Internet killed the B.B.S. Star..

Before there was Facebook, Myspace, Digg, Sphinn, Reddit, Friendster, LinkedIn, Delicious, before AOL was the main source of electronic communications & before prodigy was letting people send each other e-cards on their birthday - there was another form of networking which had all the elements that you will find today across the social networking scene.

Enter the world of the Bulletin Board System. (BBS)

1994 was a glorious year for me, I was given my first computer and began right away finding out everything I could possibly do with it. One thing was to dial out on my 2400 baud modem to prank call people. I would laugh when I dialed up a friends house and heard them start yelling “Hello, who is this?” while the modem attempted to connect.

There was other great stuff that could be done with this modem one of which was dialing into some of the local BBS’s to trade files, read or post messages & play online games. A few of the large BBS’s had there message boards connected so it was easy to post a message on the board and have someone else across the country respond.

From the BBS scene sprang groups who shared the same interests - there were the warez people who liked to trade software illegally, the ANSI artists who were into make the graphics that the BBS’s used & then the online gamers who played games (known as Door Games). Then of course there was the people who were into the “smut”, as my mother used to call it. Back then I couldn’t see the sense in spending 15 minutes downloading 1 image that 9 times out of 10 would not even fit the description of what you were downloading.

Around 1995 I launched my own BBS (by now I had upgraded to a 14.4 baud modem so I was big time) I wanted the site to be a place where people could come and ask questions about running a BBS and also download any software needed to do so. The software that I decided to run was called impulse.

But how to promote such a place?

Well in those days the only real way to get people to your BBS was to promote it on other BBS’s around the country. So I began to post (spam) my BBS’s telephone number everywhere. After a good month of that and a few hundred dollar phone bill, remember Bell Atlantic had not yet given the option to pay 50.00 a month to call anywhere in the States, I had a steady stream of users and someone online at almost all times.

The major downside to running a public BBS was that you could not use your computer when someone was connected into your site, unless you were running one of the new fangled operating systems which let you do such a thing.

I was stuck with DOS 5.1 & 2 megs of Ram on my 386SX, so no running multiple programs for me.

I ran the BBS for a year or so, until I discovered a new way of communicating by using my computer. I had a neighbor who worked at Rutgers University and had a way to dial into Rutgers to connect to the “internet”. All done using my regular program which I used to dial the BBS’s, when I logged in I could log onto I.R.C. or even try this command called WWW.

This was the end of my BBS, I found myself on IRC trading files and talking to people from around the world. Whenever I was home and using the computer I was almost always connected & users who attempted to dial into my computer were given the harsh noise of the busy signal.

So the chase of the BBS Sysop back then is the same chase that the people who run social networks now are facing; get users, make those users like what they see, have the users contribute to the community & have them tell and invite people to join in.

Seeing as MySpace and Friendster have turned into the walmart and target of the profile social network sites - new niches need to be found in order to compete.

So next time you log in to check your MySpace profile comments, send someone a poke on facebook or digg a story - think back to the leagues of 14 year old kids who in the late 80’s to mid 90’s paved the way for the social networks of the future.

..send this around..