The BBS era was also long before public doxxing and spammers scraping any and all personal info. At least before the Internet made such things easily amplified and trivial to do.
> "Thanks to local toll or long distance fees your local BBS was literally local. Everyone on it lived nearby and if you were an ass you were close enough to get punched in the face."
So just by nature of tolls you wouldn't call many out of area BBSes. If you did it was brief calls for a post or to check mail but not sit around playing a door game or downloading some big file.
That all meant BBSes were very local for most people. This is in addition to the fact only a small fraction of homes had computers, a fraction of those had modems, and a fraction of those actually called BBSes. That aspect also meant the populations were relatively small. A small web forum might have a hundred users spread over a large area while a BBS would have a dozen in the same town.
He knocked on my door 45 minutes later to talk to me about it.
If the phone number was long distance, you had to pay more - just as it is today. Local calls were usually free. Hence the GP's comment :)
Didn't stop folks from flaming and trolling. The BBS Documentary [1] has an example of a kid who follows around and threatens a BBS owner who owns a computer so because he didn't like the computer it ran on.
Definitely not but the prevalence was far less. The local nature of BBSes inspired a lot of prior restraint we don't see a lot on the Internet anymore. That's not to say anonymity or pseudo-anonymity is bad. It just creates a different environment than what you'd typically find on BBSes.
That and getting banned actually hosed you.
But I agree that I was so much less concerned about privacy back then. Likely that was out of ignorance, but also because the threat to privacy is different on the internet. In a widely networked world, the .001% of people who are malicious actors still amount to a huge number of malicious actors that didn't exist in a community of a couple hundred people.
I visited big warez bbses locally/Europe.
What would so many have done without Cott Lang democratizing creating BBSes without commercial software.
There were a lot of non-commercial options but Renegade was one of the early ones to bring in a lot of the commercial features into it.
In BBS terms it very much was modern. First it dates to 1992, so very late in the BBS era - just prior to the point where larger BBSes were starting to offer shell or SLIP/PPP access and inevitably becoming just ISPes. And it never really caught on. I remember the one time I dialed into a BBS in 93, the video mode changed and this graphical mouse driven screen was rendered. It seemed cool but BBSes as more than an ISP were already dying. The company that made it was a bit interesting - once the web came out they tried to improve it away from its EGA origins, add audio/video and pivot to directly compete with HTML and then Flash - it did not work out.
https://web.archive.org/web/19980114110236/http://www.telegr...
https://web.archive.org/web/20160820155221/http://www.kytty....
Before anyone asks about accessibility...i should point out i am still injecting a text-only version into the DOM behind the canvas tag for the sake of screenreaders.
The reason firefox looks so much worse is that it has a smaller webgl size limit than chrome (specifically MAX_RENDERBUFFER_SIZE). When rendering at full resolution, it was not large enough to hold the content sometimes. I only check that webgl value so this will resolve itself if/when firefox increases it.
I got my start with BBSes, lots of fond memories. There was one BBS in my area, and they had it setup to RelayNet (similar to FidoNet, but smaller). I knew when they would connect up to exchange, so I would be sure to upload my mail packet and then dial back up 5 minutes after they did their exchange to see if I had any new messages. I could send and reply to messages across the country in a matter of days.
Getting to acquainted with fellow users is one of the big benefits of any communication system… even HN.
Imagine reading a tweet or reddit post with ansiwave content imbedded. (Like Microsoft Chat tried with gfx and irc)
Internet really needs to break free from all the control. An overlay network like that disenter browser plugin, you could read comments on any site. Now that all popular sites are closing down comments, kinda shame it died.
Also for video, I remember small rle text stream videos on modem, just black and white, pretty easy to do now with unicode, a small 64x64 text box.. (example).
Also midi's and awesome .sf2 sound banks.
Good times back then, seems the internet lost so much in exchange for government and corporate control.
I miss the days of my animated, musical ANSI signature!