A few years ago I got bit by the “BBS” bug – a phenomena among some of us in the vintage technology scene to hunt down and experience the pre-internet culture of Bulletin Board Systems.
Contrary to popular belief, these services are still alive and well in the 21st century, albeit adapted for and living on via the very advancement which “killed” them two decades ago — the internet.
Time for a quick history lesson – Bulletin Board Systems, as mentioned above, predated the internet the primary way people could communicate with each other via computer. In a typical scenario, a user would use their computer and a modem to, over plain old telephone lines, literally call another computer to establish a connection. Once connected to the computer running the BBS the user would log in to their account and generally be able to post messages, read messages, and if the system had multiple connections available (which meant multiple actual phone lines attached) communicate with other users on the service at the same time in real time – very early instant messaging, in all principle and practice!
File sharing would also become a prominent thing, as would various games and special services which people could play or take advantage of from the BBS’s available to them. It seems like an amazing time, and one that, sadly, I missed out on.
Move on to today. The internet and, more directly, the World Wide Web are their own special kind of hell. Everyone is on there, and everyone wants to have a say or get involved in stuff. It’s a damn mess from my point of view, and I rather hate it. I miss those days when the Internet was more of a bunch of islands, rather than everyone screaming into the same over-meme’d gif-laden void of obnoxiousness on the same few social platforms.
A few months ago I realized I hadn’t been on any BBS’s in years, and I thought I’d give them another try. I don’t quite know what it was, but this time I was more “hooked” than before – I began to appreciate what was available on them, and how isolated they were, yet still how easy to access they were if you knew what to do.
The modern BBS, as mentioned above, will live on the internet as opposed to being a dial-up service. This means you connect via standard internet protocols, namely Telnet (but others like SSH are often available) from any computer connected to the internet proper. I joke and say “As long as you can run a TCP/IP stack, you’re in” so long as you have terminal software available – that’s how these things operate, of course, to this day – like an old text terminal.
There are, of course, still dial-up BBS’s which creates a challenge for some who wish to access those via that method, since home phone lines are mostly a thing of the past for many. Still, that’s a bit of the fun and once you find a solution (more on that in the future) you will get a taste of what it was really like back then to use these services – slow file transfer speeds and all!
What I discovered, in all this, was that after all these years of trying so hard to go with the flow of social media and the modern web I was really, in a sense, lying to myself about how I like to live my digital life. I don’t care about hashtag trends, how many subscribers or followers I have, how many likes or retweets something gets. It doesn’t matter to me. What does matter is actual conversation with other people about the points at hand, whatever they may be. Supportive creative effort for the sake of it, not for some ethereal social status on web services that just see you as a chance to run advertisements and nothing more. To be communicating with people on a server that a guy might (literally) be running out of his basement for the pure sake of it just amazes me as it is, to me, the purest form of appreciation for the gift of modern technology.
In fact, I like the idea so much I did the same myself, and started my own BBS… but as always, more on that in the near future.
For now, I’ll end with this: I want to enjoy my experience online. I hate what the web has become and want an escape from it all – one that doesn’t involve what many who are the problem would suggest that I just “get off the internet.” Why should I let you take something I otherwise enjoy away from me? No, instead, how about I let you have your re-creation of high school, while I spend my time with people who are worth talking to as intilectual peers.
