Hello fellow Steemians!
I've always had a special place in my heart for certain types of older forms of communications. Today I'd like to talk about something near and dear to my heart: The Bulletin Board System.
The Bulletin Board System (or BBS for short) can be compared to the modern Social Network. That is, it could provide various services such as games, email, files, message boards, and chat all through dialup and a text interface. Think of them as the first ISP's without the fancy UI or Internet. Indeed, they were quite magnificent!
According to Wikipedia, the 70's gave us the development of the analog modem and availability of personal computers like the Apple IIe, which made possible the creation of the BBS. The first dialup BBS went online in February of 1978. It was developed in Chicago by Ward Christensen and Randy Suess and named CBBS. It was patterned after the "cork board" where people could post local short messages or ads. It was just the beginning.
As popularity of such systems grew and spread in the 80's, technologies were developed that allowed these systems to exchange messages and files over phone lines. One such technology was Fidonet, which used a program called a front end mailer and external programs to process messages and other files. A front end mailer answered the dialup line There were other technologies developed such as RIME, WWIVnet, and VirtualNet.
During the BBS golden years, there were thousands of systems running different software all over the world. Wikipedia gives the number upwards of 60,000 BBSes in existence by 1994, when they began to drop sharply as Internet access became publicly available. Sadly, many BBS developers did not adapt their software to the new technologies required to communicate with the Internet.
Today, BBSes still do exist. Some BBS software packages have been "retrofitted" to work as server software on the Internet. Some examples of these include Synchronet BBS, Winserver (Wildcat! Interactive Server), and Mystic BBS. There is software called netfoss that allows older DOS based BBSes to run through the Internet under Windows. BBS technologies have changed, but the spirit of the community stays the same.
I'll leave you with that. This is just the first part of this article. Look for more in the near future!
--norez