A bit of a tangent, but the trust factor was pretty high with BBSes compared to the Internet of today. Many, including the Renegade BBS I ran, asked for your real name, phone number, and home address when signing up. I never thought twice about giving out that info and never had anyone complain to me about needing to provide it.
Thanks to local toll or long distance fees your local BBS was literally local. Everyone on it lived nearby and if you were an ass you were close enough to get punched in the face. Contrast with Usenet where trolling and flamewars were rampant because instigators could hide behind a veil of anonymity or pseudo-anonymity.
The BBS era was also long before public doxxing and spammers scraping any and all personal info. At least before the Internet made such things easily amplified and trivial to do.
> "Thanks to local toll or long distance fees your local BBS was literally local. Everyone on it lived nearby and if you were an ass you were close enough to get punched in the face."
What? This is mindblowing to me, being born in 1997. I can't imagine an online experience like this, it sounds pretty neat.
With BBSes you were literally dialing in to the machine via a modem. Local calls were free but long distance charges were expensive. There were even local toll calls, a number might be in your area code by far enough away you were charged to call. You wouldn't pay long distance rates but it wasn't free. Charges were also billed to the caller rather than callee.
So just by nature of tolls you wouldn't call many out of area BBSes. If you did it was brief calls for a post or to check mail but not sit around playing a door game or downloading some big file.
That all meant BBSes were very local for most people. This is in addition to the fact only a small fraction of homes had computers, a fraction of those had modems, and a fraction of those actually called BBSes. That aspect also meant the populations were relatively small. A small web forum might have a hundred users spread over a large area while a BBS would have a dozen in the same town.
The phreaking scene opened up access to any bbs bypassing long distance/toll charges.
What some use to do is put a 1-800 on a 1-900 number. By calling a 1-800 number you could connect to a sexline for free. We had so much as kids calling and making fun of the operators.
A few years back I got a tv for Christmas. Christmas night I setup it up and it scans the cable channels available. Next day I notice some channels with fractions like 88.2 were programmed but the screen was blank. I rescanned and discovered new channels at different freq and they were playing really new movies. I watched a movie and when it finished there wasn't any content. I rescanned often and new movies would popup during the night. Then sex movies started to show up. I realized whatever anyone ordered via ondemand in my building was being broadcast and my tv could pick it up. If someone paused the movie I would have to wait. Mornings were a mix of cartoons and fast-forwarded porns. Day was mostly cartoon. Evenings were when people would order the hit movies.
Interesting things are constantly happening no matter what era you are in.
I noticed the same thing probably 15 years ago when I bought a TV with a digital tuner. You mirrored my experience exactly with one thing to add - another thing that cracked me up was when they would order it in Spanish!
That pausing thing was annoying - on Friday or Saturday nights though you could usually change to another channel and find someone else watching the same movie at almost the same spot that didn’t have it paused.
Oh and around 1985 and 1986 I wrote my own software to guess calling card numbers between midnight and 6 am. I would either use Sprint or MCI access numbers and get about 20 working codes per night.
That's awesome. Nothing better than finding a code (turning on the screen the next morning). I got into it a little later and by that time a lot of software existed at least for the c64. I use to wardial in my sparetime and I published fun findings for a local zine for my areacode. Finding endpoints connected to a modem was a treat. Nothing better than figuring out you have to connect at 7,2 baud/parity instead of standard 8,1 then you are promped with a menu.. Fun times..
Lost to time apparently, there was a service called “PC Pursuit” that allowed you to dial into a local access number and then dial out again through a remote modem to BBSs in other area codes. The traffic in between was carried over an X.25 network. I used this service for a number of years before trading it for a Unix shell account w/ Usenet access. It was a little choppy sometimes but opened the door to a larger world.
I still use the phreaking files from that era today - the phone number I use has rung busy for at least forty years. You can still use those automated callback numbers as a convenient exit for long meetings “oops, I’ve got to take this…”
> There were even local toll calls, a number might be in your area code by far enough away you were charged to call. You wouldn't pay long distance rates but it wasn't free.
And in the late 80s long distance rates meant something like $4/minute inflation adjusted. Even "local" toll calls were up to $1/minute. Of course the billing scheme was far more complex. The paper phone book would usually have a page or two to determine the rate between various exchanges.
Sometimes the people on the local BBS would even get together for stuff! See a movie together, have a potluck out in the local park... you know, human social stuff. Hang out with the people you've been chatting with regularly.
Oh, heck yeah. I was a member of several BBSs but found a true home when I came across one run by a local newspaper reporter (Sredni). Everyone was at minimum an avid reader, and two were writers including the reporter. The BBS was run out of her home and had only one phone line, so people had to wait their turn to dial in, batch upload messages and download replies using software similar to uucp. Even with that software a BBS with a large user base like hers was often busy, so the software had a war dial mode that just retried forever.
One of the members (Skippy) literally had everyone's birthday and there was a celebration or meeting just about every weekend. When my apartment lease ended but I didn't want to move home and had no money for a deposit, Vermithrax Pejorative let me sleep on his couch. One of the guys (Dorothy) came to every event dressed exactly like Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz. My point is we were a very friendly and non-judgemental crew. Sort of the polar opposite of the modern-day internet.
I was eventually lucky enough to date Sredni I think in part because I actually knew who Sredni Vashtar was. LOL. She called me incredibly excited after I gifted her a Spider Robinson novel and it had a word she'd never seen before on page one. It was an elegant community for a more civilized age.
Remember that the internet as we know it today is young. At the peak of BBSes, you called actual phone numbers to connect to places. If you've ever seen Hackers or War Games, the hardware wasn't too far from reality
If the phone number was long distance, you had to pay more - just as it is today. Local calls were usually free. Hence the GP's comment :)
My hometown had 300 BBSes that I wrote a set of expect-like automation scripts in {COMMO} to dial in, download a ZIP of any new DMs and forum posts, and then log off and rotate on to the next one. When the number was busy, the dialer would move to the next, and when it connected successfully, the dialed would mark it completed until I clear them.
It wasn't the only online experience, but maybe it was the most common one. You also had services like Q-Link(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7jLBOIvxhg), which later became AOL.
> Everyone on it lived nearby and if you were an ass you were close enough to get punched in the face.
Didn't stop folks from flaming and trolling. The BBS Documentary [1] has an example of a kid who follows around and threatens a BBS owner who owns a computer so because he didn't like the computer it ran on.
Definitely not but the prevalence was far less. The local nature of BBSes inspired a lot of prior restraint we don't see a lot on the Internet anymore. That's not to say anonymity or pseudo-anonymity is bad. It just creates a different environment than what you'd typically find on BBSes.
Yup. Plus if you were plugged in enough, you knew about OSUNY BBS, telenet and hidden places to exchange messages like WSMR. The phreaks were everywhere. Uh, so I'm told. cough
Shout out to a fellow Renegade sysop. I don't believe I asked for anybody's home address, but maybe I've just forgotten. In the town where I lived, most of the BBS people knew each other, plus everyone was in the phone book anyway, so it wouldn't have made a ton of difference.
But I agree that I was so much less concerned about privacy back then. Likely that was out of ignorance, but also because the threat to privacy is different on the internet. In a widely networked world, the .001% of people who are malicious actors still amount to a huge number of malicious actors that didn't exist in a community of a couple hundred people.
As someone who used both Telegard and Renegade... no. Just no. Renegade literally just lifted the Telegard 2.5i source code, added a few trivial changes, and made a few bugfixes. Disagree? Name five of these 'commercial features' it added.
It's a sad truth of bulletin board software that sysops often didn't know what other software was capable of and blindly engaged in the sort of bit-bashing people engaged in when it comes to hardware... not because the other guy's stuff was genuinely bad, but because the sysop didn't want to admit that maybe they wasted a bunch of time and effort on a piece of shit.
Too bad its not a plugin for browsers, and you could post ansiwave content on any site, browsers just detected its its ansiwave code, like an extension to html.
Imagine reading a tweet or reddit post with ansiwave content imbedded. (Like Microsoft Chat tried with gfx and irc)
Internet really needs to break free from all the control. An overlay network like that disenter browser plugin, you could read comments on any site. Now that all popular sites are closing down comments, kinda shame it died.
Also for video, I remember small rle text stream videos on modem, just black and white, pretty easy to do now with unicode, a small 64x64 text box.. (example).
Also midi's and awesome .sf2 sound banks.
Good times back then, seems the internet lost so much in exchange for government and corporate control.
Git as a protocol for this brilliant. I don’t know it well enough to know what kind of client side moderation policy enforcement might be viable, or curation tools, but very, very compelling idea.
Depends on what you mean by real :D It's all unicode text, but you can actually share old school ANSI art in the .ans format because it includes a cp437 to utf8 converter. No door games but i hope to extend the MIDI scripting language to do other things, including eventually making games. Little programs/games embedded directly inside posts is an exciting idea.
Nope no animations. I think that functionality would come from extensions to the scripting language i mentioned, but that would of course be a different format than original ansi animations.
There are no usernames, only tags, of which modleader is one (and multiple users can have it). Only mods can edit tags, so you can think of them somewhat like flairs on reddit.
You can click on a post and go to "see user", which will show their user page. You could also add a signature to your posts -- they're more fun and personalized anyway. Right now that's manual effort, but i will probably add the ability to preset the editor with something so it's there every time you make a new post.
Usernames just don't work because they require an authoritative server to divvy them out. Ansiwave is designed to eventually be partially or completely decentralized -- all users are just ed25519 public keys, and the ID of a post is the signature of it, so there will never be conflicts between users/posts on different servers.
In theory we could one day have a decentralized way of registering unique usernames, similar to that DNS-like thing they made on ethereum. But i'm not even close to thinking about that right now.
I was thinking the same thing, even considering going into dev tools to try and change the font. Didn't realize it was a firefox on mac thing. I went ahead and opened it in Chrome. It's still pretty difficult font to read, but it is a bit brighter in Chrome.
You won't be able to change the font because it's being rendered in webgl. In fact, the page is one big canvas tag. I'm painfully aware of the downsides, but it gives me a lot of control when rendering ANSI art, and will allow me to make a killer desktop GUI app later on (a very fast/efficient opengl program, no electron nonsense).
Before anyone asks about accessibility...i should point out i am still injecting a text-only version into the DOM behind the canvas tag for the sake of screenreaders.
The reason firefox looks so much worse is that it has a smaller webgl size limit than chrome (specifically MAX_RENDERBUFFER_SIZE). When rendering at full resolution, it was not large enough to hold the content sometimes. I only check that webgl value so this will resolve itself if/when firefox increases it.
Thanks for the detailed response! I did poke around a bit and noticed none of my changes were having any impact. I never really messed with webgl, so didn't notice that was what was doing the rendering. Is webgl MAX_RENDERBUFFER_SIZE something I can set in about:config or elsewhere?
I got my start with BBSes, lots of fond memories. There was one BBS in my area, and they had it setup to RelayNet (similar to FidoNet, but smaller). I knew when they would connect up to exchange, so I would be sure to upload my mail packet and then dial back up 5 minutes after they did their exchange to see if I had any new messages. I could send and reply to messages across the country in a matter of days.
You won't be able to change it manually because it's a hard limit in their webgl implementation. But hopefully they'll increase it later.
We can't mimic the local feel of BBSes on the modern internet but i'm confident we can capture the rest of the experience, and at least have something better than the ad-infested garbage heap we see on the web today :D
I hesitated with the word choice but when i say "modern" i mean that the project dispenses with the implementation details of BBSes that are not relevant to the "BBS experience", such as the use of telnet/ssh, outdated text encodings, and long signup forms asking for copious amounts of personal info. I think adding images/videos would definitely affect the experience.
In BBS terms it very much was modern. First it dates to 1992, so very late in the BBS era - just prior to the point where larger BBSes were starting to offer shell or SLIP/PPP access and inevitably becoming just ISPes. And it never really caught on. I remember the one time I dialed into a BBS in 93, the video mode changed and this graphical mouse driven screen was rendered. It seemed cool but BBSes as more than an ISP were already dying. The company that made it was a bit interesting - once the web came out they tried to improve it away from its EGA origins, add audio/video and pivot to directly compete with HTML and then Flash - it did not work out.
