The more things change, the more they stay the same.  It just occurred to me - the role of a BBS-based software system hasn't changed much over the years.  Sure, the technology has gotten better, faster, and prettier; but the things we use it for haven't changed much, nor are they likely to.

Back in the late 70's and early 80's (when the Internet was nothing more than a top-secret government project to link military bases to a non-centralized computer network in case of nuclear attack) we geeks used to log on to local, text-based bulletin-boards using 110 bits-per-second (or if our parents had money, 300bps or even 1200bps on deluxe systems!) phone-coupler modems; we'd dial the number using our Bell System desk phone, listen for a carrier tone, then slam the phone handset down into these giant rubber suction cups which were part of a device that would convert (MODulate) the data from the computer into audio information to send through the phone's speakers and over the phone line, then convert the responses back (DEModulate) to data the computer could understand.  (MOdulate + DEModulate = MO + DEM = MODEM & that's where we got the word from.)  But I digress...

Back then, the only way for us non-government geeks to communicate with other geeks was using our MoDems to connect to Bulletin Board Systems (BBS's).  A BBS was usually hosted in some fellow geek's basement, and usually the people who hosted BBS systems wrote the programming code themselves, as well as having built the computer themselves from parts made by a company called HeathKit, and in many cases installed the second phone line themselves also.  (Whether or not they actually paid the phone company for their second phone line is a matter of debate; in the good old, bad old days, phone piracy ran rampant on the high seas of geekdom.)

These pioneers of interactive social computing stored their homegrown BBS program code on their 5.25" floppy drive (the good computers had two of those; one to store the Dos 3.3, ProDos, CP/M or equivalent Operating System and one to store the program and its data).  The program was often written in a text-oriented language like BASIC (I wrote mine on a TRS-80 and later migrated it to an Apple II).  

These BBS's of yesteryear, these precursors to the modern web-forums we now take for granted, were primitive and text-based but they served exactly the same purpose we now use them for, with very little change in the role they play.

Back then, we would log on by direct dialing the phone number of the BBS's SYStem OPerator (SYSOP).  The SysOp would usually need to have a dedicated phone line for the computer and have his MoDem constantly connected to it, with the BBS software running.  The SysOp's modem would be in a state of "AT&A0" (Hayes Modem language for "Attention: auto-answer") and as soon as we heard the carrier tone we'd place our phone handset in the suction cups and all things going well we'd see the receiving MoDem on the other end prompt us for a login.  Of course, all things wouldn't necessarily go well unless we knew how to send the dial command in the first place -- it wasn't as simple as just popping open a window and giving it a number to dial.  Back in the days of the Command Line, we used commands like "ATD" (Attention: Dial) or "ATDT" (Attention: dial using touch-tone).  We'd also have to use commands to tell the modem to send/receive with even or odd parity, the number of stop bits, the speed, the local echo, etc.  Usually we'd enter these all in a single Init string, something like "ATH0 E0 X1 V1" which would tell the modem to open a connection with no local echo, and display all error messages as text instead of numbers.  But I digress again...

Once we were connected, we'd be prompted for a login.  The system would allow a guest login on a limited basis, and usually guests were asked for their username or "handle" almost immediately.  In many cases, the SysOp would send a personal message to meet and greet each new user and welcome them to the system. Often, if the SysOp happened to be in front of his computer at the time, he'd break in using his own personal override and "chat" with new users in real-time.  Of course, real-time was a relative term.  At only 110 bits per second, the text would roll onto the screen at a speed similar to an old-style teletype machine.  If you do the math, it takes 8 BInary digiTS to render each ASCII character, so 110 divided by 8 is 13.75 text characters per second.  That's roughly 60 to 70 words per minute.  There were times when we could literally type faster than the MoDem could send/receive!!!

Since the remote connections were all coming from over phone lines, most of the time the BBS was designed to only accommodate one remote user at a time, though in the cases of the larger, established BBS's, the hosting computer might have 2 or 3 modems connected to 2 or 3 seperate phone lines allowing 2 or 3 users to be on at once. Obviously, given the limitations, the tendency to chat online in a real-time sense was not very common in general - but there was a menu command that allowed users to "chat with SysOp" and occasionally another menu command to "chat with another user" just in case more than one of us happened to be able to log on at once.  Most of the time, however, this wasn't the case, and so most of what we used the modem for would be to post messages for other users.  

The messages could take one of two forms: public messages, which would be viewable by everyone who logged in, or private messages, which would be viewable by a specific user only.  These private messages are the closest thing to what we now know as email.  Back then, the only people we could send email to were users who logged into the same closed BBS system we did; that would change in a few years as more and more students and hobbyists began using their computers to log into the newly-converted ARPAnet, now called the Internet.  (and yes, Al Gore was part of the Senate subcommittee that supervised the conversion of the cold-war era ARPAnet into the current global peace-time network of computer systems, so in a certain sense he could be said to have helped create what we now know as the Internet. But I digress again...)  

In the golden age of the BBS, users would see a text-based menu which usually contained a listing of the services one could access within that BBS.  Usually this included the main three: Message boards, Chat with SysOp, and File Repository.  Most of the time there was also a listing of other BBS's in the area and their phone numbers.  Users would post messages to each other to get together for a game of D&D, or to talk about programming, or simply to yap on incessantly about this or that.  The tech industry as we know it today didn't exist yet, and most of the so-called "useful" things we use email and message boards for today weren't in existence yet - not to mention the fact that the terms "social computing", "online community", "chat room", "Instant Message", and the rest, simply hadn't been invented yet.  We were just a collection of geeks in darkened basements, dimly lit by the greenish glow of monocrhome text on the CRT in front of them.  

Yet after all this time, although the tools have changed dramatically and although the user base has grown from a ragtag collection of geeks to a majority of the combined populations of all the first- and second-world countries of the entire planet; although the computers have grown exponentially in power and shrunk exponentially in size and migrated in location from the dimly-lit dungeons of a few musty basements to the office buildings, desktops, palmtops, laptops, coffee houses and public squares of the world; although everything we know about the computing industry has become so infused into our everyday existence that it's second-nature to us; despite all of this, the things we use computers for at this social level have not changed; the computer's role in social interaction is still exactly the same as it was all the way back at the beginning of its practical existence: we post messages to forums where a group of like-minded individuals discuss and reply to them; we send personal messages to other users via email; we send text-messages to each other (of course, back then they were all, by definition, text messages) we share files with each other, and the list goes on.  

It has been an incredible path  to watch the phenomenon evolve over the years: from the BBS to email and UseNet; from Email and Usenet to HyperText and the World Wide Web; from HTML 1.0 to interactive pages with javascript, PERL, Shockwave and VRML; from PERL to ASP, XML, etc, from Shockwave to Flash; until finally the web is as useful and versatile a tool as we can make it.

And, now that the web is as useful and versatile a tool as we can make it, what do we use it for?

We set up our web pages with blogs, guestbooks, bulletin boards, message boards, forums, chat rooms, email systems, file repositories --- all things that were part of the very first BBS in existence, all the way back then.  

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

-Pete Petersen, November 2005