Which protocol(s) did BBSes use reddit / bbs ---------------------------------------------------------------------- vigilante_stark · 2018-09-23 06:13 Hi guys I really love learning about historical technologies. Part of my self education led me to learn about BBSes. I've learned a lot about them by now and it was really an awesome experience to look into the early days of the internet. What I would like to ask you guys is some technical stuff. Like I get it that you used to dial up a BBS's number and connect to them. But which protocols were used by BBSes? From what I can guess, it probably had to work on Ethernet/IP. But what after that? TCP or UDP or something else. Was telnet in the picture back then? What about higher layers of the OSI model - Was something like Http/IRC in use? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- fahr1 · 2018-09-23 06:47 The Old BBS's used serial modems, the protocol wasn't TCP/IP or anything of the type. Right after BBS's, there was the SLIP (Serial Line Internet Protocol) that essentially turned serial communications into TCP/IP. But before that, it was just straight out serial communications. There were File Transfer protocols, like Ymodem, Zmodem,Punter but they were mainly for transferring Binary or text information via the serial. Serial communications was sent one bit at a time, very slowly like 300 baud was 30 characters per second, you could literally type faster than that so sending 170k of data over a 300 baud was insanely slow, but we did it... This will help understand it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asynchronous_serial_communication ---------------------------------------------------------------------- edge_of_etiquette · 2018-09-23 06:58 Much more simple than TCP/IP etc. In a typical terminal program, you’d have settings for number of bits (usually 8 but 7 was an option), and whether you were full duplex (host you were communicating with would echo back characters you typed) or half duplex (your terminal would display characters you typed because remote host would not. If you connected directly to another user, instead of a host, or entered “chat mode” with a sysop, you would see them type and backspace, character by character. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- DigitalGoose · 2018-09-23 07:25 It was just a raw stream of bytes, but you could ask the BBS to use [ANSI](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANSI_escape_code) to encode things like cursor moments and color. The [modems spoke a protocol](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ITU-T_V- series_recommendations) which could do error correction or compression , but this was the modems doing that, not your computer or software. Finally - when sending files - there were many protocols like [Zmodem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZMODEM) and some complex ones where you could continue to interact with the Sysop and chat, play crude games, while simultaneously downloading. Some allowed simultaneously uploading and downloading files at once. But this was not common. Right before BBS's died off and the internet took over, someone came up with a neat proprietary protocol called [Excalibur](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excalibur_BBS) which acted like TCP/IP but it never took off. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- vigilante_stark · 2018-09-23 07:36 Thank you all. These comments really paint the picture I wanted to see. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- SqualorTrawler · 2018-09-23 07:51 As others have said, no network layer. Telnet didn't matter for BBSes because you were mostly dialing them directly (until the 90s - though I think there were a few Internet- based boards before that, but they weren't accessible to most people). You'd issue a command in your terminal to dial, it'd dial, negotiate the connection, and then text would start flowing on your screen. Serial communications to your modem would be modulated for transmission over the phone line, then demodulated by the remote modem and sent via serial modem into the remote computer. Only later did BBSes even interconnect to the extent that networking was a concern. The earliest boards were standalone entities - you couldn't connect to one and send mail to a person on another. You had to know what system a person was on and checking regularly to make e-mail useful. BBS networking - one BBS talking to another - was initially a store- and-forward model. You'd dial in, send mail to someone on another system, but the mail would sit there on the local BBS's hard drive, until a designated time (called Zone Mail Hour in Fidonet) in which a lot of boards stopped accepting human callers, and would dial out via modem to other systems, exchanging mail (and files) (computers calling computers over the phone). As time went on, in order to deal with the reality of long distance charges, mail would hop through multiple systems on the way to its destination. A mail you send today might take multiple days to arrive at its destination, for systems which exchanged mail merely once a day. As the Internet came into play things got faster and more on-demand (no long distance charges concerns on the Internet). That said, it was possible for boards to directly dial their destination hosts and exchange mail too, depending on how things were configured, if the Sysop didn't care about long distance charges (Some people thought so- called echomail should only ever be sent that way, but that sentiment is about as extinct as one gets.) Your questions about networking become more obvious to understand when you think of computers as isolated PCs with modems on them - the model we have now is this idea of everything is networked and everything speaks TCP/IP. There were no IP addresses as you know them (just node numbers and phone numbers), and only as the 90s wore on did things become more interconnected. Most systems had no network cards or network capability or, especially in the 80s, the processing power to handle networking in any meaningful way (in particular the 8 bit systems). > Was something like Http/IRC in use? No. Chat was via BBS facilities which weren't based on a single standard. The closest thing to IRC that existed - at least in the 80s - was Diversi-Dial or ddial, superceded by STS. An Apple computer would have a stack of modems hooked up to it, and people could dial in, occupy one of those phone lines, and chat. I forget the limit but most of these were 8 users max so you'd often have to deal with busy signals. Ddials could use one of their lines to dial other Ddials, and those could then connect others, creating a network not unlike IRC, but all of these networks were basic serial communications, with modems dialing out to other systems (ddial was in fact limited to 300 bps - not kbps or Mbps, but just 300 bits per second.) One way around connection charges was using X.25 networks of the time. If you are curious about any of this, BBSes for most platforms are now available via telnet, but for old systems there is intemediate hardware or software running on modern equipment which is acting as a sort of translator of the network communications (telnet, usually), making the BBS think it's an incoming phone call. You can telnet to BBSes today running on original Commodore 64 hardware (for instance). There are also Diversi-Dial systems you can telnet to if you want to see what chat was like in the 80s. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- spish · 2018-09-23 12:00 You can type faster than 30 characters per second? The worlds fastest typist hit, maybe 17 characters per second (assuming 212wpm and 5 character words). ---------------------------------------------------------------------- gbbgu · 2018-09-23 12:31 I can't speak for OP, but I would often end up typing ahead of screens because they took ages to load. After a while you memorised the menu commands and could navigate without waiting for the full screen to appear. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- fahr1 · 2018-09-23 14:23 What I meant was it "literally felt like". I could edit it but I'll choose not to, it was later last night and i was burnt out... but thanks for the clarity. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- fahr1 · 2018-09-23 14:24 This is about what I was talking about. things moved very slowly back then and being able to type ahead was a time saver.. :) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- ScootyPuff-Sr · 2018-09-23 15:00 > An Apple computer would have a stack of modems hooked up to it, and people could dial in, occupy one of those phone lines, and chat. I forget the limit but most of these were 8 users max so you'd often have to deal with busy signals. A Diversi-Dial system ran on an Apple //e, which had slots suitable for an 80 column text card plus seven peripherals; by loading the Diversi-Dial software from cassette using the built-in ports, the machine didn't need to use a card for a floppy disk interface, so it could have up to seven modems. So eight users, if you count the local user. (The Diversi-Dial manual actually suggests that when starting, you buy a full set of 7 modems from the preferred supplier, because when you buy that many at once they assume you're a dealer and give you a discount!) A system with only six modems, replacing the seventh with a parallel port card, could be connected to a second Apple //e similarly equipped, giving 12 phone lines total. Those parallel cards had two ports, so they could be daisy chained to add another 6 modems at a time. The manual doesn't specify a limit but I imagine you'll run in to the limits of the 300 bps modem user ports getting backed up long before you plug up the parallel port link between machines. As you say, the system could dedicate one modem to connecting to another Diversi-Dial system remotely as well. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- kb2mob · 2018-09-23 15:03 If you haven’t had a chance yet, watch the BBS Documentary by Jason Scott. You can find it on Youtube or even Archive.org. The whole series can really show the BBSes and how they worked, plus the people behind the screens. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- PhotoJim99 · 2018-09-23 16:12 As said by others, none of the above. None of what you described even needed to exist. There was no network \*per se\*. Basically, a computer can send text to a terminal or screen, and if you have a serial port, you can send that text out that port and listen for text coming in that port. Hook up a(n analog) modem) to the serial port, and now the other computer, instead of being beside the first one, can be across the city or country or world, connected via a telephone line. The computers had to speak the same character set (usually ASCII, but in some cases ATASCII or PETSCII or EBCDIC or some other standard character set). If you wanted to be able to place text on a given position on the screen, some sort of terminal emulation was necessary (ADM3A, VT52, VT100, VT102, ANSI). Some of these emulations also did colour text. I should note that "emulation" is not quite the right word, because you could hook up a real terminal of some of these types right to a modem and then there'd be no emulation happening at all. Multi-line bulletin boards also existed, but simply used multiple modems. There could be some interaction between callers on most of these systems. The BBS era was a lot of fun. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- gjhgjh · 2018-09-23 16:39 Dialing in to a BBS is point to point only. A lot of what is done now in networking simply does not apply to point to point communications. The physical layer simply consisted of 2 modems and a telephone line. The data link layer consisted of a number of protocols designed to send bits asynchronously. At 300 baud The standard was called Bell 103. At 56k bps the standard was called V.90. All it was meant to do was reliably get bits from one modem to another across a telephone line. No complicated networking at this point. The network layer doesn't make sense in point to point communications because the network is no more than two computers. The transport layer doesn't apply either because again it is a point to point only communication. Any networking is happening at the application layer. The session layer either doesn't exist or is so simple to not to be a concern. The communication is point to point. The way to end a session is to hang up the phone. The way to start a session is to place a call or answer a call. Since only one modem can be connected to another modern at a time and only one application was running at a time there is no reason to keep track of multiple session states. The presentation and application layer was typical handled by the BBS program. Sometimes this was handed of to other programs in the form of doors or file transfer protocols. At which time the BBS program would stop running until the door or file transfer program handed everything back to the BBS. There was no multitasking like we know it today. The computer that dialed in to the BBS essentially operated as a terminal. Everything you typed was sent directly to the BBS letter by letter and every response was returned letter by letter. You can find examples of different protocols and techniques used but the hardware set up serious networking limitations. All connection were strictly point to point. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- A_Downboat_Is_A_Sub · 2018-09-23 17:12 >An Apple computer would have a stack of modems hooked up to it, and people could dial in, occupy one of those phone lines, and chat. I forget the limit but most of these were 8 users max so you'd often have to deal with busy signals. In New Jersey in the early 90's there were several chat boards that ran on systems that allowed 24-72 lines connected at the same time. Cheers, Excalibur, and The Hot Spot were three of them in Central Jersey. They all had systems pre-WWW that processed credit card information over the computer to pay for monthly services. When The WWW came along they all became ISP's, competing with AOL locally. After a time, using SLIP through a dos based client was no longer needed, and the BBS portions of the ISP's died, then the ISP's died as well a few years later. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- GuruMedit · 2018-09-23 21:02 Not BBS related but related nonetheless. We had an old chyron machine at the TV station where I worked way back in the days. Entering weather data into the machine literally meant typing a page until the buffer filled up which was signaled by a brief beep. That meant you stopped and waited about a minute or so for the characters to be replaced s-l-o-w-l-y. It became a pattern of sitting for 30 seconds to type, then going to the VTRs to continue the news run, and coming back a few minutes later to repeat the cycle. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- vigilante_stark · 2018-09-23 22:26 I did watch a 5 hour documentary on YT and it was a lot of fun. Neither that nor wikipedia or any other website that I googled really went into technical details and clearing my doubts about the OSI and networking details. This is why I love the communities like reddit. You get help from real people with real experience. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- _into_the_void_ · 2018-09-28 07:47 >some complex ones where you could continue to interact with the Sysop and chat, play crude games, while simultaneously downloading. Some allowed simultaneously uploading and downloading files at once. Ahhh... the good old days of HS/Link! ---------------------------------------------------------------------- YserviusPalacost · 2018-10-02 23:26 Yep, and the real pros would configure their preferences to not even display menus, and then the productivity really ramped up.... 😅 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- MercTGB · 2018-10-03 01:54 so was anyone in here on TGB ddial? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- cognitivegear · 2022-06-19 23:14 Ok, I know this is years later... But happened on the topic and a little digging shows Excalibur used RIP graphics for the protocol. That is a (semi) open protocol. There isn't a lot of support for it nowadays but you can always use some of the old software (like RIPtel or Procomm Plus) to connect to boards that support it. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- DigitalGoose · 2022-06-22 02:30 From what I remember of the 1 or 2 Excalibur BBS's I was on : Excalibur was its own thing. Windows 3.1 + only. If you called with any other software, you got a prompt to download of the Excalibur client .exe file. It wasn't Ripscript. Ripscript worked like ANSI or Avatar, it was just text that got turned into graphics by your terminal program. I think even the mainstream Qmodem terminal software ended up having Ripscript graphics support eventually. But Excalibur on the other hand was its own windows-only client, you could not use any other client. It went way beyond what Ripscript did, it had a TCP-like protocal that let it do full multitasking downloads , audio, chat rooms etc. It felt more like the "Prodigy Service" (but with multitasking), instead of a typical BBS... Very cool, but I think I'd just used Mosaic to get on the internet around the same time, so it was too late. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- cognitivegear · 2022-06-22 02:36 Oh interesting! Sorry, my Google fu failed here. 🙂 I saw something that said it was RIPscript, and couldn't find anything on the protocol. I'd love to see the protocol, I think those slightly older than web technologies are fascinating.