Ask HN: What was it like to use BBS?
Somehow this just smells like a homework assignment, or possibly article research.<p>However I&#x27;ll toss in a couple things I haven&#x27;t seen mentioned yet.<p>* Offline mail readers. QWK or BlueWave, there might have been others.<p>The standard way to use a bbs was to start your serial comm program like a pirate copy of procomm plus, use it to dial in to a board, and interact with the bbs for a while. Navigate menus to download files, read messages in subs (forums), write messages in subs, play games. Then disconnect.<p>If a given board had qwk module installed, you could do almost everything offline, and all you connected for was to download and upload a single zip file called a packet containing every message that was new since last time.<p>I don&#x27;t remember but I think it could do files too. Like you&#x27;d get the file list once, and I guess get file list updates with each new packet.<p>You read the messages (both private mail and forum posts and I think even some games turns) while offline. Write your responses and new messages offline. Select files to be downloaded from the list or uploaded from your machine.<p>The offline reader program creates a packet containing everything you are going to upload. Messages you wrote and files you&#x27;re uploading.<p>Then you dial in to the board and you&#x27;re only connected for the bare physically minimum necessary time for the computer to download the new packet from the board and upload the new packet from you. No navigating menus, it goes as fast as the computer can go, and if you don&#x27;t have files in there, then the packet is small because plain text compresses a lot. And so you were only on the phone for vastly shorter time.<p>I don&#x27;t remember but I think the offline reader could dial the bbs itself, which skips navigating aany menus on the bbs at human speed. But I might have forgotten. Maybe you manually navigated to a menu choice in the bbs to download and upload the qwk packets manually. Or maybe both are true like the manual option was available even though you shouldn&#x27;t need it usually.<p>I remember I used BlueWave which had some enhancements over standard qwk, though it was qwk compatible, so if a board only had a standard qwk door (oh yeah, apps on bbs&#x27;s were called doors), BW could still use it.<p>* That was another element of life, a variety of standards. like qwk vs bluewave, arc vs zip vs arj, 100 different bbs host softwares, several worldwide networks like fidonet (fidonet was just the biggest because it wasn&#x27;t tied to a particular bbs host software, but there were for instance WWIV had it&#x27;s own network of WWIV boards that called each other just like fidonet, and a wwiv board could also be on fidonet too of course).<p>Almost everything you did involved knowing enough about it to deal with these different systems and standards. Does your terminal support Ansi? Does your modem support MNP-5 (error correction and compression, they didn&#x27;t at first) Does the other guy&#x27;s modem that you&#x27;re calling? Does the board have a qwk module? Does it allow files or just messages? Some boards even had special client software that let the bbs be graphical instead of text. Does your computer have the hardware necessary to run that? Do you have a cga card? or just herculese? or ega? or tandy graphics? does the software support any of those? Which of the 25 different kinds of sound card do you have, and does this game support the one you have? Does this text file have dos or mac or unix line-endings? Some multiple standards at least shook out to one 99% standard by the late 80s. Eventually all files were compressed with pkzip, all modems had v.42, all boards and comm programs supported zmodem for file transfers, all boards and clients supported pc ansi terminal emulation, all boards used 8n1 serial params. But for some years those were all up in the air.<p>* Post signatures. These would often get elaborate. There were programs that pasted a quote or a joke to the end of every post you wrote as part of the signature. Many peolple designed huge elaborate flaboyant ascii and ansi art for their signatures.<p>One of those random joke inserts was one I ended up remembering forever:<p>REAL programmers use &quot;COPY CON FILE.EXE&quot;<p>Today&#x27;s version of that would be:<p>REAL programmers use &quot;&gt;file&quot;<p>* Product tribes. That &quot;real programmers&quot; joke was partly about how people would judge each other for the products they used. Delphi comes out and makes programming pretty easy. Real programmers use turbo c. (I might have the timelines on those wrong but it&#x27;s the idea not the details). Bluewave is better than QWK. Telegard is better than WWIV, Deskqview is better than msdos, 4dos is better than msdos, drdos is bdtter than msdos, os&#x2F;2 is better than windows, arj is better than zip, ... This is more about the times than BBS&#x27;s strictly, and somewhat still exists and probably always will, you filthy green bubble serf. ;)