The Limitations of the BBS Era Forced Better Online Communities
Telnet BBS Guide
A nostalgic Hacker News discussion about the Telnet BBS Guide reveals why 1990s bulletin board systems fostered tight-knit local communities, text-based games, and ANSI art. Participants argue that slow modems, high long-distance charges, and limited hardware forced creativity and genuine connection. Modern BBSes like Xibalba attract younger users seeking an escape from corporate social media. The conversation also covers the shift from Telnet to SSH and modern terminal clients.
It is ironic and somewhat interesting that the biggest aspects of the BBS scene that most people seem to miss (the community/local culture, meeting like-minded people in real life, some of the games, ANSI art, Echomail discussions), are all things borne from the technical limitations of the time.
- atomic_cattlepr
Definitely get a nostalgia buzz thinking about the early 1990's BBS scene. Had a very vibrant community of BBS users in my city during that time.
It is ironic and somewhat interesting that the biggest aspects of the BBS scene that most people seem to miss (the community/local culture, meeting like-minded people in real life, some of the games, ANSI art, Echomail discussions), are all things borne from the technical limitations of the time. Slow modems and high long distance charges meant most people kept to their local boards. Games had to be designed in text with only a rudimentary colour scheme (sure, there was RoboBoard, RIP, NAPLPS and other graphical protocols - none which really caught on all that much) and still be compelling. Most were limited turn based (which meant being forced to only spend a couple hours a day playing, then having to wait). "World-wide" networks like FidoNet were dog-slow by today's standards (it was a toss-up whether a message would reach its recipient faster on an FTN network or via snail-mail), so discussion threads would last for days but only have several hundred messages in them to sort through.
I remember the years and work spent to try to improve on these limitations. Galacticomm and eSoft had their huge hackish ways to get past the non-multitasking nature of DOS and the IRQ limits of PCs to allow people to run huge multi-line boards on regular PCs. We saw Planet Connect dramatically lower the cost of distributing FidoNet packets via satel […]
- hollowonepl
BBSes is one of those last places in the internet where you still can find your tribe without algorithms and, too much crying about politics. I’m glad it’s still hard UX entry to many as we don’t need many there. Just those enough few who get it
- _whiteCaps_
I spent a lot of time playing Barren Realms Elite and Legend of the Red Dragon when I was a teen.
- bityard
Wow, there are a lot more of these online than I would have guessed. Over a thousand. Feels like it would take forever to find one with a regular active user base. My off-the-cuff guess would be that 99% of them are ghost towns, kept online by the sysops only for the nostalgia factor. (But I'd very much like to be wrong about that!)
Related: I'm (pleasantly) surprised to see the rash of BBS-related content on HN recently, as I've been working on my own (rather niche) BBS retrospective article for the past month or so.
- beej71
BBS story... A local BBS had an issue where one of the features would cause it to crash when activated. The sysop worked around it by changing the main menu to read:
[T] Crash BBS
and just trusted people wouldn't ever try it more than once.