Bulletin Board Systems: The Dial-Up Underground That Built Online Life

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Before the World Wide Web, getting online meant ordering a desktop computer to dial a local phone number, sitting through a minute of screeching static, and hoping no one else in town was already connected. This episode traces the bulletin board system from Community Memory, a coin-operated public terminal project that began in Berkeley in August 1973, to CBBS, built by Ward Christensen and Randy Suess while they were snowed in during the Chicago blizzard of 1978. It went online on February 16th, 1978 and logged over a quarter of a million callers.

From there the story follows the hardware and the culture that grew on it: acoustic couplers, the Hayes Smartmodem, shareware, ANSI art, and the secretive pirate boards where leetspeak was born. FidoNet let hobbyist boards pass mail across continents in the dead of night, and by 1994 some 60,000 boards served 17 million users in the United States. Then cheap dial-up internet and the Mosaic browser arrived, and within a year whole local scenes were ghost towns.

Community Memory users were expected to post classifieds, and instead wrote poetry, stories, and philosophical debates until the project lost its mainframe in January 1975.
Shareware spread through boards, carrying Doom from id Software, Apogee's games, and PKZIP to a mass audience.
Elite boards demanded voice verification by phone and an upload of freshly cracked software before granting access.
In January 1993 the FBI raided Rusty n Edie's BBS in Ohio, a hub for trading unlicensed software.
The 314 area code in St. Louis peaked at over 360 local systems in June 1994 and was called a BBS ghost town twelve months later.

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