Just thinking about Bulletin Board Systems fills me with nostalgia. They were computer systems that you dialed into with a modem to leave messages, exchange files, play games, and (if the board had more than one line) chat with other users - like&the Internet, only on a much smaller scale, and without the rampant commercialization or hype. Usually small and local, they typically fostered a strong sense of community among their members.

I honestly believe that BBS's will make a comeback in a few years...

Why?

Corporatization and Capitalism is taking over the internet and changing the standard paradigm from "putting information out there for everyone for free" to "I put it out there, now pay me to see it". The fact that the government is now trying to make the internet into a kinder, gentler place is just fucking thigs up even more.

Internet2 most likely won't solve this problem, but enough pissed-off intelligent sysops that are careful who they let in to their own network will.

BBS's are NOT coming back, at least not in their former form. There were only a few BBS's that ever got really big in the old days (Mindvox and The Well come to mind). This was mainly due to the high infrastructure costs. Since most BBS's were run by amateurs they could hardly afford racks of modems and servers. The availability of high-bandwith net connections and the near ubiquity of the net has killed almost all of the old school BBS's.

However, one of the really nice things about BBS's were that they tended to be local (to avoid high telco charges), and formed tight little communities. This could certainly be duplicated on the net, and has been. If you look at all of the club sites on the net; Yahoo Clubs, Ecircles, etc. you will see that they reproduce almost of the features of a BBS. Namely: forums, chat, file archives, news of the day. BBS's also provided email, but that has been replaced by internet mail which obviously has a much greater reach.

I do miss all the boards though, ascii art and all.

bboard = B = BCPL

BBS /B-B-S/ n.

[common; abbreviation, `Bulletin Board System'] An electronic bulletin board system; that is, a message database where people can log in and leave broadcast messages for others grouped (typically) into topic groups. The term was especially applied to the thousands of local BBS systems that operated during the pre-Internet microcomputer era of roughly 1980 to 1995, typically run by amateurs for fun out of their homes on MS-DOS boxes with a single modem line each. Fans of Usenet and Internet or the big commercial timesharing bboards such as CompuServe and GEnie tended to consider local BBSes the low-rent district of the hacker culture, but they served a valuable function by knitting together lots of hackers and users in the personal-micro world who would otherwise have been unable to exchange code at all. Post-Internet, BBSs are likely to be local newsgroups on an ISP; efficiency has increased but a certain flavor has been lost. See also bboard.

--The Jargon File version 4.3.1, ed. ESR, autonoded by rescdsk.

Back in the 80s and early 90s, BBSes were ran utilizing phone lines and usually DOS based software applications. To achieve multi-user capabilities, one would have to install multiple phone lines and have a semi-decent computer to provide the users with what they wanted, which was usually door games and files.

These days, though, BBSes can be run on anything from Linux to Windows, and they can have servers for FTP, HTTP, and other internet protocols installed. Mutli-node / multi-user mode is already there since modern BBSes use the telnet protocol. There are still a few BBSes that are in the stone age and are using phone lines for communication. They are few and far between, however.

Fidonet still exists, although it is not the network it was 10 years ago. Fidonet was the largest, and is the oldest BBS network in existance. There were many other networks that have come and gone, but Fidonet is still hanging around.