An old photo of a large BBS (2022)
rachelbythebay.com302 points by xbryanx 3 days ago
302 points by xbryanx 3 days ago
From my days... this is what an old photo of a "proper" BBS looked like https://beeline.org/beeline/?view=a29ed68f4f4d53 (note the wire wrapped custom modem controller) - the description is "Original Apple IIe with 11 modems and two 4-port homemade serial cards"
And to keep better time, https://beeline.org/beeline/?view=c0a8000daa11ca
It was later upgraded to a 486 https://beeline.org/beeline/?view=188870d0bbc894
Yeah this is a lot closer to the home BBS I grew up around. We had 20+ phone lines coming into our house all in a bundle going through the attic and dropping down into my dads "office" within the house. That led to a shelf full of modems, where I had to go find an inactive one and shut it off to free up a line. All so I could go turn on the modem in my room, because it was time to play a game with a friend across town.
Over time the BBS grew into us being a local dialup ISP as my Dad dug deeper into self employeement in the computer age.
I fully appreciate the horizontal "stack" of modems underneath the desk in the second photo :)
And a Televideo 910. Keyboard with added reverb :)
Ah, I was wondering what that was. My knowledge of terminals is not good (I just guess VT100 for everything :)
Higher resolution photo https://web.archive.org/web/20230531042903im_/https://static...
That's not a real BBS. A real BBS is one where you dial in at 20:50 and the sysop's mum answers and says it's not 21:00 yet and you need to call back a bit later when the phone line is switched across to the modem.
That brings back memories. When I was aged 9-12, I made enough money mowing lawns during the summer to afford to have multiple phone lines to support my BBS. I made a bit of money during the fall raking leaves as well. But when winter time came, I had to always disconnect all of the additional lines because I could not afford them.
But I also kept one extra line just for my PC because it was always a pain to dial out to another BBS or chat room when my mother wanted to use the phone to talk to her long distance boyfriend.
Apparently "Software Creations" BBS, which ran PCBoard BBS software and was operated in cooperation with Apogee games.
Thank you!
In the alcove on the right, I think I'm seeing 66-blocks, breaking out the phone lines that must be routed to each machine. Two blocks stacked, each with a fanout of wire on the right side.
Oh that's a breaker box (or a box of wiring of some sort), not a mirror!
A mirror? I first saw it as a common (US-centric) exterior metal door, with a window -- and with a shelf blocking the opening.
The blur does interesting things.
yeah the shine in the top left of the rectangle was what led me to think it was a mirror, which from my experience would have been really strange for the types of nerds that would work in windowless rooms back in those days.
The black cable underneath looked like the shadow of an oval frame
Glorious. This must be what is like when old people long for the hot car they lusted for in their youth.
> Glorious. This must be what is like when old people long for the hot car they lusted for in their youth.
Absolutely. The blog post goes to great lengths about why it's stupid to run a cluster, and I run a NAS in my house that has more horsepower than anything from the 90s, but there's a part of me that's still a teenager who wants to run a monster multi-node BBS
I get it... FWIW, you can run a telnet/ssh based BBS today over relatively modest hardware, though self-hosting at home given common blocking of regular server ports is a pain.
I've got a nas and a relatively powerful mini-pc for most of my home lab server stuff... but all the same, juggling about 6 BBS related projects I'm hoping I can bring all together later in the year.
Or maybe this is like fondly remembering the busted economy car that you drove around with your friends? I have my first 386DX sitting on my desk right now and it looks exactly like the top left of that photo.
The hot car that we all lusted after was maybe something like a SGI Indy or an O2.
I recall old people being glad that air conditioning was invented.
Life with air conditioning is nice, but life without it wasn't as bad as it is now when the a/c fails.
Cars had vents that would blow outside air right were it was needed without using the heater/fan system, or wing windows that you could direct "relatively quiet" air at you.
Now if your car's a/c fails, you get to roll the window down and that's about it.
In this picture it seems that all machines have a 3.5" floppy disk inserted. Maybe they had no hard drive and only booted from floppy and then ran software over the network?
A lot of network interface cards had a socket for an option ROM that would allow network boot, but you could definitely fit a client on a floppy and boot that way, too. Novell Netware server would be the mostly likely server for that vintage of rig and a Netware client fit easily on a floppy.
That telephone cord is impressive.
Pretty standard option for any home with a teenager, to be honest. Long enough to drag the handset into the nearest coat closet when needed.
We have them at work on our voip phones so we can roll around to each other's cubes while talking to a client without putting that client on speaker. We have headsets and the like too but you're not always wearing it when the phone decides to ring.
Interesting. I thought that looked like a frisbee between the 3 disk packs (?) just below the ceiling next to the cupboard with the brown slatted doors. But then the original picture was so small I thought it must be a desk fan, but in the larger picture I'm going back to my original guess of a frisbee!
Hmm, that is interesting, why was that version originaly hosted on 3drealms site? Probably nothing, somebody there just wanted to share a cool picture. But what if that were an early apogee shareware distribution bbs?
it was 3D Realms official BBS
https://nitter.privacyredirect.com/ScottApogee/status/159372... Scott Miller - Apogee/3D Realms Founder :
>BBS's (bulletin board systems) were the backbone of the online world before the Internet came along in 1995. Apogee teamed up with Dan Linton's BBS, called Software Creations, and we poured $200k+ into it to grow it to nearly 140 call-in nodes with a T3 (high bandwidth) line.
I was lucky enough to have a T1 in 1995 and still think to this day that 1.544 Mbps is enough to do real work.
I seem to recall that the release of DooM caused BBSs around the world to be backed up for ages.
wait, are you OP? or did you happen to find a high res version of the same paper-copy picture that OP supposedly was given 30 years ago and then scanned and then threw out. or did OP make it up? or is OP just a bot?
maybe i'm a bot.
anyway i used to call into BBSs back in the early 90s and the thing I'm remembering is that they survived mostly on donations, and now that I am seeing the infrastructure that supported those systems and recalling the price of hardware back then I'm starting to second guess everything I thought I knew.
Rachel says she had the photo as a postcard. It's likely that more postcards were printed, and that other people had owned those copies, rather than people being bots.
Click on the HN “past” link for this submission near the top of this page, then you’ll get to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30096565 (see the top comment there) from when the original image link was still working.
Many sites including Google offer reverse image search. You give it an image and it gives you a list of places it appears, sometimes in higher resolution or with more context (or different context, which can be interesting).
FROM https://x.com/ScottApogee/status/1593729387106512896?sort_re...
Top comment about this photo is ( and the poster) Scott Miller - Apogee/3D Realms Founder @ScottApogee BBS's (bulletin board systems) were the backbone of the online world before the Internet came along in 1995. Apogee teamed up with Dan Linton's BBS, called Software Creations, and we poured $200k+ into it to grow it to nearly 140 call-in nodes with a T3 (high bandwidth) line.
Nobody mentioned the smell of that time yet.
An acrid air, stingy for the first few seconds but then somewhat enjoyable because of the ozon. The smell of stale coffee and cigarettes lingering. The smell of wood for cabinets (instead of pressed and glued materials).
This is how I remember the university where my father worked (more coffee), the teachers room from my moms school (more cigarettes) and the IT department of the university (very strong in the 'IT-smell', but also hard on coffee and sigarettes).
You don't find those smells like that anymore. I'll leave the description of the sound in this room to the next one. This was a loud room!
You forget the toxic brominated flame retardents. No, I don't miss that smell so much.
Those were the days. I still believe nothing replaces the camraderie of the small, local BBSs. The large ones were good too, but these tended to resemble the modern Internet forums a bit more.
I miss BBSs and that's why I featured them in the story of my sci-fi game! If you are interested: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3040110/Outsider/
> ...nothing replaces the camraderie of the small, local BBSs.
Nothing quite replaces the drama level and drama complexity of the small, local BBSs. Especially when the denizens met in the big room with the blue ceiling.
Disagree only in the sense that I think the drama escalated a bit in the interregnum, as the BBS scene merged into one large if fragmentary collective on the internet. Empirical evidence for that extreme level of drama and complexity here:
https://www.wired.com/2001/12/sexchart-degrees-of-separation
I go back and forth on whether BBSes were better or AOL was better. I had great experiences on both in my formative years.
For me it was BBSes hands-down.
I was user #12 on the Bloom County BBS and, eventually, got the coveted sysop perms.
It felt far more of an "adult" accomplishment than (much later) when I got my driver's license.
I am surprised by the assumption that each box could only handle one modem. I seem to remember that some DOS BBS packages could handle multiple modems/users concurrently and only needed multitasking operating systems for “door” programs. Am I misremembering?
A guy who was local to me, when I was a kid, wrote multi-user BBS system (called "MUBBS" originally-- I don't remember what the name was changed to later) in Turbo Pascal that had a preemptive multitasking loop running in x86 real mode to handle multiple lines simultaneously. The coolest part was the console was just a "line" so you could logon to the board and interact while somebody was online with the BBS, too. Most other DOS BBS packages were only available for the SYSOP or the caller individually.
Edit: Ugh... I'm gonna have to go back to floppy images to find it. There's a "MUBBS" for Mac from 1992 showing up in search engine results but that's not the one I'm thinking of. It was more like 1989 or 1990.
Some details/speculation from the original thread here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30098186
“as modems got faster, supporting 16 modems on a single machine became impossible, and it was often cheaper to buy a new commodity desktop PC rather than a much more expensive machine with a 16-port serial card capable of handling the IO.”
You are correct, but the problem was the PC only had 16 IRQs. That required using intelligent multi-port cards from Digi or Rocketport. They worked by aggregating all the ports to a single card IRQ, and managing all the hardware signals, echo.
I wrote the software for a breakout box that could handle 128 serial ports. It was an ISA backplane with an industrial 286 computer and multi-port serial cards. This was our solution for a MajorBBS system.
The BBS software would have to timeslice between all the cards handling each IRQ, then poll the card details to see which ports needed service.
GalactiComm eventually came out with their own around 1993 that could go out to 255 serial ports and did not require the 286 processor.
By the mid-90’s, Livingston PortMasters were the preferred way to aggregate serial connections, which quickly gave way to USR TotalControl.
iirc fancier (expensive) multiport ISA card had their own CPU (probably a Z80 or 8051) and a little RAM as buffer. Here an EISA card with an (unusual) Z280: https://oldcomputer.info/terminal/ap_cards/si-eisa_1.jpg
Even the Apple II had multi-line BBSes[^1], so I'm not sure about her assumption.
[^1]: e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diversi-Dial
Even for a standard PC, you could buy a 16 port serial card and hook it up to 16 modems, either discreet devices or the dedicated ISP kit which might support dozens of incoming calls (possibly on a single bearer) via various means. Telebit netblazers and then ascend maxs were common in those days.
The question is if you could actually handle that many lines concurrently, with available software and the hardware resources of a single PC. Rachel's article as well as other comments here indicate that you could not.
From memory, it very much mattered on your choice of serial card/controller. High quality, high speed, (and high price) cards had their own buffers and better drivers resulting in fewer interrupts and more efficient use of host resources when supporting multiple concurrent file transfers at line speed. Being able to drive the modem-to-host connection faster than the modem connect speed was also helpful for modem protocols with compression.
You certainly could with later 386 and 486 systems. The multiport cards take care of the interrupt issues. 16 lines, all running at 115200 bps (to allow for better compression!), isn't even 2 megabits/sec. That is worst case. I had a 386 with ethernet and it could push 10 megabits no problem.
Telephone line modems were always slow compared to the microcomputers of their day. A 14400Baud modem will just send less than some 1.5KB/s. Even a Z80 could handle a few streams of that. I rather suspect this BBS offered fancier services than just chat and file up/download.
>Rachel's article as well as other comments here indicate that you could not.
That's because she doesn't know what she's talking about.
You could just use DoubleDOS [1] to run the BBS in partition 0 and the door could run in parallel in partition 1. This was my setup before Windows 3 and DESQview replaced it.
DESQview never really clicked with me. Did run DoubleDOS and when I was a TA (or whatever it was) providing support in the computer lab in grad school (most people didn't have their own computers) it was a convenient way to switch between whatever official systems I needed to access and my own stuff.
I'm fairly certain you are correct. I remember the MajorBBS could handle multiple lines on its own.
I knew a couple of local DOS BBSes that ran multiple lines with PCBoard under DESQview.
For sure. I knew people who ran multi-line BBS's on DOS PCs under DESQview, just like that (running Searchlight BBS, in my case). I know of a four line that was just using multiple external modems and non-standard IRQ's for COM3 and COM4 (since, by default, COM1/3 and COM2/4 share an IRQ).
MajorBBS could handle multiple lines on its own, but you had to handle ALL of the lines with one box. That meant a serial port interface like DigiBoard which provided some number (8 or 16 or more) of serial ports that you would connect to modems.
Yep - I ran a 16 line Major BBS back in the mid 90's in Seattle - used what was called a "Bocaboard" - had 16 serial ports on it - plugged in 16 external USR 28.8 modems. It all ran off of one PC.
I remember DigiBoard from my early ISP days. We attempted to turn a mid 90's-era Linux system (Slackware) into a terminal server. The Linux drivers for DigiBoard weren't quite up to it so we wound up going with Telebit Netblazers, I think.
I think we used RocketPorts for a while until switching to Livingston Portmaster 3s, which you plugged a T-1 into.
Portmasters were very popular. Later on the ISP I worked with moved on to Ascend boxes which had digital modems (T1 / PRI lines.)
PRI was a huge step. The "individual modem" days were a mess. Each modem had a serial cable, phone line, and power brick. I remember doing some maintenance in one of the POPs. There were at least 100 modems, stacked on a cheap plastic shelving unit. The shelving unit was sagging from the weight and heat of all the modems.
This early POP was haphazardly built, so no cable management. I remember a river of phone cables coming out of the wall. The power bricks were also crazy. We had power strips 2 or 3 levels deep, making it a hazard to even get behind the rack without tripping on something.
They'd already switched to PRIs before I started so I missed out on that "fun", but I can personally vouch to the younguns here that every word you just wrote was completely plausible and likely.
Portmasters were a godsend. They turned piles of gear into clean boxes at a fraction of the heat and mess.
It's because it's someone that wasn't around during that time geeking out over something they weren't a part of and making stupid assumptions.
Serial ports are a fun thing to learn about, computers had more than one. Now with USB, computers can have many serial ports.
This makes me wish I took photos of Diversi-Dial (aka D-Dial) setups, which somehow impressed me more due to how much they accomplished with much much less hardware.
They were able to set up a 7 x 300baud modems in real-time chat system on an Apple ][ . The original marketing called it a CB (Citizens Band) Simulator. They were able to run up to 1200baud, but I never saw one of those functioning.
As if 7 people chatting through a single 6502 wasn't impressive enough, many of them dedicated one or two of their lines to interlinking with other D-dials.
Talk about an esoteric memory.
- https://www.ddial.com/ - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diversi-Dial
And the larger ddial sysops would daisy chain multiple Apple IIes together. A connector would take up one port on each machine. Two machine would give you 12 modems. Each new machine after the second would add space for 5 modems (-1 on old machine, +6 on new machine). For the sysop it was a big investment for very little, if any, monetary reward. I remember a user account would cost $5 a month.
Our ddial was a few towns away so we bought a line in the exchange in between that would forward to the ddial. This way we would not pay a bunch on long distance calls.
Ahh BBS's: where I learned the difference between a local call and a "local toll call" (parents were not happy)
Same here, except I took it further and was calling out of state BBSs to download the latest warez. First phone bill after getting the modem was $250, in around 1984 (or about $800 in 2026). Parents were pissed. That's when I learned about phone phreaking.
> That's when I learned about phone phreaking.
“And never again have to pay for a service that would be dirt cheap, if it weren’t run by a bunch of profiteering gluttons!”
- Razor & Blade
Not mentioned but very important was the number of inbound telco lines installed. Equally important was making sure the local phone company properly configured the hunt group for those lines. Without a properly functioning hunt group it would be very difficult to optimize the allocation of telco connections to all the users connecting and disconnecting.
Also, it was unusual at the time for a local phone company to receive a request for 25 lines (or more) to be installed in the basement of a residence. They would generally push back thinking you were running a bookie operation or some such.
Awesome.
Side note: virtual 8086 mode was protected mode, or rather, implied protected mode. A task could run in virtual 8086 mode where to the task it was (mostly) looking like it was running in real mode, when in actuality the kernel was running in full protected mode.
Note that the "kernel" was never DOS. It could often actually be a so called "memory manager", like EMM386, and the actual DOS OS (the entire thing, including apps, not just the DOS "kernel") would run as a sole vm86 task, without any other tasks. The memory manager was then serving DOS with a lot of the 386 32 bit goodness through a straw, effectively.
It's very bizarre from today's (or even back then's) OS standards, and evolved that way because compatibility.
Is it so bizarre from today's perspective? Virtualization and hypervisors are commonplace.
The virtualization itself is not the bizarre part. The bizarre part is where the actual OS is 16 bit and runs as the singular "task" of a thin 32 bit layer that merely calls itself a "memory manager". The details of that machinery (segmentation, DPMI, ...) are quite a sight to behold. And it's all because of how PCs evolved at that time, and because we needed to keep running DOS and still wanted to make use of all the extra memory that wouldn't fit into its address space.
I worked for Exec PC internet which evolved from the BBS which was the largest in the US afaik. It ran on somewhat custom PCs where there were I think four nodes per board on bread racks. No cases. Custom software. That BBS was over 250 lines at one point. I remember hearing stories the room with the modems, a lot of Couriers near the end, was so hot they would have to replace dead ones every week.
ExecPC had shelves of Couriers and at some point they were just bare modem cards not in indiviual cases. It was impressive to see.
I worked for an ISP that was racks and racks of bare couriers with lucent portmasters.
And the follow-up article: https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2022/01/27/scale/
The quote at the bottom is great:
You can have a second computer once you've shown you know how to use the first one.
-- Paul Barham, quoted in the COST paper
Followed by a quote from Pink Floyd's _Another Brick in the Wall (Part 2)_.
_Stand still laddie!_
Office chair technology also has really advanced since then (looking at the chair on the picture, which is commonly seen near computers in photos of this era)
Indeed, the Aeron chair, which became a design classic and the apparently the best-selling office chair ever in the US, only came out in 1994. So about the same time as the web. Not sure if it’s the only office chair design with a dedicated wikipedia page? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeron_chair
Depends, is the deck of a battleship an "office"? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emeco_1006
Theres also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirra_chair. (wikipedia has a page for "list of chairs", but not all of them have a dedicated article)
probably my least-regretted purchase (excepting my dog) is my used Aeron that I bought in ~2014 for $300. Still use it daily
> It's possible they managed to do some rudimentary multitasking with DESQview (or worse...) and so supported two whole users with each box. Does that mean they had to be at least 386s to do protected mode? Or was it virtual 8086 mode? I (fortunately) have forgotten the finer points of how that stuff used to work. I DO remember how damn crashy a box became when you ran it "under DV". Constant system freezes. Yep.
I don't recall DESQview to be all that crashy. I was aware of a number multi-line BBSes that used it (just in the 416). Some BBS software called out its use specifically:
* https://www.synchro.net/docs/multnode_config.html
* http://software.bbsdocumentary.com/IBM/DOS/OMEGA/
Also, a comment from someone whose uncle co-founded the company Quarterdeck:
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29396561#unv_29400530
Also, also, if anyone wants to simulate the old-school DESQview experience, perhaps try out "twin":
* https://opensource.com/article/20/1/multiple-consoles-twin
DESQview was absolutely not crashy. I ran several different types of BBS software in it without issues. The "DESQview (or worse...)" comment raised the hair on the back of my neck. DESQview was revolutionary at the time and I was annoyed at having to use Windows many years later.
ASCII windows may not have been everyone's cup of tea but I loved it.
> DESQview was revolutionary at the time and I was annoyed at having to use Windows many years later.
I remember running Win3.11 with-in a DESQview window (and IIRC there was a full-screen mode as well).
I recall running Opus (or maybe the predecessor whose name escapes me) under DESQview on my lousy XT clone. I don’t recall it being crashy but it certainly didn’t have enough horsepower to handle the BBS software and an interactive DOS window.
I couldn’t afford a second machine in those days and having to sacrifice my one and only PC for the full-time BBS wasn’t fun :)
I used DESQview with my BBS. It only had one line but I ran a second local node so I could be online at the same time as my users. I don't remember ever having any problems with it.
Anyone else still remember old BBS phone numbers? I’ve got several stuck in my head from 40 odd years ago, but I can barely remember my kids’ cell numbers.
I still remember the number for Bob's Answering Machine in Phoenix, one of the local Fidonet-connected BBS's.
But oddly, at the same time, I was running a WBBS (wave to Mr. W. Conrad, the author) as a local dual 360K floppy PC-XT BBS, I don't recall my OWN phone number for it.
"Imagine how much power those things used. Every watt of heat they dumped into the room then had to be pumped out, so that means a corresponding amount of air conditioning to take it outside. That seems like a whole mess of juice to me. "
--------------
A 286 used around 3 Watts of power, while a current generation PC PCU uses upwards of 150 W. That's a factor of fifty. That's not even factoring in the GPU's, which these computers would have lacked.
This room was neither quiet or cool. While the CPU's were comparatively low power back then, all the other stuff (modems in particular) would have put out a lot more heat than their modern equivalents. However, this room could realistically have been in somebody's residential home basement without any exotic A/C measures. Maybe a wall-mounted unit or two. It would not have pumped out nearly as much heat or consumed as much power as modern gear of equivalent volume.
Well, it's truth but not the whole truth.
An IBM AT was capable of consuming nearly 200W [1]. Of course a typical machine would not consume as much, because it did not have its RAM and disk slots maxed out. The CPU indeed consumed around 3W, and normally even lacked a radiator.
A modern PC can consume large amounts of power, mostly determined by the appetites of the GPU. But here is plenty of desktop CPUs with 65W and even 45W TDP, and a typical recent Intel or AMD CPU would consume 3-5W when idle. A quite powerful ARM A7 based system, such as an Orange Pi 5, would draw < 15W under maximum load, likely providing more compute and I/O than that whole room on the photo.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Personal_Computer_AT#Power...
People's intuition is based on what a rack in a typical modern data centre would be like. i.e. High end server CPUs and multiple GPU's per box, which really should be factored in since they're the bulk of the power draw and heat production. Put a few of these in your basement and you're going to need special cooling and power solutions.
The pictured room is not full of high-performance computing machines, even for the day. (HPC was ruled by mainframes back then, although if this picture was taken well into the obsolescence of the room, high-end workstations (e.g. Silicon Graphics and Sun) may have been gaining on them for some applications.) This room was built for getting a couple hundred callers networked into a BBS where they could access the same files, text chat, and perhaps even MUD a little. This was a fundamentally different beast.
Indeed, a single high-end desktop today at full load would probably use more power than everything in that room.
I used to dial into that BBS... long distance. It had a huge library of shareware.
https://groups.google.com/g/bit.listserv.games-l/c/1tg85kGBH...
Same here! This brings me back. And makes me feel old. Dialing the big BBSes like this one were rare special occasions for me, due to the cost of long distance.
From the follow-up article: https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2022/01/27/scale/
"If you are sticking with the 2022 equivalent of MS-DOS and machines that do exactly one thing at a time, then yeah, you are going to have a whole fleet of systems all sitting there busy-waiting on something stupid."
"Don't recreate the basement full of PCs when the problem can actually be solved with a single box sitting in a cabinet somewhere."
If they really were just PCs to act as a modem-to-network bridge, this seems to be remarkably cost-inefficient. I remember around 1997 helping the university chuck out a few serial line concentrators (no idea what they were actually called), each of which had 32x RS-232 ports that worked up to 19200 baud and a 10Mbit coax network connection at the back. The on-board computer (wouldn't be at all surprised if it was much more than a 68000 or two) interfaced with all the serial ports and translated it to telnet on a remote machine. You could also send it an escape code and then via a primitive command line connect to any arbitrary IP address and port over TCP. I remember in my student days (so maybe 1995) using finger and SMTP directly from these text terminals without actually logging on.
No idea when these became available, but we were chucking them out in 1997 or 1998 as we were upgrading the labs of text terminals to PCs, so they probably at least a decade old by then.
The BBS software itself would have likely ran on the PCs, one instance per simultaneous user, and because it's a single-tasking OS, that means one simultaneous user per PC. They aren't just bridging packets to a single central multi-user server that serves everyone.
Not necessarily. DOS multi-taskers like DESQview and TopView existed. You didn't even need a 386.
Okay, but what did you use for a multiuser backend database back then? One that could handle multiple threads reading and writing to it? A lot of these old BBS systems were just slapping together endless directories of flat text files.
DOS / Desqview support filesystem locking with "share.exe." Honestly I am not sure how well this worked, but I knew guys who ran multi-line BBSes under DOS and Desqview (and later OS/2) without issue.
Even with multiple PCs you would also have similar "shared filesystem" issues. You'd need some sort of fileserver and a shared, network drive. Novell was popular at the time.
I remember trying to set up a bbs on my pc in the 80s and I didn’t have a separate phone line so I just put it on while I slept. Then people started calling and annoying my parents with daytime modem calls, because I was like 10 and I didn’t think through any of this.
I set up a uh war dialer around the same age over night and my mom got some pretty upset calls the next day.
She had no idea who these people were or why they were upset. I don’t think I copped to it, it was not an easy thing to explain but I did not do that again.
The real question is: Was the turbo button pressed?
Probably not. That would slow them down. The turbo button under-clocked CPUs :-)
I remember thinking that I would reach absolute peak-coolkid if I could start and run a BBS. I even installed WWIV and DesqView to fuel the fantasy and prepare. But my parents didn't understand technology and couldn't grasp why I wanted to hook up (and pay for) a second phone line for the house. So, unfortunately I would remain a mere luser until I went off to University where the Internet was just getting popular and 10-Base-T ethernet drops to the dorm rooms were standard, and I very quickly forgot all about BBSing.
When I got my first PC (a 286 with a 2400 baud modem) I had to wire my computer to the telephone line from my bedroom all the way to the kitchen. I had some very long telephone extension cable and every morning for 2 weeks my parents woke up with chest-high line running down the hallway.
After those 2 weeks, my parents decided to get me my own phone line in my room. That's also week I started running my own BBS. I ran it for several years.
Those were strange and interesting times.
Cool Kids run T1s ;)
Really Cool Kids T3s...
Thanks for the reminder. Those were heady days.
My first programming job out of Uni had dual ISDN to the office.
We ran all of Camarades for the first year on a dual ISDN, then came a leased line to Haarlem which was the closest fat pipe and the year after that we saturated the intercontinental backbone during a space shuttle launch. Oops. Then we moved to Canada to have sufficient bandwidth.
The OS that was running on these is irrelevant, the important part is the BBS software.
And these usually ran quite a few lines per box, sometimes they would use external racks of modems, but I'm not seeing that here so maybe these were using internal modem cards, so maybe 6 per box, but if they were using external modems it could easily be 12 or more, with the PC cards hosting multiple serial ports, 4, 6 or even 8 per card.
Typically a card would have a single large connector at the back and then a pigtail with a DB9 or DB25 (yes, I know) for every modem.
"usually" and "typically" are doing a lot of heavy lifting here :)
Access to knowledge, equipment, and budget varied dramatically prior to widespread internet access. Someone setting up a BBS might not even know about multi-line modem cards or serial port expansions. Even if they knew about them they may not have been able to reasonably obtain them. Or they may have been operating on donations, surplus, or discount equipment. Or they simply may not have had the luxury of time to research all of that as user demand meant they were too busy laying tracks in front of the train.
Many BBSes ran on 1-2 lines per PC because that's what they understood how to build or the hardware they had access to. You might be surprised at just how many lines some BBSes setup this way had!
People forget there was a time that anything outside the standard PC was extremely expensive, often had flaky or nonexistent software support, locked you into a fly-by-night vendor that might go out of business tomorrow, was only available via a distributor who wanted to have you talk to a "sales consultant" before they'd sell you something, etc. Many many people chose sub-optimal implementations because it was an off-the-shelf PC they could replace at any time with trivially simple software requiring no special CONFIG.SYS drivers or TSRs to fiddle with. Especially if you'd ever been burned previously.
The OS was relevant if your BBS software was limited to a single simultaneous user, like many of the early DOS BBSes. The late 80's "PCBoard" BBSes I'm familiar with needed one PC per user, plus a file server with Netware.
Ok, but that's just the vehicle, it is the BBS software that does the works. And even in the 80's there were ways to run multiple instances of 'single user' BBSs on one box, for instance (dare I say it...) OS/2 and TV.
Yeah, this jumped out at me too. It's a wild misunderstanding of how BBSes worked.
That said, I have no idea how a multi-node BBS would work, in terms of keeping state synchronized.
It depends on the era.
Earlier: one PC per user, shared file system using a Novell network. Later: multitasking OS (Desqview, OS/2) or BBS software that natively supported multiple users (like MajorBBS.)
I ran a BBS on an Amiga for a while. The OS natively supported multitasking, but I only had one line. At least I could log in the same time as a user...
The older brother of a friend of mine in the 90s was the co-sysop of one of Sweden's largest "elite" BBSes at the time, Farout BBS. I got to tag along to the sysop's apartment once and see the setup, which was an Amiga 2000 with 3 active nodes and available serial ports for a total of 7 nodes, though the sysop hadn't gotten around to get more telephone lines wired to his apartment.
awesome! getting more phone lines into a residence could be a pain. I knew a guy who had an 8 line BBS in his (parents', actually) basement. Getting more was difficult because they were "out of facilities" and he had to move it to an office.
> It's a wild misunderstanding of how BBSes worked.
That's quite the assumption.
There were a lot of different BBS hosting programs. They wildly varied in what they supported and how they were implemented. Further even within a given piece of software the ways you could configure them and the consequences also varied. Even if a given software supported concurrent users on a single PC for various reasons a BBS might choose not to host that way.
Aren’t the modems the black boxes sitting on top of each PC in the picture?
Yes, you're right, I totally missed them. Those look like USR 'Courier' modems but the resolution is really crappy so hard to be sure and it looks like there are multiple types. There might still be modems in the boxes themselves as well. It doesn't look like more than two modems per box if there isn't.
yes, most of them look like USRobotics Courier modems. Note that not all the machines have one, and some have two.
Assuming that the parent commenter is right and that they are using internal line cards, I wonder if the external modems were being added to support higher speeds.
However, the fact that we can see at least 2 (but I think four) 66 blocks means they had 50 to 100 phone lines for the machines visible, which would make sense that the external modems are the primary connection and no internal modems are being used, based on the number of modems visible and the fact that each 66 block can handle 25 lines.
I think you're right and that there were only two modems connected to the boxes so that's just the built in serial ports, here is another copy of the same picture by someone that apparently funded the board with some details:
This almost confirms it then, each machine has an external modem tied to 1 phone line per modem, and there are no internal modems in use. The picture shows 50 modems that I can see, and the original article indicates that it's around half of their total setup. Scott notes that they had a T3 (likely a frac T3) with 140 dial-in nodes, which aligns with the articles guess of 134 machines.
So I would say that almost definitely, they are using 1 (or 2 for some on the right side of the photo) external modem per PC connected to the 66 block, those analog phone blocks tied back to the channel bank/multiplexer, and the carrier's T3 tied in there.
No internal modems used at all.
And the person who posted the photo on twitter is none other than Scott Miller, founder of Apogee Software, publisher of some of the most revolutionary games of the late 80's and early 90's, and this BBS (Software Creations) was the cornerstone of distributing the shareware versions of those games. Very cool bit of history, I remember dialing in to Software Creations to download Commander Keen!
> do you think "wow, cool, they got to wrangle all of that", or do you think "OMG they had to wrangle all of that"?
I touch on similar point of view discussing digital audio work I do for fun. I use CSound, which I've heard described as "assembly language for audio", and I think that's accurate.
Anyway, when I first, FIRST started, and got a tiny bit familiar, I thought "Wow, I can do anything!" but quickly realized I was also responsible for everything. No free lunch.
I can recall people being very impressed at unix systems being able to handle many clients, and being personally confused at the idea of a computer only being able to handle a single user.
I can recall people being very impressed at unix systems being able to handle many clients
That seems odd to me, too, because before DOS and the Commodore 64/Apple ][ era, multi-user systems were everywhere.
Not just mainframes and minicomputers, but there were many dozens of multi-user systems based on CP/M, MP/M, and other operating systems. Even Tandy had them.
The revolutionary part of the "personal computer" era was that it was your "personal" computer. You finally didn't have to share it with anyone.
Everyone seems to assume you need protected mode to run multi-user systems, too.
It wasn't as secure or as easy, but you could certainly do multi-user systems without protected mode and within very small RAM amounts.
Brings back memories ...
Boardwatch was the magazine for BBS ( I do not know of any others)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boardwatch
Some all? on internet archive https://archive.org/details/boardwatchmagazine I recall buyingthe magazine back inthe day...
There is so much speculation in the OP that I am not even sure if the title is correct.
For a similar nostalgic hit:
Related:
Ask HN: Remember Fidonet?
>It's likely that one box in this picture equals one "node", which serviced exactly one phone line at a time, and thus one user at a time.
Not really, plenty of BBS systems would allow several connections on one machine. It was more a limitation of the amount of modems you could cram into the box than anything having to do with the OS. Judging by the 4 stickers on each one (on the right) under the floppy drive, I'm guessing each had 4 lines.
Here's a memory: My old Fido-net system, running on a 386, with a single phone line. Connected to a Microcom 34Kbaud modem.
Everything is chugging on, and connects to another system further up the chain at 2 am for network traffic. Except he's on a new phone number, on a new exchange in the state. A 914 exchange. Only the phone company's updates haven't reached all of the telephone switching centers in the sate. Somehow, it was re-routed to 911 services, and I had the police and fire department at the front door responding to a 'silent call'. They went away unhappy. I wasn't very happy either.
So, a number of different BBS servers supported multiple incoming lines (effectively multitasking inside of the BBS server application itself, not by running multiple copies of the software on the same machine), typically up to 8 in one machine either using a special communications card that connected to a number of external modems or by stuffing internal modems into as many ISA slots as you can (typically up to 6 so you still had IO and video, 7 if you ran 'headless'.)
Some BBS servers also supported multiple instances by connecting to a master server, which supplied dynamic content such as chat, forum messages and e-mails or door game data to all of the other machines. In large markets a BBS having dozens of lines was not uncommon.
If the site is not responding, can always try the way back machine.
https://web.archive.org/web/20220207120422/https://rachelbyt...
I remember dialing up to a BBS in the area in 1990 that had 4 phone lines. That was amazing at the time when most BBS only had 1 line.
But I do remember downloading text files FILE.IDZ about other BBS, and reading some magazines that mentioned other BBS systems that had 32 and more phone lines but you had to pay. That seemed like it was just on another level in another part of the world that seemed like fantasy compared to the area I was in.
My roommate circa 1989 had a bunch of Apple II’s with multiple modem cards per machine to run a bulletin board. Not sure why an Apple II could support multiple users logging into the BBS via multiple modems but DOS based machines could not.
> So then, when you see this picture (and remember, it might only be showing half of the whole setup), do you think "wow, cool, they got to wrangle all of that", or do you think "OMG they had to wrangle all of that"? It's an important distinction to make, and I think someone's gut reaction to this amount of hardware in one place might influence how they approach building new systems.
Definitely in the "wow, cool, they got to wrangle all of that" camp!
I remember dialing up to this BBS quite a bit, and I also remember downloading tons of demos from other BBSs that originally came from SCBBS!
Apogee was somehow part of the party < https://x.com/ScottApogee/status/1593729387106512896>
Because of the shareware distribution. A lot of Apogee software was shareware (free).
It's possible they managed to do some rudimentary multitasking with DESQview (or worse...)
There were even hypervisors available, such as VM/386:
I think the standard BBS modem for most BBS’s was the US Robotics brand if I’m not mistaken.
My first modem was a Supra 2400 baud, then thinking about all the speed I would have with my new 56.6. My first hard drive was a 20 meg, new it was $320. 20 megs $320 kids, imagine that.
That was for my wonderful brand new Amiga 500. Those were the days.
>> So then, when you see this picture (and remember, it might only be showing half of the whole setup), do you think "wow, cool, they got to wrangle all of that", or do you think "OMG they had to wrangle all of that"? It's an important distinction to make, and I think someone's gut reaction to this amount of hardware in one place might influence how they approach building new systems.
It's a very good point. Like, I have some stuff that eats up RAM like a, a very hungry thing, so I went online to see if I could buy some old server blade with a couple TB of RAM from ebay. I found a few, refurbished, not in a horrible condition, not prohibitively expensive (I'm not currently funded, as such) and I remember this distinct feeling, like a frisson of excitement at the thought of having access to ~20 times more POWER than I usually have...
... and then I cooled down, didn't buy a server, and instead rented one with "only" 256 GB RAM until I could fix my stuff so that it now runs with up to 8GB on my laptop. Still expensive, but we're getting there.
Morale of the story: don't know. I prefer to find ways to make software go faster than rely on hardware? I get the feeling I'm very alone on this, seeing as everyone's talking about putting nuclear-powered server farms in space and whatnot.
Would love a technical explanation of how all that stuff worked by someone who did that kind of stuff in those days. In the old days I personally never saw anything bigger than a four line BBS. But I remember reading about that one in shareware README.TXT files
Wouldn't mind hearing war stories from the cdrom.com guys as well.
https://www.cnn.com/TECH/computing/9904/08/cdrom.idg/ and https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/wow-what-a-system-ftp... I'm not aware of any others with more details and war stories.
Does BBS still have a usage nowadays? I feel HN is not too different -- and actually offer less than a BBS -- back then there are a lot of goods on a large BBS. And it's easier to mix a pic with text, but I could be wrong.
Also thinking it's a lot environmental easier to host a BBS than a Discord server.
How did they keep the room cool? that equipment must not be shown... Maybe fans to move the hot air ....
It helps these computers didn't use much power, probably didn't even have much of a heatsink on the CPU. Someone in this thread quoted 3 watts for the CPU. Of course with this many of them you might be using something like a kilowatt (for all the components) which is enough to make a room quite warm, but not damaging. Think about a kilowatt space heater - it's not really dangerous to things that don't directly touch it.
If it's like the old ISPs I was familiar with, they didn't. The POP (point-of-presence, 100's of modems, plus several terminal servers, routers, etc.) would generally be in some basement without any cooling at all. There would literally be warped plastic.
If they were really badass, they had a rack of Telebit modems. (Telebit made 68020 based modems that did 56+ Kbps long before a 56K standard, and literally had more compute power than most of the computers they were connected to.)
Looks like the shelves were custom-built for those machines. I wonder what the monitors were hooked up to, or if they were just spares.
My first thought was that this was built someone who clearly cared about the system they were running.
(2022)
Some more discussion then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30096565
I imagine Rusty ‘n’ Edie’s BBS was double of that
There's a name from the past... according to the Wikipedia article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rusty_n_Edie%27s_BBS, they _only_ had 124 dial-in lines.
So are those just regular bookcases that the computers are stacked on?
You could probably replace all those machines with a Mac Mini or even a Raspberry Pi.
By the early 90s didn’t most BBS software support multi-line setups on a single pc?
For anyone that enjoyed door games, Grok will simulate L.O.R.D. for you.
Would these machines have been networked with CAT-3? Daisy chained phone cords?
More likely coax. 3com 509c network cards. Much less infrastructure to have a lan that way.
IBM had a network that ran over phone cords that were daisycbained from one node to the next.
Depends on the exact date.
I never worked with DOS BBS systems, so I can't say about this photo specifically, but the ones I did work with had between one and four dialup modems hooked up to each machine, depending on its capabilities. They did "networking" through a store-and-forward messaging system. It wasn't networking as we'd recognize it today.
In the 90’s we had microsystems, in the 2020s we have microservices.
Wow, I used to dial into BBS for around 3-4 years. good time!!
The pre-Internet BBS era is something I remember fondly. I was a kid, so there's that halo effect of course, but I loved the indie DIY nature of it and the diversity and community you'd get.
There's a site called textfiles.com that's kind of a museum, and a documentary you can find on YouTube. There's stuff on archive.org too.
It wasn't actually that long of an era. The first modern BBS was probably CBBS in Chicago in 1978, though there's other claimants depending on how you define BBS. When the Internet started to go mainstream in the middle 1990s, the BBS scene died shockingly quickly. So it lasted a little under 20 years, probably 17 or 18.
The glory days of it were probably from about 1985 until 1995. By 1985 you started to have PCs and modems good enough to make it a pleasure to use and cheap enough (and with a used after-market) to achieve significant penetration and enable less wealthy and kids to get online. By 1995 the Internet was starting to kill it.
I read a lot of rosy stuff about how people behaved so much better back then, and some of that is BS. There were trolls, weirdos, creeps, racists, black hat hackers that would mess with you, and malware that would mess up your machine. There were flame wars and sectarian splits where a bunch of users on a BBS would leave for a different one. There was junk content, filler, and nasty stuff like CSAM around.
I would, however, say that the signal to noise ratio was a lot better than modern social media and the modern SEO-trashed web. The big difference is that these systems did not have algorithms biasing things in this direction. You didn't have an algorithmic feed preferentially surfacing the most idiotic or inflammatory content to get you to get angry about it and "maximize engagement." You didn't have algorithms incentivizing endless amounts of chum to game the rankings. It was easy to just ignore the trolls and morons and creeps and go for the good stuff.
Much of the same can be said of the early pre-socials pre-SEO web.
You also didn't have a lot of money involved, and while money can create productive incentives in a lot of areas it seems to create mostly perverse incentives in media, especially if the money is coming from advertisers rather than consumers of the media.
The original sin is really the time-on-site/time-on-app KPI. It is literally destroying civilization. I don't think that's much of an exaggeration.
All in all it was good times, and I miss the ethos and community and sense of discovery of it.
I remember that time fondly also. You are spot on with the glory days. I dialed into my first BBS in 1988 with a 1200 baud modem. By 1995, they were basically dead.
I miss those times
Nice computer “racks”
... and then a raspberry pi today can outdo all of those computers.
