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BBS way back then were free or pay?

T

TommyVercetti

Diamond Member
My friend says he used to connect to lots of them which were free. How is that possible. The person running it must have lots of phone lines, and that costs good money.
 
Most of them had 2 phone lines at most... you'd call and get a busy signal sometimes.

I used to stay up and wait til I got a clean line so I could play LORD and Usurper 😀 😀
 
I and my friends all ran BBS's at one point or another. Most of us just plugged our 2nd phone lines in and ran from there. Some of them offered extra time on them if you sent in money.

The BBS I miss the most was based out of Maryland, it was called The Other Place, or just TOP. The first time I dialed into it I was floored by the fact that there was 10 phone lines connected into it. All of a sudden I was doing real time chat with multiple people on my computer. Too bad it shut down back in '93 or '94... I loved that BBS, although I bet those phone lines were expensive.
 
Most BBS's ran off one or two lines in my area... you just had to set your modem for auto-redial, and wait for connection... sometimes you'd fall asleep waiting, but then that distinctive hiss would jolt you awake for some LORD action..

😀
 
ah yeah... i loved those days of the BBS.... Kermit

my favs were

Port Harbor BBS
and my buddy's Artificial Intelligence BBS...


the memories.... :tear;

edit: oh yeah, they were all free
 
Gasp! Hard to believe that back then people actually did things selflessly for the community.

Most BBS's were free, although a lot ran on a donations system where you could get more overall time, more door game time, or access to more files and whatnot if you donated.

The phone lines weren't that expensive, but it could get expensive if you ran fidonet or speakeasy and the closest node to you was outside of your long distance calling area.

However, as I remember most people just did it for the fun and for the community, nobody was ever really in it for the money.
 
There used to be this multiline BBS where I live that was like $10 a month to use. Was fun until one day one the BBS's partners flipped out, wiped all the software and ran off with half the hardware.
 
I still play on BBSes. 🙂

They were both free and pay. The free ones typically only allowed 30 to 60 minutes a day online, or only had 1 or 2 nodes.

There used to be dozens of BBSes here in Portland, OR. We would hop from BBS to BBS, using up our free time. Oh man, those were the days. We being my brother and I...

We're still in touch with quite a few of those old local BBSers, some 9 years later...... it's amazing when I think about it.

One of the last local BBSes to go down around here was The Game Connection, or gconn. In its prime, it was a HUGE BBS with over 50 dialup lines and 25 telnet lines, and it was usually busy.

sigh..... those were the days. You guys have no idea. It was NOTHING like the internet of today.

🙁

Although I guess its not all bad, but there doesen't seem to be a way to capture that oldtime feeling these days.
 
There's many telnet BBSes still around for those nostalgic about playing their favorite door games. It just isn't the same feeling though.
 
Originally posted by: Nohr
There's many telnet BBSes still around for those nostalgic about playing their favorite door games. It just isn't the same feeling though.
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Yeah, I know...

There is nothing today like the crowded BBS teleconference. No chat room holds a candle, whether it be IRC or other.

We've been playing a BBS based text RPG called MajorMUD for the last 8 years. Heh....
 
I use to pay $20 or $30 a year to a BBS with around 10 phone lines, you would get 60 minute and 3 meg daily d/l. The same BBS had free access also, but it was limited to 15 minutes and access to 1 phone line, and a ul/dl ratio. It was money well spent, it was the easiest way to get new shareware. The BBS also had Tradewars, which was a ton of fun.
 
Heh.. I remember those days. My brother and I used to run the Darque Side of the Moon BBS/AE line. Was fun.. we had hidden message boards and whatnot, and one of the better textfile collections (remember those?)..
 
my first online doom dealthmatches were on bbs's. this was before the internet really. and games like doom mostly relied on direct modem to modem connections for reasonable ping, using the net was beyond rare. on a bbs forum u could setup games and perhaps if you were lucky and the stars were aligned, host or join a game successfully🙂 warcraft 1 multiplayer etc.. ah those were sweet. and yea, bbs were pay. i remember i used to play on one that was a hobbiest bbs, only like 5 bux a month from what i remember. if there were too many epople on, then u'd get a busy😛 i got my ass kicked by thresh back then. course i didn't know how to straff turn correctly at the time.. bah. ping was horrid so it wasn't that great anyways, only rts's were really playable.

free ones blew or were for chat.. or were for recruiting subscribers to pr0n.
 
Gasp! Hard to believe that back then people actually did things selflessly for the community.
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And most of them went broke trying...

Many of the decent BBS were not free. The subscription was reasonable, 10 or 20 bucks per year vs. per month these days, but a fair number of them were not free. I'm talking mid-80's to early 90's.

If you dialed into a strictly local BBS with no more than 100 members, or was operated by a college one was attending, it was probably free (plus tuition). But most sizable networked BBS were not free. It was simply too cost-prohibitive to operate a sizable BBS out of the goodness of one's heart.
 
Originally posted by: RossMAN
Most BBS's from back in the day were free, according to BBSMates.com there are (were) close to 5,900 BBS's in Texas.
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90,000+ (conservatively) BBS'es listed. 90% of them were like...you dial-in to my modem from five houses down....we exchange a couple files, pass some messages, and we got a "BBS". 😛
 
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