To call a BBS was to visit the private residence of a fellow computer fan electronically. It was the intimacy of direct, computer-to-computer connection that did it. He visited five or six local boards, with names like “Octopus’s Garden,” “Southern Pride,” and “Online's Place.” I followed in his footsteps the next summer, spending hundreds of glorious hours online.ĭialing into a BBS felt like whole-body teleportation. They facilitated file transfers, inter-BBS messaging networks, multi-node chat, and popular text-based games. The BBS concept was a digital version of a push-pin bulletin board that might flank a grocery store entrance or a college student union hallway.īy the time dad brought home the modem, BBSes had grown dramatically in scope. People could, in theory, call BBSes anywhere, but since they'd have to pay for long-distance, they tended to stay local. The resulting software, called CBBS, allowed personal-computer owners with modems to dial-in to a dedicated system and leave messages that others would see later, when they, in turn, dialed up the BBS. The author’s computer connecting to BBS in 1996 (Benj Edwards) The same scenario repeated itself on thousands of computers across the country until, one by one, the brightest lights of the BBS world blinked out of existence.

My system was one of the casualties, a victim of the desire to devote all my online time to the internet. Like a comet to the dinosaurs, it upended the natural order of things and wiped BBSes out. Then the internet came along in the mid-1990s. Anyone with a modem and a home computer could dial-in, often for free, and interact with other callers in their area code. These mostly text-based, hobbyist-run services played a huge part in the online landscape of the 1980s and ‘90s.

To my astonishment, it never shut down after all.īBSes once numbered in the tens of thousands in North America. It’s my old computer, still running my 1990s-era bulletin board system (BBS, for short), “The Cave.” I thought I had shut it down ages ago, but it’s been chugging away this whole time without me realizing it-people continued calling my BBS to play games, post messages, and upload files. In the back corner, I hear a faint humming. I climb the stairs in my parents’ house to see my old bedroom.

Old computer games 1990s school