Bulletin board system
Bulletin board systems were in many ways a precursor to the modern form of the World Wide Web, social networks, and other aspects of the Internet.
InfoWorld estimated that there were 60,000 BBSes serving 17 million users in the United States alone in 1994, a collective market much larger than major online services such as CompuServe.
The introduction of inexpensive dial-up internet service and the Mosaic web browser offered ease of use and global access that BBS and online systems did not provide, and led to a rapid crash in the market starting in late 1994 to early 1995.
[3] Today, BBSing survives largely as a nostalgic hobby in most parts of the world, but it is still a popular form of communication for middle aged Taiwanese (see PTT Bulletin Board System).
One particularly influential example was PLATO, which had thousands of users by the late 1970s, many of whom used the messaging and chat room features of the system in the same way that would later become common on BBSes.
Examples of direct-connecting modems did exist, and these often allowed the host computer to send it commands to answer or hang up calls, but these were very expensive devices used by large banks and similar companies.
With the introduction of microcomputers with expansion slots, like the S-100 bus machines and Apple II, it became possible for the modem to communicate instructions and data on separate lines.
The first public dial-up BBS was developed by Ward Christensen and Randy Suess, members of the Chicago Area Computer Hobbyists' Exchange (CACHE).
According to an early interview, when Chicago was snowed under during the Great Blizzard of 1978, the two began preliminary work on the Computerized Bulletin Board System, or CBBS.
[7] The system came into existence largely through a fortuitous combination of Christensen having a spare S-100 bus computer and an early Hayes internal modem, and Suess's insistence that the machine be placed at his house in Chicago where it would be a local phone call for more users.
Hayes' solution to the problem was to use a small microcontroller to implement a system that examined the data flowing into the modem from the host computer, watching for certain command strings.
Most of the information was displayed using ordinary ASCII text or ANSI art, but a number of systems attempted character-based graphical user interfaces (GUIs) which began to be practical at 2400 bit/s.
Many third-party services were developed to support these systems, offering simple credit card merchant account gateways for the payment of monthly fees, and entire file libraries on compact disk that made initial setup very easy.
Almost every popular system used ANSI-based color menus to make reading easier on capable hardware and terminal emulators, and most also allowed cursor commands to offer command-line recall and similar features.
FirstClass offered a host of features that would be difficult or impossible under a terminal-based solution, including bi-directional information flow and non-blocking operation that allowed the user to exchange files in both directions while continuing to use the message system and chat, all in separate windows.
Internet protocols also allowed a single connection to be used to contact multiple services simultaneously; for example, downloading files from an FTP library while checking the weather on a local news website.
MS-DOS continued to be the most popular operating system for BBS use up until the mid-1990s, and in the early years, most multi-node BBSes were running under a DOS based multitasker such as DESQview or consisted of multiple computers connected via a LAN.
Other popular BBS's were Maximus and Opus, with some associated applications such as BinkleyTerm being based on characters from the Berkley Breathed cartoon strip of Bloom County.
However, some home computer manufacturers extended the ASCII character set to take advantage of the advanced color and graphics capabilities of their systems.
Unless a caller was using terminal emulation software written for, and running on, the same type of system as the BBS, the session would simply fall back to simple ASCII output.
Other systems used the Viewdata protocols made popular in the UK by British Telecom's Prestel service, and the on-line magazine Micronet 800 whom were busy giving away modems with their subscriptions.
Since most early BBSes were run by computer hobbyists, content was largely technical, with user communities revolving around hardware and software discussions.
Large systems used all 26 DOS drive letters with multi-disk changers housing tens of thousands of copyright-free shareware or freeware files available to all callers.
Some BBSes, called elite, WaReZ, or pirate boards, were exclusively used for distributing cracked software, phreaking materials, and other questionable or unlawful content.
These specialty and pay BBSes usually had something unique to offer their users, such as large file libraries, warez, pornography, chat rooms or Internet access.
However, many free BBSes also maintained close communities, and some even had annual or bi-annual events where users would travel great distances to meet face-to-face with their on-line friends.
[21] The notorious Rusty n Edie's BBS, in Boardman, Ohio, was raided by the FBI in January 1993 for trading unlicensed software, and later sued by Playboy for copyright infringement in November 1997.
Elaborate schemes allowed users to download binary files, search gopherspace, and interact with distant programs, all using plain-text e-mail.
As the volume of FidoNet Mail increased and newsgroups from the early days of the Internet became available, satellite data downstream services became viable for larger systems.
A notable example was Phil Katz's PKARC (and later PKZIP, using the same ".zip" algorithm that WinZip and other popular archivers now use); also other concepts of software distribution like freeware, postcardware like JPEGview and donationware like Red Ryder for the Macintosh first appeared on BBS sites.
