Who visited dial up BBS's in the '80's?

[SaltBoy]

<-- Raises hand. Hacker's Haven was my BBS of choice, followed of course by Soft Warehouse *cough cough*. 🙂

 

[spacelord]

300 baud was so fast!
I was "online" with BBSs in 85-86 timeframe.

C64s had some of the prettier BBS software of the day. I remember guessing the password of a local sysop (kid that noone liked), and raising a little hell from my Apple IIe.

 

[Freejack2]

I remember starting out in the late 80's. Had an Amiga 500, For a short while I had a Zoom 1200? baud modem but it would drop calls on large downloads so I returned it and got a Supra 2400 baud modem.
I had a big list of local bbs'es that I would call up. The best was when the multiline bbs'es started popping up. There were two really good multiline ones that I would call. Finally I got a 9600 baud Zyxel modem for like $300 and just my luck both of the multiline boards went away. One of them, one of the partners decided one day he had it so he took most of the hardware and took off. The other one, the owner got busted for payroll check fraud. Fortunately a year or so after that companies around here started offering unlimited internet dialup.

 

[dethman]

not 80s but early 90s.

 

[omega99]

can someone explain what the heck is BBS??

 

[SaltBoy]

Originally posted by: omega99
can someone explain what the heck is BBS??

Google is your friend. 😉

 

[isasir]

Originally posted by: pulse8

Originally posted by: Nohr
I didn't start using BBS's until the early 90's. Used to have a lot of fun calling several local ones daily. Used my old 286 with a 2400bps modem. Downloaded 1KB every 4 seconds!

Same here. 🙂

Downloaded my first pr0n on a BBS. 😀

Ha, my first time as well, probably like uh, 9 years ago, I guess. Amusing story actually. I had d/led a nekkid pic of this chick, with a filename called cable.gif. I guess it took me a good 10 minutes to d/l the ~150k file. So I download the file, view it, get all happy (well, not that happy), and go offline. 2 minutes later the phone rings. (Bear in mind this was a big deal to me to d/l this file, at 15 yrs. old) I answer the phone:

Me: Hello?
Other person: This is Cable, you just downloaded my pic from Westar BBS right?
Me: (Oh sh*t) Uh yeah
Chick on phone: You liked the pic?
Me: Um, yeah
Chick: Good. Bye.
Me: Bye
<click>

I think later on I came to realize that the guy that ran the BBS had two daughters, and one of the daughters must've seen me d/ling that file and decided to bust my chops. 😱

At the time I wasn't sure if I was more nervous or excited thinking that I'd always get phone calls from the women whose pictures I d/led. 😀

I remember having the phone near me after I got offline just in case I were to ever get another call like that.

 

[sciencetoy]

Thanks for the trip back in time - the guy in the apartment upstairs was putting together a BBS and we had our doors opened and he'd keep calling out, hey, try this one, try this. Then I'd try calling in - it usually didn't work - and then I'd go upstairs and we'd play some and make some progress. This had to be pre-83 because that's when my oldest was born and I don't think I'd be doing that kind of thing with kids.

Early computing was really, really social.

 

[aircooled]

Originally posted by: omega99
can someone explain what the heck is BBS??

BBS = Bulletin Board System. Basically a forum that you directly dialed using a terminal program and a modem. Usually run on someone?s personal computer from their bedroom or basement (but later became more legit).

In the 80?s long distance was expensive so one the largest trading items on underground BBS?s was MCI codes (back then if you used MCI you dialed an 800 number, then punched in a code).

 

[propellerhead]

Ahh... yes. Back in the days of Compuserve's GIF files. JPG format was not popular yet.

 

[0roo0roo]

first ass kicking by thresh on a bbs. oh i sucked. oh how did those bbs suck....

 

[0roo0roo]

oh yea, later bbs were pay gaming, first multiplayer warcraft games and doom/doom2 were played on those. the were the first battlenet. oh the bugs..they were horrible. but yes, one line one modem per person so it would get expensive ...so they weretn' free. u could have tried on the early internet, but your ping would probably keep you from playing anything😛 lowest possible lag from modem was on bbs. i remember playing doom on my 14.4modem. i didnt know how to use straff turn, it was horrible. i dunno about 80's, but i figure that far back all they had were text based games🙂

 

[hagbard]

Originally posted by: aircooled
I used to run a BBS from my bedroom on a Commodore64 back in the mid 80's... Only one user at a time could be online, I "upgraded" to a 1200 baud modem for better performance and I had 2 (count 'em 2) 5 1/4" external floppy drives to store all my data..... Ahh those were the days.... 🙂

Started doing the BBS thing in 1985 with a 300 baud modem which was built into my Tandy Model 100. First experience with cyber sex as there was a girl there who liked to tell me how much she enjoyed posting in the nude 😱

Discovered the Internet in 1992, and connected to a friends computer at the local University using a program called "Slirp". Was up to a 1200 baud modem by then...and I must say, it was almost as fast as my cable connection today.

 

[0roo0roo]

my first mp3 was also horrific, i could only play it at 1/4 quality in winplay3(i think). damn 486. none of my friends knew what an mp3 was hehe.

 

[aircooled]

During the BBS days in the later 80's, The Commodore crowd started visiting a new network called Quantum Link (or Q-Link for short, if you bought a modem it came with a Q-Link floppy). It was a network where thousands of people could be logged in simultaniously and you could chat, play games, visit forums, etc...
In 1992, Q-Link changed their name to American Online. Who'd of guessed....

 

[Nohr]

Originally posted by: aircooled
During the BBS days in the later 80's, The Commodore crowd started visiting a new network called Quantum Link (or Q-Link for short, if you bought a modem it came with a Q-Link floppy). It was a network where thousands of people could be logged in simultaniously and you could chat, play games, visit forums, etc...
In 1992, Q-Link changed their name to American Online. Who'd of guessed....

Oh hey, I remember those floppy disks. Never used the thing though, just assumed it was some shareware communications software.