Differences between version 11 and previous revision of BulletinBoardSystem.
Other diffs: Previous Major Revision, Previous Author, or view the Annotated Edit History
| Newer page: | version 11 | Last edited on Friday, December 2, 2005 12:06:10 pm | by AristotlePagaltzis | Revert |
| Older page: | version 10 | Last edited on Friday, December 2, 2005 12:04:56 pm | by AristotlePagaltzis | Revert |
@@ -1,5 +1,5 @@
-[BBS]es once played the role that the InterNet does today, in an age when there was no such thing as the WorldWideWeb, and the InterNet was still a government research project. [BBS]es were text-based. Connecting to them was like logging into Linux in text mode. After you got past the login prompt, the [BBS] would send a menu over the phone line. You would respond by typing a letter or number from the menu. For example, if the menu said <tt>E)mail</tt>, you would type "e" to send [Email]. SysOp~s tried to spruce up the plain text interface by adding color
. For those who had color
monitors, [BBS]es looked like those lighted, colored
pegboards that they sold to kids during the same era.
+[BBS]es once played the role that the InterNet does today, in an age when there was no such thing as the WorldWideWeb, and the InterNet was still a government research project. [BBS]es were text-based. Connecting to them was like logging into Linux in text mode. After you got past the login prompt, the [BBS] would send a menu over the phone line. You would respond by typing a letter or number from the menu. For example, if the menu said <tt>E)mail</tt>, you would type "e" to send [Email]. SysOp~s tried to spruce up the plain text interface by adding colour
. For those who had colour
monitors, [BBS]es looked like those lighted, coloured
pegboards that they sold to kids during the same era.
The bulletin board originally started out as strips of paper posted up in the supermaket; this type of bulletin board is still in widespread use today. When computers became more widespread at home (late 1970s/early 1980s), the bulletin board system ([BBS]) took off. A [BBS] was a computer with a MoDem,hooked up to a phone line, which accepted incoming calls and enabled callers to exchange electronic messages. The very first [BBS] provided no other functionality. Later on, [BBS]es would support file uploads and downloads (via the <tt>XMODEM</tt> protocol at first, and later on the <tt>ZMODEM</tt> protocol), "door" games, real-time chat with the system operator (SysOp), real-time chat with other users if multiple phone lines were installed, and Netmail. Netmail was transferred daily over a global, MoDem-based network called FidoNet that mimicked [UUCP] and even improved upon it. Some [BBS]es provided a service called Echomail, which was very much like UseNet and was built on top of Netmail.
An entire industry rose around selling software for running [BBS]es. Some of these programs evolved into [ISP]s in a box and are still being sold today. Others, like the popular Renegade BBS, have gone in the OpenSource direction. [BBS]es at the time ran mostly on single-tasking OperatingSystem~s, so a whole computer had to be dedicated to a [BBS].
