Bulletin Boards are online world's good old days Mark Stachiew, October 29, 1997, The Gazette Back in the Stone Age of computers, before Bill Gates had made his first million and the Internet had yet to see its first "spam" message, computer users talked with each other via Bulletin Board Systems (BBSes). While the World Wide Web has taken a bite out of the number of BBSes, they never really went away and now the old-timers who still use them are banding together to tell cyberspace newcomers what they're missing. A BBS is basically a computer sitting in someone's home running software which allows it to answer incoming calls. Other computer users call the BBS to exchange messages, play games and download computer programs. It really is an electronic bulletin board. They are usually free to call since the system is being run as a hobby by someone who is donating time and computer. No fancy browsers or hardware are required. The lowliest computer with a modem and terminal program will be enough to connect to a BBS. Longtime users of BBSes remain nostalgic about the early days of the 1980s when the first home computers gave birth to the first fledgling bulletin boards. In those days BBS callers used glacially-slow 300 baud modems with acoustic couplers that had to be fit over telephone handsets and looked like rubber earmuffs. They endured these hardships because of the magic that BBSes created. It was a new form of communication which allowed people to make contact with total strangers which sometimes developed into lifelong friendships. Lynda McCormick knows all about how BBSes bring people together. She runs one of the oldest ones in Montreal. McBBS has been in continuous operation since 1984 and people who called on the first day are still calling 13 years later. "Some of the old-time users will still call in long distance when they've moved away," she says. "Not on a regular basis, but it's fantastic to hear from them and hear how life is treating them now in Toronto, London, Ontario, Seattle, or L.A." McCormick is still enthusiastic about BBSing and is creating an online BBSing Museum with electronic ephemera from BBSes which have long since vanished into the ether. "The BBS scene in Montreal has been a very rich one with many characters, personalities and a few very hilarious stories," she says. "I for one would like to see it preserved and cherished as it should be, and not simply swept away and forgotten." One local BBS operator, Steve Monteith, has maintained a list of Montreal bulletin boards (www.vir.com/~capt_xerox/bbslist.html) for nearly 12 years. Looking over archives of the list demonstrate how much damage the Web has done to BBSing in this city. In 1989, Montreal boasted 175 computer bulletin boards. That number grew steadily, peaking at 482 in 1995 which is about the time that the Web began to blossom. Since then the number of BBSes has plummeted to 221. At that rate of decline they could be extinct in two years. So do BBSes have a future? The people who still use them think so. They persist because they create a sense of community among their users and because callers usually live in the same town, so they are able to get together offline where friendships are formed. That can be difficult on the Internet where you could be exchanging E-mail with someone in Zimbabwe or Kuala Lumpur. Monteith notes a few other advantages of the local BBS over the Internet. You won't get unwanted E-mail (spam) and BBSes are rarely commercial. "You can read through whole message bases, and not see an advertisement and you can be quite sure that your name on a BBS isn't going to be sold to some mailing list." An international grass-roots organization has sprung up to spread the word about BBSes. The Council for Online Community Alternatives (http://coca.home.ml.org) aims to promote BBSes as an alternative to the Internet and to build awareness among computer users that BBSes are available in their communities. They maintain that in recent years millions of people have rushed out to buy computers thinking their only online alternative was the Internet, oblivious to the existence of local BBSs. COCA likes to point out some of the advantages of BBSes. For example, at peak times the busy Internet can slow to a crawl. That isn't a problem on a BBS since there is usually only one user connected at a time so your new fast modem will actually work at full speed. Unlike most discussion groups on the Internet, the ones on BBSes are usually moderated and ill-tempered "flame" wars are less common. And pornography is much rarer on BBSes. BBSes are becoming more sophisticated. Many local BBSes now offer Internet E-mail and access to select Usenet newsgroups. Some have lots of downloadable files while others use flashy terminal programs which give them a graphical interface which is almost as easy to use as a Web browser. Some bulletin boards are even directly accessible over the Web, usually via telnet. You can find a list of other Internet BBSs at [1]http://dkeep.com/sbi.html. _________________________________________________________________ References 1. http://dkeep.com/sbi.html 2. http://members.nbci.com/plam/library/library.html Sources: http://members.nbci.com/plam/library/bbs_days.html http://www.fidonews.org/prev/1444/articles.html