80’s, and 90’s and in which circles (i.e. hobbyist, professional, academic etc.)? 3) What were the OS trends for BBS hosting? 4) Did you have to have specific software on the client side to access a BBS or could one just telnet/SSH into a BBS from the shell? 5) Were BBS providers limited in what clients they could serve through by the software they used? 6) Which client was the most compatible with most providers? Bonus; How exactly did one access the Internet in the 1980s, before browsers, the World Wide Web, and Gopher? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [deleted] · 2018-05-09 21:11 [deleted] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Aventurion · 2018-05-09 21:32 > /3. Same as question 2? It isn’t same question. For question 3, I wanted to know how OS popularity shifted during the BBS era. Like when did DOS become more popular than Amiga? How popular were Unix, CP/M, and Apple System 7/8/9 amongst clients and servers? Stuff like that. > /4. There were a ton of different clients you could use. I personally liked Telix while my friend like ProComm Plus more. Most software supported ANSI \(like, who didn't?\). Some BBS's supported RIPterm, which used vector style graphics. You had to have a special client that could interpret RIP. Thanks for the info. While you mentioned that there were many options for BBS clients, you didn’t answer if it was possible to just telnet/ssh into a BBS from the shell without a 3rd party client. > /5. Not really. Someone running an Amiga BBS could have people connecting using DOS clients. When it comes to a situation like this, were there ever problems with fonts or animations showing up, or scripts working on one OS/client but not the other? > /6. I don't think there was a "most compatible." Pretty much everything worked. A lot of clients also supported external protocols for downloading and uploading files, so you could add those if you needed \(xmodem, ymodem, zmodem, etc\) If maximum compatibility wasn’t a meaningful metric, then what made a particular client-side or hosting-side software popular? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [deleted] · 2018-05-09 22:04 [deleted] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- ScootyPuff-Sr · 2018-05-09 22:24 *1, 4, Bonus:* BBSes were not, generally speaking, on the internet. The typical BBS was run on a standard home computer of the day with a telephone modem. The modem was NOT "on the phone" while waiting for a user to connect, any more than a fax machine was. The user, with their own home computer and telephone modem, instructed their modem to place a phone call to the BBS' telephone number. At the BBS end, the phone rang, and the BBS' modem picked up the line. This is what established the connection - direct, point to point. Access to "the internet" was rare, and usually just limited to email and "usenet" groups, which were sort of a half-way point between mailing lists and forums. More common was access to messages transferred by networks like Fidonet. At a certain scheduled hour, the BBS would declare itself unavailable for calls (often it would answer an incoming user call, but announce itself as unavailable and hang up immediately), and either place a call to or receive a call from another BBS acting as a message hub. It would upload outgoing messages and download incoming ones. Yes, that meant the messages would only refresh once a day at best. It also meant that it could take a couple of days for a message you send to work its way up the chain and trickle back down to a destination in another region. *2, 3:* Home computers. BBSes were not a thing in the 1970s, the first one was only invented at the end of 1978. In the 1980s, BBSes reflected the mix of home computers on the market at the time: Commodores, Ataris, Sinclairs, Apples, Tandys, and a few rich guys with IBMs. I suppose there must have been BBSes on BBC Micros and Acorns and such in the UK. By the early 1990s I would say most ran on MS-DOS, and by the end (1997-1998 or thereabouts, when everyone got 28.8kbps modems and dial-up internet accounts) it was mostly on Windows. *4, 5, Bonus:* Terminal software was, for the most part, universal. Most BBSes used plain text (ASCII) or a standard extension for very basic text graphics (usually called just "ANSI"). Some used OS- specific characters (PETSCII on Commodore machines, for example). Most boards that used special character sets would ask you if you were capable of using them, and if you weren't, they'd default to plain text. There. Were. No. Pictures. There were a few rare exceptions to this; if I recall, there was a system system called ~~Remote Access~~ *FirstClass* which used a proprietary client on Mac & Windows machines and allowed for a "richer experience" (read: slower, laggier, and limited to people with fancy computers). But you ask about telnet; most people did not have telnet. You ask about a shell; most people had computers that only ran one program at a time, there was no "shell" the way you imagine it now. You booted a terminal program from a disk and dialed a BBS. Later you would shut the computer down, put in a disk for a word processor or spreadsheet or game or whatever, and reboot. Heck, my first year of BBSing, I didn't even have terminal software, I used my Apple //c as a dumb terminal. *6:* Any good terminal software that ran on any computer, with a few features (the ability to emulate a DEC VT100 terminal and display ANSI graphics) would get you into most boards in your local area, plus several of the paid nationwide services (CompuServe, Delphi, GEnie... but NOT America OnLine or Prodigy). In most cases, unless you told someone, they would be hard pressed to figure out what sort of computer or software you were using. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- jhavard · 2018-05-09 22:30 As for what made something popular, usually "it came with my modem", at least for the client side. For actually running a BBS... you typically ran what you were used to or whatever you could afford. I was a fan of TriBBS and Wildcat. Not surprising, but most of the BBSs I used ran TriBBS or Wildcat. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- jslabovitz · 2018-05-09 22:36 I ran a BBS in the DC area from 1982-1984 or so. I also used a lot of BBSes around the country, as well as the ARPAnet (early internet). Here's my listing from one of the BBS lists from the time: > Bethesda, Md. RCP/M, 301-229-3196, John Labovitz, no call back. 2300-1500 weekdays, 2300-900 weekends. SPRINT,MCI and ITT. 300, 450 baud. @2.4mb on line including most of 'C' users group stuff. Up as of 06/20/82. There's a lot of implicit jargon in that paragraph, so I'll parse it out for you: - RCP/M: 'Remote CP/M', meaning that when you dialed in you were actually using the command line of my system. There was also a BBS proper (e.g., messaging system) which I wrote myself in BASIC. - 301-229-3196... 300, 450 baud: my phone number, and the baud rates of the modem I used. It was a Hayes Smart modem that only advertised doing 300 baud, but you could push it to a whopping 450! - no call back: when I started in 1982, I used a convention where if you wanted to dial in to the BBS, you called the number, let it ring once, then hung up, and dialed again. That specific timing would be enough that the modem would answer the call the second time. Otherwise, it was a voice line -- we only had one line in the house, shared by my parents, my brother, and I! - 2300-1500 weekdays, 2300-900 weekends: Those were the hours that I had the BBS online: 11pm-3pm weedays (basically, when I slept and was in high school) and 11pm-9am weekends. - 2.4mb on line: This was a Heathkit H89 system, with an internal 5.25" floppy drive and an external enclosure with two 8" floppy disks. Each 8" disk one held 1.2MB. I had a pile of disks with different types of software -- a library of C code (as described), probably games, database stuff, info files, etc. I had a posted rotating schedule where I'd mount two of the disks every day. In answer to your questions: 1. As I said above, my BBS was only online certain hours. It was just a PC-like machine sitting on a desk in a bedroom -- nothing magical like headless/colos. 2. There were lots of operating systems. I used CP/M. Other friends used Apples, Amigas, TRS-80s, etc., etc. 3. I think I was pre-trend. ;-) Fidonet and doors systems came much later. 4. Telnet?! SSH!??? Dude, it was dial-up modem over copper landlines. You ran a terminal program on your PC, hooked into either an acoustic coupler or a hardwired modem, and dialed a telephone number. 5. Not particularly. The differences came down not so much to clients per se (terminal programs were essentially all the same), but file transfer protocols. In the RCP/M world, XMODEM and YMODEM were popular. Other platforms had other methods of transferring files. 6. See previous. Bonus: I accessed the internet (ARPAnet) first because I found a random phone number in a text file that went around called something like 'interesting modem numbers to call.' It turned out the number was a terminal access point (called a TAC) at the Department of Defense (just across the river from me). Once I dialed in and got a prompt, I could connect to any machine on the ARPAnet. I had instructions to connect to some mainframes at MIT. One of them was called MIT-MC, and when you logged in and gave it a bogus username/password, it would say, 'Do you want an account?' So I got an account -- at age 16. I used that system, plus several others, for years after. It was a very different world. If you're really curious how Ye Ole Internette worked, go look for a copy of [Zen and the Art of the Internet](https://www.amazon.com/Zen- Art-Internet-Innovative-Technology/dp/0134529146). It was published just before the web (ca. 1993), and is a great travel guide for the time before browsers. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- commiecat · 2018-05-09 23:03 >ProComm Plus That's what I used. Most people in my area did Telix or Telemate though. I played a game called MajorMUD which virtually required scripting to do anything noteworthy. PCPlus used "Aspect" scripting language. There weren't any downloadable scripts for me but I also found that my scripts were far less likely to be messed with. Of course then someone wrote an application (MegaMUD) designed to play the game which blew any homemade scripts out of the water. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- SqualorTrawler · 2018-05-09 23:18 1. BBSes ordinarily ran at people's houses. There were business ones and university ones, but by orders of magnitude, people's houses. Usually bedrooms; sometimes basements. 2. In the 80s, PCs and compatibles, Commodores, Apples, and Ataris on a worldwide basis, probably the most common, though practically any platform with sufficient memory and storage had some sort of BBS software. Later, Macs and MS-DOS in the late 80s and early 90s. Then at the end of the BBS era, Linux. There were some scattered Unix boards around. 3. Things were definitely centered mostly on MS-DOS once the 8 bit era was waning, with the Mac contingent second. But again, it didn't matter what a board ran so long as that board could serve ASCII. Custom character sets that Ataris and Commodores had could make things colorful and graphical but most boards that provided that also provided an ASCII alternative in case you didn't run those platforms. In time, once 8 bits died away, color and graphics were provided by CP437 and ANSI sequences which all platforms (including some old 8 bit ones) could support. [This is what ANSI/CP437 looked like](https://ww w.google.com/search?q=ansi+graphics&num=100&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X& ved=0ahUKEwj-u8q74_naAhXHh1QKHQikC-kQ_AUICigB&biw=1920&bih=989) and is what most boards in the early 90s looked like. 4. You had to have software that made your computer into a terminal, interfacing (usually but not always) via serial port. This was just referred to as "term" software. There are countless ones for every platform you can think of. 5. For the most part, no. Every piece of term software could handle ASCII, and every board - at least any I'm aware of - could also serve ASCII. Extended features providing graphical interfaces came later and they required clients that could support that stuff, but they never caught on very much. 6. Not possible to answer. Any client that could handle ASCII was compatible with pretty much every provider, and every client (term program) could handle ASCII. And if there was a modem available for whatever machine you were running, there was also terminal software. 7. You hooked your modem to a phone line and dialed it directly. Rather than have IP addresses, you had to know a standard telephone number for the board you wanted and you or your (auto)modem dialed it. Then you disconnected and dialed directly into another BBS if you wanted. This idea of connect to the Internet, and connect to any other system on the Internet, is a completely different (and far better) paradigm. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- buffering · 2018-05-09 23:46 1. Remember that most BBSs were only single-user systems with a single phone line, so no special hardware was required. If you get a busy single it means someone else is already using the system. Most were served by a typcial home computer, perhaps enhanced with additional disk storage and a real-time clock. There were also multi-user commercial BBSs than ran on commercial server hardware. 2. Many BBSs catered to users of a single platform and would therefore run on that platform. E.g., a BBS that caters to Apple II users would run on an Apple II and host Apple II software and info. By the late 80s MS-DOS machines quickly became the choice for generic BBSs, as hardware prices fell. 3. OS trends mirrored home computer trends. If a city has a lot of Amiga users then it will also have a lot of Amiga BBSs. The rise of MS-DOS machines in the late 80s and early 90s led to a rise in MS-DOS BBSs. 4. Dial-up BBS is basically the same as telnet, it's just a stream of bytes. When you telnet into a Linux server, the server will check if your terminal supports `xterm-color` emulation, and if so it will know to send xterm control characters. It worked the same was with BBSs. Different clients supported different features, and a BBS could ask what features your client supports. 5. No limits, like telnet. If you dial into a BBS that uses MS-DOS ANSI graphics and your client does not support ANSI graphics then it will look weird but will otherwise work. 6. Each platform usually had a single client that was most popular. Most clients could emulate multiple protocols from other platforms. For example, the most popular Apple II client could emulate unix terminals protocol like VT-100, as well as MS-DOS ANSI graphics (even if it wasn't able to reproduce most of the graphics or colors). Bonus: You would typically get internet access through a large university or organization. A student could dial in to the unversity to get access to their unix account, using the same software they use to dial into BBSs set to VT-100 emulation. Once connected, the student could read their email using `pine`, live-chat with other users using `talk`, and then hit the Usenet newsgroups using `tin` or `nn`, just like today. Before the web, I think Usenet was by far the most popular use of the internet. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- the1casey · 2018-05-09 23:48 I used telix too. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- poolecl · 2018-05-10 00:58 There was RIPscript in the mid 90s that did graphics. They were basically vector graphics but were sent by the BBS as a set of text that described the image. The client was pretty much proprietary, but the server end you just told it to serve RIPscript and it would just send different "text" to the clients. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- G_Porgie · 2018-05-10 01:47 > if I recall, there was a system system called Remote Access which used a proprietary client on Mac & Windows machines and allowed for a "richer experience" (read: slower, laggier, and limited to people with fancy computers). RemoteAccess only supported ANSI, ASCII, and Avatar (all text formats) during most of its life, and adopted RIP graphics at the latter half of the 90's along with most other packages. There were some BBSs that supported graphical formats in one way or another, but you are right in that most were generally proprietary to their own client software. There were a few I remember (or probably misremember now). One sysop in my hometown developed a pretty cool package called Roboboard FX which actually did pretty well for running a graphical BBS. NAPLPS which I recall might have been used by CompuServe was also supported by one or two BBS packages. The Amiga BBS software called Skyline supported a graphical format called SkyPix. I think the one for Mac and PC you were referring to was either Pancake or TeleFinder which were both MacOS BBS packages. WorldGroup (the newer incarnations of The MajorBBS) had a client/server piece where the client was a graphical interface that ran on Windows (was actually pretty cool, though also very slow). ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 13_0_0_0_0 · 2018-05-10 02:46 Bonus: before they allowed commercial traffic on the internet (and long before the proliferation of the http/html clients & servers), the network was restricted to academic, military, and government. Most machines (through the 80s and very early 90s) were Unix, maybe some CP/M, mainframes, micros. That includes client users as well, who connected usually via dumb terminals (like a VT-100) plugged into a Unix or CP/M server via a serial convection, or sometimes a terminal emulator on a desktop (Apple, IBM, Mac, whatever). So a small college might have a Unix server, hooked up to the internet with a leased line (say 64kbit/sec), with a few dozen terminals in a room. The students/faculty would go there (possibly waiting or adding their name to a sign-up list, and subject to a time limit), log in to their shell account, and run the Gopher client app. It's worth noting that the technology to connect a terminal (dumb terminal or desktop with terminal emulator) was the same serial RS-232 technology that modems used. So it was almost trivial to put a modern on the server and a modern on the terminal, and connect over the phone line. Trivial but not cheap. Every student that had their own computer and modern might be able to dial into the server, but the were always restricted by how many phone lines and modems they had. A school might only have 2-3 lines, so time limits were common. Sometimes the servers were set up to also serve content from users' home directories. For example, a Unix server at SomeCollege could be configured so that a student/faculty user named jsmith could stick an html file in a directory called public_html in their home directory, and have it be available to http://someserver.someuniversity.edu/user/jsmith/. You still see remnants of this in some http servers today. But http didn't come until later. Before that there was Gopher, and other internet protocols like ftp, finger, Archie, telnet, nntp, email, irc. All had terminal (and later graphical desktop) clients. Finger was a fun one. You'd create a .finger file in your user directory, which someone anywhere online could read by "fingering" you@thatserver. It was like a single text page http server, for things like status or contract info. It's important to understand that these protocols were well defined and often narrowly focused, so they were generally compatible with any client/server written (as long as the author adhered to the specs). Eventually when they started allowing the general public on the internet, they connected the same way at first, through terminal emulators to a shell account on a Unix box, then eventually direct IP using protocols like SLIP or PPP (with the appropriate desktop network stack). There was a period where the latter was more expensive, so cleaver engineers found ways to stream IP via a shell login, using programs like SLiRP. For me personally I have a lot of great memories configuring my home Linux box to the internet via SLiRP. It blew my mind that I could have an irc chat, a file download, be telneted into a host, all locally and at the same time I'm different console sessions. Later running X11 over the internet was even more mind blowing (even if it was insanely slow). There was no Google yet, so everything (good ftp sites, places to telnet to, Gopher sites to see...) were listed informally in text files and shared different ways, often by word of mouth, maillists, irc chats, or on Usenet newsgroups. Some servers didn't even have a domain name, just an IP address. In some ways it's a little like Tor, only much less grimy. Early on, Windows didn't have a way to natively do internet IP protocols, but someone created Winsock, an API standard for Windows that was similar to the Unix Berkeley Sockets API. That, with the proper clients, drivers and hardware, would allow the desktop to connect to the internet the same way we do today. Most of the popular clients were available - mail, finger, ftp, telnet, Gopher, and of course http eventually. Hell, thru probably still work (well, maybe with pre-Windows 10). And here we are. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- mydarkerside · 2018-05-10 06:16 I was in the BBS scene from about 1991-1995. I was mostly a user and only ran some BBS software for fun and learning purposes. 1. By the 1990's in my area, it was more common to have a second phone line dedicated to running the BBS, so there were many that were 24/7. Most smaller BBS had just one line, and bigger ones would have 3-5 and some as many as 10+. 2. I can't remember all the different BBS software, but I would say there were 3-4 that were running the majority of the BBS's I visited. 3. Even though I had Windows 3.1 at the time, I ran predominately using DOS (I was running a 386 with 1 megabyte RAM). Most software and games back then were geared towards DOS anyway. 4. I can't remember, but there were a couple of dialers that I used primarily back then. It wasn't telnet, it was just straight up dialing a phone number through the modem and connecting to the BBS directly. 5. Back then, most BBS were limited to just local users. You had to be aware of local and long distance numbers, even within your area code and nearby cities. Being in my early teens and not from a wealthy family, I would get in trouble if i ran up the phone bill. 6. No answer. My first experience with the "internet" was when some BBS allowed access after you dialed in. There wasn't DSL or cable ISP's coming into your house directly. I started using telnet and FTP, & IRC. I didn't really get to use the WWW and a web browser until I started college in 1995. Before then, I just didn't have fast enough of a computer to even run a web browser like Netscape. Believe it or not, I actually surfed the web purely from a text browser. Pretty much just looked like a BBS, with no pictures. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- temotodochi · 2018-05-10 07:25 1. I ran my mid 90s BBS pc in my bedroom, it was passively cooled so not much noise. Hard disk being the loudest part. It was a normal pc with a keyboard and monitor, mouse not needed. 2. In my time DOS and OS/2 were preferred for stability, i did test out Win95 but it was unstable. 3. DOS & OS/2 in the 90s \- My BBS software was PCBoard. 4. No telnet, everything was done over a terminal program which called into the bbs by phone, Telix and Terminate were the popular ones. Terminate had more features and had a scripting engine for some light automation. 5. No, all terminal programs were simple enough that they could display whatever the BBS sent. Colored or not. 6. All terminal clients were mostly compatible with all bbs softwares. It was just ASCII and ANSI anyway. For internet or university email you called either into a university BBS or later you called into a serial line provider service which connected you directly into the net. University or commercial service BBS usually had email / IRC or other services built in as remote programs usable with a simple ascii interface. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- ScootyPuff-Sr · 2018-05-10 08:21 > RemoteAccess only supported ANSI, ASCII, and Avatar (all text formats) during most of its life, and adopted RIP graphics at the latter half of the 90's along with most other packages. Darn. I can't remember the one I'm thinking of then. It was Mac- focused, and I had a university class that used it for submitting assignments, but neither Pancake nor TeleFinder sound familiar, I'm certain the name started with 'R'. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- nzwolfgang · 2018-05-10 10:12 OP reminds me of a ten year old kid looking at a rotary dial phone and trying to press the holes in the circular part to dial the numbers. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- HernBurford · 2018-05-10 11:56 > terminal programs were essentially all the same Them's fightin' words! Telemate in 1992 and Telemate forever. More seriously, to add to the "Zen and the Art of the Internet" recommendation, I'd add 1992's [Whole Internet User's Guide and Catalo g.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whole_Internet_User%27s_Guide_and_Ca talog). I'm sure there's a digital copy somewhere. I have a print copy on my shelf with my retro books and it turns up occasionally at the thrift shops. It's a user-focused look at hot net technology like anonymous ftp, UUencode and gopher. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- WikiTextBot · 2018-05-10 11:57 **Whole Internet User's Guide and Catalog** The Whole Internet User's Guide and Catalog, by Ed Krol, was published in September 1992 by O'Reilly. The Los Angeles Times notes that the Whole Internet User's Guide and Catalog was the "first popular book about the medium" and "was later selected by the New York Public Library as one of the most significant books of the 20th century." The title and format were inspired by Stewart Brand's Whole Earth Catalog. *** ^[ [^PM](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=kittens_from_space) ^| [^Exclude ^me](https://reddit.com/message/compose?to=WikiTextBot&me ssage=Excludeme&subject=Excludeme) ^| [^Exclude ^from ^subreddit](https://np.reddit.com/r/bbs/about/banned) ^| [^FAQ ^/ ^Information](https://np.reddit.com/r/WikiTextBot/wiki/index) ^| [^Source](https://github.com/kittenswolf/WikiTextBot) ^] ^Downvote ^to ^remove ^| ^v0.28 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- G_Porgie · 2018-05-10 11:57 Hermes was another Mac-based BBS package, I believe. Nothing starting with an "R" comes to mind, though I wasn't a Mac user until the very late 90s, so I wasn't that well versed in Mac BBS packages. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- xianoth · 2018-05-10 17:45 1. I started my first BBS on a. Commodore 64 with one 1541 floppy drive and a 399 baud modem. It used to be up and open between. 11pm and 6am as that was when my house was asleep and the house phone line was available. Every night I had to make sure the ringers on the phones around the house, we had 3 phones on the same line, so when users called in, they wouldn't wake the house. 2. My experience with BBS' happened from 1985 to 1995 when the internet started being available. The popular software being used in my area was Perspective Software's C-Net BBS. I got to use version 10.0 to 11.1a before I experienced my first IBM (now would be considered just a PC) BBS. Most of the people I knew has Commodore computers at the time. 3. Mostly Commodore computers, C64, C128, and finally Amiga. Very few PC boards were around, but they did exist. 4. To access a BBS, there were a few requirements. Need a computer of some form, a phone modem and a phone line. The computer would run a terminal program which is similar to a telnet program that allows you to connect to the remote terminal via the.phone line. You had to have some knowledge about setting up a terminal program. You had ti manually set the baud rate you were going to connect at, thestop/start bits, as well as whether or not you wanted color ANSI or not. 5. Anyone could run a BBS, as such, any client could connect to a BBS if you knew the phone number, what speed the site ran at, and whether or not the phone line was busy. There were a few high business. Sites like AOL, Prodigy, and others that had a their own interface, but they all connected the same way. 6. Any. Terminal clients were versatile and there were a lot to choose from. Bonus: in 1980s, you had to be going to a university or a college to have access to the 1980 version of the internet. Public access to the internet didn't appear in my area until 1994. Everything was done via the phone line, which had an upper bandwidth limit. At the time, 14.4K to 56K were the medium to blazing fast speeds. To get 56k on a phone line,, data compression was used. Actual line speed was slower due to the limitations of the phone system. The web didn't exist. Until the 99s, so if you were on the internet at the time, it was ALL text based. IRC was really popular as it connected people from across the country without costing an arm or a leg. Connectivity was an expensive idea before the internet. If you want an idea of how businesses worked before the internet, watch 9 to 5 and Working Girl from the 1980s. Lots of typewriters... ---------------------------------------------------------------------- orexclusivo · 2018-05-10 19:47 Could it be FirstClass? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FirstClass Around 1994 or so I had a part-time job at a fledgling ISP that was running FirstClass. They were running in on Macs, but there was also a Windows client at the time. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- nolageek · 2018-05-10 21:31 > If maximum compatibility wasn’t a meaningful metric, then what made a particular client-side or hosting-side software popular? A big part of it was what kind of computer did you have and what BBS software were you familiar with. Also, cost and needs definitely played a factor, since if you just wanted a one line BBS as a hobby, you probably didn't want to pay for an expensive license for software that was meant for large multi-line boards.. Software popularity was pretty regional, for some reason. In New Orleans most single line boards were WWIV, so that's what a lot of the PD (public domain) boards ran. Elite boards ran Vision-X or OBV/2. Multi-line boards in NOLA ran mostly MajorBBS or I think Searchlight. WWIV (with source) and its clones was also heavily pirated so there were a few of those as well. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- ScootyPuff-Sr · 2018-05-11 00:00 THAT'S THE ONE. Thank you. So much for "starts with 'R'..." ---------------------------------------------------------------------- gjhgjh · 2018-05-12 22:01 Ever watch someone dial without removing their finger when the dual returned? Sometimes it worked but usually it messed up the timing enough for the call to either not go through or go through to a different number. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- gjhgjh · 2018-05-12 22:32 >> 3. Same as question 2? >It isn’t same question. For question 3, I wanted to know how OS popularity shifted during the BBS era. Like when did DOS become more popular than Amiga? How popular were Unix, CP/M, and Apple System 7/8/9 amongst clients and servers? Stuff like that. Both clients and servers where run on personal computers in people's homes. The OS was mostly dependent on the type of computer being used. >> 4. There were a ton of different clients you could use. I personally liked Telix while my friend like ProComm Plus more. Most software supported ANSI \(like, who didn't?\). Some BBS's supported RIPterm, which used vector style graphics. You had to have a special client that could interpret RIP. >Thanks for the info. While you mentioned that there were many options for BBS clients, you didn’t answer if it was possible to just telnet/ssh into a BBS from the shell without a 3rd party client. Most BBSes where dial-up. Meaning that your computer has a MODEM and the BBS computer has a MODEM. The MODEMs use the standard telephone network. You will cause your MODEM to dial the phone number of the BBS and if it's MODEM answered you could establish a connection. >> 5. Not really. Someone running an Amiga BBS could have people connecting using DOS clients. >When it comes to a situation like this, were there ever problems with fonts or animations showing up, or scripts working on one OS/client but not the other? There were a couple of standards that, as long as the standard was followed, kept this from happening. ASCII and ANSI were two popular standards at the time. >> 6. I don't think there was a "most compatible." Pretty much everything worked. A lot of clients also supported external protocols for downloading and uploading files, so you could add those if you needed \(xmodem, ymodem, zmodem, etc\) >If maximum compatibility wasn’t a meaningful metric, then what made a particular client-side or hosting-side software popular? Cost, marketing, and availability to name a few factors. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- DaleYRoss · 2018-05-15 06:06 1. Separate phone lines, UPS 2. For me starting mid -80's on... DOS then Windows NT, I had the first BBS online running Windows NT. I was a member of FidoNet. Most users came for Echo Mail. BBS started as a support site for Industrial Automation 3. Most popular were in order... DOS, OS/2, Some form of Windows 4. A telecommunication software To Dial was required 5. Really depended on the software you use. For most, no client software required other than a terminal program. PROCOMM was very popular 6. See 5 I did move my node to internet starting around 92. I had a connection 24/7 via dialup. Bonus Gopher, telnet and ftp ---------------------------------------------------------------------- nolageek · 2018-05-15 19:37 I was a Procomm Plus guy as well. I never did like Telix/Telemate but most of my friends loved it. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- mro_1337 · 2018-05-16 22:42 http://google.com you seem to make a lot of these conversation starter posts on reddit. are you sincere? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Go_Kauffy · 2018-07-19 01:36 There are a bunch of great and complete answers here, but I thought I'd throw in my input, since this is a subject I know something about.. and I try and dump whatever things I know into Reddit. Based on some questions you asked, I think I need to re-frame your understanding a bit, and in the process, might answer your questions. So, even though *technically* the internet existed in the 1980's, the internet proper wasn't widely available to the average schmo until the day it began its precipitous decline (the online service **Prodigy** elected to connect its userbase to Usenet-- another topic). This means, truly, that if you wanted to know something you either: 1) Had to know someone who knew it already and ask them. 2) Physically go to a library and find a relevant book and look it up. 3) Read about it in a magazine. 4) Purchase a book on the subject in question (which you might order by mail, by reading about it in the magazine and then phoning a person). I think this is the hardest thing for people below a certain age to wrap their head around. To run a bulletin board, you needed a computer. A single computer. Again, for the average home hobbyist, computers were prohibitively expensive (e.g., Google "price of TRS-80 Model III"). You may get an add that lists the costs of components. Let the stick shock set in, and _then_ convert those dollar amounts to 2018 dollars. Other than this modem computer-to-computer thing, the notion of a "network" purely did not exist. Some early networking hardware showed up toward the end of the 80's, but most people weren't using it, as that meant, y'know, you'd own more than one computer. In those days, also, there really wasn't such a thing as "OS-agnostic" hardware. Meaning, whatever brand of computer you bought likely came with its own OS. Very, very few people had hard drives, so the entire OS was either in the machine on a ROM (or EPROM).. and, for context, I'm talking about a physical chip, as opposed to what you might think of as a .rom file today (which contains a copy of what might be in one of those chips). There were very few "common" operating systems (meaning, a single operating system that ran on different types of hardware). I'm certainly not an expert in this area, but the only two that jump to mind are Unix (which lives on today in many forms, but back then was _not_ used by the common folks on their home computers) and CP/M, which is a gnarly DOS that ran on a few different kinds of machines. A lot of work has since gone into solving this problem. Even the Macintosh and the Amiga, for a long time, had specific different versions of the operating system for each different type of hardware/model they released. Generally, at the start of the 80's, the only people that owned computers were either using them for a specific purpose in their business, or they were __SUPER___ nerds. You didn't start to have more popular things you might recognize as home computers until the early- to-mid 80's with TRS-80's (they had a few different models, very business-oriented, and then a more-familiar home computer type called the Color Computer or Tandy CoCo). Apple released its Apple II line, which didn't start to gain popularity until the Apple ][+ and Apple //e, which boasted 48K and 64K of RAM respectively. The Commodore Pet appeared in some schools as a learning computer, which paved the way for the much more popular Commodore 64, which is a machine on which a lot of people learned to program. The IBM PC was somewhat of a late comer, and was, at the start, the shittiest of all computers-- complicated reasoning as to why-- and we're stuck with much of that legacy today. So, that's a lot of info to say: your BBS ran on whatever OS your computer happened to run. There were a few largely-used types of BBSes (you read about plenty of them elsewhere in this sub, I guess), but very often, the person who owned the computer, who was also likely to be a decent programmer (as mentioned, you didn't buy a computer unless you were a severe nerd-- after all, they had essentially zero other uses), would code up their own, proprietary, one-off BBS system. While this might sound like a ton of work, it truly wasn't, given how simple computers were then. With no sound, no graphics, no files to share, etc. it really was a matter of just getting text into and out of your program, and then you could direct that text to go to and from the modem. 5 PR#1 10 PRINT "Enter Password:"; 20 INPUT P$ 25 IF P$<>"alibaba" THEN GOTO 10 30 PRINT "Welcome". Boom. There's (I think) a login for a BBS that might run on an Apple //e. The good news, however, is that given that the machines were only exchanging textual information, as long as your modems were set to the same transmission settings, any type of computer could pretty-much talk to any other. However, as BBSes became more complicated and started adding primitive graphic expression (usually ANSI text-based "graphics" with color), you started to need something on your side, like a terminal emulator, that could properly render these things. If you didn't, you'd see largely indecipherable garbage on your end. There was no telnet/SSH/shell or any of that. You used a modem, connected to a landline, to dial a number. Often, you did this by actually typing a command to the modem like ATDT2293196, which was Hayes speak (Hayes was a popular modem manufacturer that established a kind of market standard language). This translates to: AT - Attention (hey, modem, I'm sending you a command) D - Dial this number. T - Use touchtones (there was another type of very old school dialing called "Pulse") And then the phone number you wanted to dial. Why is the number only seven digits? Because 10-digit dialing wasn't a standard thing for a local call. You only used area codes to call long distance, or into another area code. Other people, who were on PCs at the time, would know the names (and have listed) the names of the popular client software that would support the above ANSI-type stuff on the PC. Here's how the experience might have looked on an Apple ][+. I mean *literally* like this: [Apple simulation](https://youtu.be/p3QZqhp67l8?t=44s) . This is a brilliant emulation, although it's supposed to be somewhat simulating someone typing also. In reality, if this text were coming from the remote end, as content from the BBS, it would be approximately twice this speed. Edit: Formatting. Edit: Which PR# to activate. Edit: Caveat on simulation/emulation.