City Limits

Before this whole Internet/Web fad, before AOL, before CompuServe, before even Prodigy, we had the BBS — dialup Bulletin Board Systems serving communities of computer users. BBSes had their heyday in the Eighties, and they were generally small, homebrew systems — a Sysop (System Operator) would start up a BBS by installing special software on a spare computer, attaching a modem and a phone line, and waiting for the calls to roll in.

The BBS was primarily a local thing, because generally people didn’t want to spend money to dial long-distance. So what you had in the Eighties (and still very much into the Nineties, and a bit still today) was a broad patchwork of regional online communities. This local aspect of the system was largely lost when everyone moved to the Internet, and it’s only present in niche sites like Craigslist and various City Guide sites.

In their heyday, there were over 150,000 BBSes in North America alone. There remain a mere few hundred. Here are about 10 minutes worth of clips from The BBS Documentary; they will help to shed a little light on our old world to those who weren't familiar with it:

As I reported in an earlier post, I still have my BBS, City Limits!, on it's original computer. If you click on the link in that last sentence you will be taken to an online emulation of my BBS that I created over 10 years ago. I still fire up the real thing once every few years, and log in through Front Door just for nostalgia. Blogging is as close as I have come to finding the sense of comaradery that BBSes provided.