BBS Memories

After reading an article at Ars Technica reminiscing about calling dial up bulletin boards with a 2400 baud modem, I’ve been trying to remember details of those days. Twenty years of the Web have erased most of those memories to my disappointment. Even remembering names of the BBSs I frequented escapes me.

What I do remember is mainly concentrating my attentions on an OS/2 board near the end of my long distance calling days. At that point, America Online had become my main destination and so the primitive ANSI based boards were on the way out, not only for me but for most users. I wish I could remember the board’s name that has slipped so easily from my personal memory banks.

It was my first dealings with posting online, though I was more of a lurker than a poster. Other than a brief period in the early 2000s, that’s been my pattern and for good reason – I learn more than I have to contribute at the highly specialized forums I like to haunt.

But back to the OS/2 BBS. Those were heady days of hope where trading tips on running the unusual operating system were necessary to keep Windows and DOS apps running smoothly under it. Hopes of a multitasking world that were dashed thanks to internal divisions at IBM and Bill Gates ability to undermine most of his rivals.

Another BBS type I frequented were those housing shareware and freeware to download. Think I can remember any of them? Nope. Looking around the net for information on old BBS sites was not productive and I have a feeling they were some of the smaller boards. Instead I ran into info on a couple of large BBS operations that were subscription based and explains the text file tags I used to run into within archives or comments in posts.

The latter turned out to be a notorious one, Event Horizon. Apparently it was the source of all the girlie pics floating about online back in the day. I remembered it as where really neat astronomy pictures came from. A lawsuit from Playboy was its downfall according to what I read at Wikipedia. I had no clue.

The other board that seemed to have tags on all sorts of things was Exec-PC out of Wisconsin. I dimly recall hooking up to it a few times, but free trials were very limited. Countless shareware games and apps had text files showing them originating from there so I recognized the name right away. It must have been quite the operation back in the day.

It was a different time, one that kids raised in the world wide Web era can’t comprehend. There was no mousing around menus and you typed every command using the Ctrl key a lot. Color ANSI graphics told you this was a big board you’d dialed into and flashing or animated ANSI told you it was a really big board. Or at least that’s the way it appeared to me back then.

Slightly more clear are some memories about using freeware or shareware terminal emulators. I think HyperAccess was one I used for awhile under OS/2, while WinComm Lite was used under Windows at the end. Frankly, my memories are so hazy I’m not sure. The ones provided weren’t adequate for my needs, that much I do remember clearly.

Then there was the world of newsgroups and the specialized software to access them. They died more slowly than the BBS systems and are still around if nearly forgotten. I still have notes saved taken from discussions at rec.models.scale on specific fixes for model kits. I gather the surviving groups are mainly about pirating media these days.

Looking back at the hardware side, I remember figuring out modem strings for the various modems I had with Zoom providing the best performance of any. In fact, I’ve still got an old 56k external model made by them stored in case of emergency. My first modem was the slow 2400 baud built into my Packard Bell 486SX-25 based system. As speeds progressed, I went from 14.4k to 28.8k before ending up at 56k. All were Zoom made and all performed beyond spec in actual speeds achieved.

That’s very impressive since I live out in the countryside. Zoom was simply the best.

Broken downloads just hit me in a flashback. Oh they were so frustrating! So much time spent only to have it break off and have to be started again. Finding BBSs with Z-modem protocol became mandatory, because it could resume from halts and had decent error checking. So much grief over huge three megabyte files that seems silly in an era of downloading multi gigabyte games and multimedia.

Like the author of the piece, I too feel like something has been lost since those days. What’s missing is the sense of adventure going online. How can there be any feeling of exploring unknown territory when everything is hooked up to the Net?

Humanity needs frontiers to stay collectively healthy and we no longer have any. But that is a subject for another day.