Ask HN: What was it like to use BBS?
It was pretty awesome.  The barrier to entry was a little high for a lot of people in the 80&#x27;s as you required a decent PC, modem and had to pay the phone bill for long distance calls.<p>Something people don&#x27;t remember is that long distance calling was not free, you couldn&#x27;t call other area codes or states in the US without paying a per minute fee. It was more on-par to international calling today then with mobile phone calls. Oh, and busy lines were not uncommon, you&#x27;d spend hours trying to dial into a system to get a file or post on a forum etc.<p>I would say it is less like social media today and more like forums.  So less Facebook&#x2F;Twitter and more reddit style. Though BBS&#x27; were also less filtered and far less big brother IMO. Of course some site admins would be militant about their feelings and only allow certain view points but that was fine because there were tons of other BBS&#x27; to play on.<p>The industry was fairly big and growing fast, one of the larger us BBS systems was execpc, you can find stuff on them still.  They started as a small BBS that turned into a fairly large internet provider eventually. But there were tons of players, and there were systems like Tag BBS etc. I both hosted a BBS for a number of years and was a user of tons of them.<p>Another key thing people don&#x27;t think about today, disk space was at a premium (especially for personal computers).  We used floppy disks for moving files a lot and hard drives were expensive so getting 10Mb or 40Mb drives was awesome.  Putting in 3-4 hard drives to get yourself over 100Mb was crazy.  Drive technology was still evolving so lots of different types with pros&#x2F;cons and most were loud, pretty large and obnoxious.<p>A lot of the search &amp; compression technology we created during the BBS days is still in use, though in different ways now. Compression being pretty critical since for most long distance sites you paid per minute and downloading a 1Mb file over 9600baud was slow.  Man I remember going from 1200-2400-9600-19200 then 38400 and 115200.  You felt like a damn rock star when your file downloads didn&#x27;t take 6-8 hours and could be done in like an hour or so.<p>It was definitely a lot of community and sharing. There were trolls then just like now, but generally I feel like back then they were less damaging or hurtful and more entertaining. Of course, there were scams on most forums just like now, but good BBS sites did their best to keep them at bay.