Speaker 1: Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera.
Speaker 1: It's ready. Are you get in touch with technology? With
Speaker 1: text style from how stuff works dot com. Hello again, everyone,
Speaker 1: welcome to text stuff. My name is Chris Poulett, and
Speaker 1: I am an editor at how stuff works dot com.
Speaker 1: Sitting across from me, curiously as usual, is senior writer
Speaker 1: Jonathan Strickland. Dust machine is niched for a finger, pokin
Speaker 1: ont mitten grabbin, It's easy schnapping the spring work blow
Speaker 1: and fuels in ont popping corkin Mitch spits and sparking.
Speaker 1: Its niched for verkin by dust doom coffin, dust robin
Speaker 1: nickensight zerin keeping hands in dust pockets, reluxant ont vatch
Speaker 1: dust blinking lights. I love dust blinken lights. Shouldn't that
Speaker 1: be de blinken lights. Well, I'm sorry that's the way
Speaker 1: it was written. I know on what we are about
Speaker 1: to talk about. UM, we have a little listener mail.
Speaker 1: This listener mail comes from Patch, actually comes from several people,
Speaker 1: but Patch wrote the first one. Hi, I found your
Speaker 1: podcast a few days ago and really like it, and
Speaker 1: I was wondering if you could do one on the
Speaker 1: old b b s S. I'm building one myself. Thanks, Well, Patch,
Speaker 1: we're going to talk about bbs is. And indeed, that
Speaker 1: quote was not from a movie, It was not from
Speaker 1: a song. That was a text file that was uploaded
Speaker 1: to BBSs and made its way through various bbs is
Speaker 1: in the in the eighties. Of course that was fake German.
Speaker 1: It's not real German. Yeah, I remember frong leis And yeah, anyway,
Speaker 1: I don't know what you would call it English, English, Deutsch,
Speaker 1: in English, dout English, I don't know anyway. Um, Yeah,
Speaker 1: And it's funny because the old bbs is, what ever
Speaker 1: happened to those? They're still around, not all of them,
Speaker 1: but yeah, Patch is apparently trying to build an old BBS,
Speaker 1: but then would be a new BBS. Just confused, that's
Speaker 1: a good question. It stands for bulletin board System and
Speaker 1: it really is sort of the computer version of the
Speaker 1: old bulletin boards that you would see in dormitories or
Speaker 1: office buildings or even homes where people would just put
Speaker 1: up a little note and for other people to see,
Speaker 1: maybe they had something that they wanted to sell or
Speaker 1: they were looking to buy, or just a cute joke
Speaker 1: or something you just want to pop it up there
Speaker 1: on the bulletin board. Same sort of thing, except in
Speaker 1: this case it's all going to be located on a computer. Now,
Speaker 1: the important thing to remember is this is taking place
Speaker 1: that the era of the BBS is takes place before
Speaker 1: the public era of the internet. Right, So, uh, taking
Speaker 1: it down to bare bones, basically, what you've got is
Speaker 1: a computer running a piece of software. They will allow
Speaker 1: you to post and read messages. That's that's the simplest
Speaker 1: form of what a BBS is. You have had one
Speaker 1: more element. It allows you allows remote users to post
Speaker 1: and read message. I was going to add that, I
Speaker 1: mean without without the modem attached to it and a
Speaker 1: phone line. Yeah, it would just it's essentially yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean it's a bulletin board for one person, which is
Speaker 1: kind of silly. But the BBS, Uh, yeah, you had
Speaker 1: a computer that you could dial into so and and
Speaker 1: the BBS is that I think of our sort of
Speaker 1: if you will, hyperlocal. Yes, they didn't necessarily have to be,
Speaker 1: but you know it would be you know, Bob's computer
Speaker 1: over here. Remember Bob. We talked about Bob before. He's
Speaker 1: very generous with the you know, allowing us to use this.
Speaker 1: I've been told that I have to call him Robert. Now, yeah, okay,
Speaker 1: So Robert has this computer and he's got a modem
Speaker 1: and a phone line that you can use and h
Speaker 1: Robert hosts messages about I don't know, role playing games
Speaker 1: for example, and uh, well it's good because you have
Speaker 1: your community that the people he wants to play with,
Speaker 1: you know, and get together on Saturday night and spend
Speaker 1: a couple of hours playing Dungeons and Dragons or uh,
Speaker 1: ponds are blitz. That's not role playing game, but you know,
Speaker 1: you could get people around the table to actually put Yeah,
Speaker 1: that kind of thing. You have a group of people
Speaker 1: who enthusiasts who want to play these games with you,
Speaker 1: and you want to share tactics or messages about it
Speaker 1: or body jokes. Right, dial up, We're not even there yet,
Speaker 1: let's keep going anyway. So that's the thing he's got.
Speaker 1: Roberts got this computer with a modem, and so uh,
Speaker 1: Jeff and Steve want to hook up well on onto
Speaker 1: the bulletin board, so they Jeff calls in the number
Speaker 1: for the modem on Robert's computer, so he dials in
Speaker 1: and he can see anything that Steve or Robert have
Speaker 1: posted on their Jeff is reading messages. Uh wants to
Speaker 1: comment on something. You post a comment on there and
Speaker 1: hangs up the modem and then you know, whomever else
Speaker 1: is in this group can dial up and see what's
Speaker 1: on the bulletin board and post messages. However, Uh, generally speaking,
Speaker 1: I would I think you probably agree with me. Generally speaking,
Speaker 1: we're talking one person at a time, Yeah, especially the
Speaker 1: early bbs is where they were limited to a single
Speaker 1: user at a time. So yeah, again, this is a
Speaker 1: precursor to the Internet, so you don't have any Internet
Speaker 1: that you can log into. Uh, this was kind of
Speaker 1: these these regional networks really, and not even a network,
Speaker 1: because you're talking about just a one single machine that
Speaker 1: you could dial into. So I guess you could call
Speaker 1: it a network of two machines at any given time. Yeah,
Speaker 1: because you have the one that is programmed to receive
Speaker 1: the call. It's the host. Yeah, the host, which you know,
Speaker 1: the client calls in and and and logs in with
Speaker 1: the user name and password. Um, I'm assuming that you
Speaker 1: would want to do that anyway, despite the fact that
Speaker 1: as people aren't going to know how to do this,
Speaker 1: you know how to do this let alone that. But
Speaker 1: they're not gonna necessarily know where the BBS is and
Speaker 1: what phone number to call to get there and have
Speaker 1: the equipment to do it. But you still, you know,
Speaker 1: have the client log into the host and check and
Speaker 1: post most messages to it and in some cases files. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Do you know when the very first Bolton board system
Speaker 1: launched or who did it? I do? I don't. Okay,
Speaker 1: So I asked you a question, and I drop a
Speaker 1: bomb on you and you have no way of answering it.
Speaker 1: That's an awesome co host, Jonathan Um, I'm thinking it
Speaker 1: probably now that I've actually looked at my notes, would
Speaker 1: be in Yes, that's correct. Ward Christensen and Randy Seuss
Speaker 1: built the first Bolton Board system as the computerized bolletin
Speaker 1: Board System. They created it out of Chicago. Well they
Speaker 1: built they took down Chicago and built a bulletin board system. Well,
Speaker 1: I mean, if you're gonna replace Chicago with some then anyway,
Speaker 1: the Bolton Board System, well you know it's there, used
Speaker 1: a smaller city to build a BBS anyway, Well they tried.
Speaker 1: Never mind, I can't make jokes about that city anymore.
Speaker 1: I was told not to. Uh. The so Chicago. Heck
Speaker 1: of a town. Uh. The the these guys. What they
Speaker 1: did was they built up the system. They designed a
Speaker 1: program using assembly language actually eight assembly language. They designed
Speaker 1: this program where it was it would allow people to
Speaker 1: come in and post and read messages and that's essentially
Speaker 1: all it could do when it first launched, and it
Speaker 1: launched it was built in nineteen seventy eight, but it
Speaker 1: launched in publicly in nineteen seventy nine, and um, well
Speaker 1: there was. They did announce what they had done in
Speaker 1: the UH and BITE magazine in November. Um so they
Speaker 1: you know, Bite was. If you're not familiar with Bite,
Speaker 1: how would you describe by I would say it's a
Speaker 1: computer enthusiast magazine, but it was really um for serious
Speaker 1: computer enthusiast. These are people who are interested in programming
Speaker 1: and hacking in the classical I think these are the
Speaker 1: same people who would order computer building kits that they
Speaker 1: would build their own personal computers. Yeah. Sorry, I didn't
Speaker 1: mean interruption. Go ahead, but it's not like, for example,
Speaker 1: a PC world would be where you're reading about software
Speaker 1: and things. These are people who would want to make
Speaker 1: their own software and build their own It was it
Speaker 1: was written by and four hackers. That's what you can say.
Speaker 1: And we're talking about hackers in the sense of people
Speaker 1: who programmed, not necessarily people who are trying to break
Speaker 1: into security systems or create malware. UM. That's a that
Speaker 1: was something that hacker came to be known for UM
Speaker 1: later on. But originally hackers were programmers. There are guys
Speaker 1: who were trying to end women, trying to figure out
Speaker 1: how to make a computer program do a certain task.
Speaker 1: And UM, they often weren't really worried about how pretty
Speaker 1: it looked at the end of the day. So the
Speaker 1: c b b S, which was the the Computer bulletin
Speaker 1: Board System, UM, it launches it and and people users
Speaker 1: think it's really cool, but it's it's in Chicago. It's
Speaker 1: using you have to dial in, right, so unless you're
Speaker 1: local to Chicago, it's a long distance call, so you
Speaker 1: can't you know, you can't just call in and not
Speaker 1: and not worry about charges. Uh. And it wasn't distributed.
Speaker 1: It was just that, you know, they talked about how
Speaker 1: they did it, and some people read it and thought, hey,
Speaker 1: this is a great idea, and they attempted their own version.
Speaker 1: And among those was a guy named Bill Blue. He
Speaker 1: wrote a b B S really which one I don't know.
Speaker 1: He wrote a b B S ABS and it was
Speaker 1: it was kind of followed. It followed along with the
Speaker 1: c BBS system. But he built it so that anyone
Speaker 1: who had an Apple too, and anyone who had the
Speaker 1: d C. Hayes m M modem very specif think, could
Speaker 1: could run the the program. So the CBBS one was
Speaker 1: particular to Chicago, but Bills was one that if you
Speaker 1: got that code and you had an Apple computer and
Speaker 1: you had this modem, you could run this and create
Speaker 1: your own Bolton board system. And so people started to
Speaker 1: do that. And uh, back in the day, you know
Speaker 1: what the fastest or what was considered a fast modem
Speaker 1: back then, right, Yeah, three D bad. If you don't
Speaker 1: know what bad is, that means that it could transmit
Speaker 1: three hundred symbols in a second. That's not fast people,
Speaker 1: It's yeah, it's you can't and you can't easily translate
Speaker 1: BAWD to bits per second. It it's not it's not
Speaker 1: it's not analogous exactly. It's not analogous. But by the
Speaker 1: by the time of the well actually that I guess
Speaker 1: technically literally, the standard is still the same the fastest.
Speaker 1: About the fastest you can go on a phone line
Speaker 1: in the United States is uh yeah, is it fifty two? Yeah,
Speaker 1: because it was supposed to be fifty six, But there
Speaker 1: is a legal limitation. I was about to say technical specification,
Speaker 1: but it's not the actual speed. But yeah, when I
Speaker 1: started using a dial up modems the standard and then
Speaker 1: shortly after that, uh, back back when they stopped being
Speaker 1: as common, probably in the late nineties early two thousand's,
Speaker 1: modems hit a practical limitation that there's a limit to
Speaker 1: the amount of bandwidth you can send over phone line
Speaker 1: because it's using audio to do this rather than the
Speaker 1: bandwidth on the other side of the audio space in
Speaker 1: a phone line. So um, yeah, due to practical limitations.
Speaker 1: But yeah, three bod that can you imagine trying to
Speaker 1: transfer something like a YouTube video or a flash animation
Speaker 1: at three You might not want to have anything scheduled
Speaker 1: for the next year. It would take you a very
Speaker 1: long time the and and that kind of brings us
Speaker 1: to one of the reasons one of the limitations, or
Speaker 1: if you will, one of the features of bbs is
Speaker 1: they were text based. Yes, they had usually some sort
Speaker 1: of file structure system that you can navigate so that
Speaker 1: you could read things that are similar to today's message
Speaker 1: boards on internet UH sites, websites, UM. So you had
Speaker 1: the message boards where you could converse with other people
Speaker 1: who would visit this BBS again, not in real time,
Speaker 1: but for the most part, because usually at least for
Speaker 1: the smaller bbs is, you're the only one on that system.
Speaker 1: You might be on at the same time as the
Speaker 1: system operator that's the owner uh systems. That's where sissop
Speaker 1: comes from. If you've heard that term. It comes from
Speaker 1: the old BBS days. Actually, a lot of the acronyms
Speaker 1: and that we see online they have their origin back
Speaker 1: in the old bbs is. So yeah, you you normally
Speaker 1: would be having asynchronous conversations, right you would post something,
Speaker 1: you would log off the BBS. You might check the
Speaker 1: next day and see that someone's replied to you. It
Speaker 1: wouldn't be this instant message uh that that we've become
Speaker 1: used to on the internet. And now. Some bbs is
Speaker 1: did eventually get to the point where they had multiple
Speaker 1: phone lines. So if you would called one and got
Speaker 1: a busy signal, you could call the next phone line
Speaker 1: for the same BBS and connect to it and they
Speaker 1: could actually have multiple users online at the same time,
Speaker 1: but that that was not the case for your average
Speaker 1: BBS because you know, if it was just some guy
Speaker 1: running it out of his um, you know, his his den,
Speaker 1: it may be that there's just one phone line that
Speaker 1: he could even dedicate to it. And of course, if
Speaker 1: if he's not there at the time, there's always the
Speaker 1: chance that the BBS would crash. You would call, you
Speaker 1: couldn't connect, and you know, you you'd be stuck without
Speaker 1: that BBS until he came back home and fixed it
Speaker 1: or she. I shouldn't just say he. I mean I
Speaker 1: always say he because I think that's probably the majority
Speaker 1: of the users, but it wasn't total all male. Uh.
Speaker 1: And on these bbs is you could find things besides
Speaker 1: the message boards. You could find other things like you
Speaker 1: you mentioned files. That was That was a little later,
Speaker 1: but not by much. We talked about shareware and how
Speaker 1: that that model developed and how games used to spread
Speaker 1: that way. Um. But yeah, I think that's true. I mean,
Speaker 1: we're talking about again, we're talking about physical limitations, and
Speaker 1: in the nineteen eighties we're not talking about you know,
Speaker 1: gigabyte hard drives or terabyte hard drives. Hard drives. Yeah,
Speaker 1: if there were hard drives at all. Um, so we're
Speaker 1: not talking about anything too particularly large. But people did, um,
Speaker 1: you know, share information and pirate software, pirate software uh
Speaker 1: to to a lesser extent. I think that probably, I
Speaker 1: think you're right. I think that was probably more along
Speaker 1: the lines of when these systems became more sophisticated. But
Speaker 1: you know the things that you do on for example,
Speaker 1: use net groups or I r C now or even
Speaker 1: back in the earlier days of public uh Internet, Um,
Speaker 1: you know you didn't. You couldn't really do that because
Speaker 1: you just didn't have the hardware to make that happen.
Speaker 1: It was on a much smaller scale now. They didn't
Speaker 1: have games. Um, there are a lot of games that
Speaker 1: you could play on a BBS Many of them had
Speaker 1: specific limitations on how long you could play, because you
Speaker 1: don't want to have one user dominate that phone line,
Speaker 1: right right, So most of the time these bbs is
Speaker 1: would have a as a timer, and once you exceeded
Speaker 1: the limit on that timer, you would get disconnected and
Speaker 1: someone else could call in sorry go ahead. Um No.
Speaker 1: There were also turn based games, if I'm not mistaken, um,
Speaker 1: where you could you know, log in, play your turn,
Speaker 1: and log back out and wait for somebody else to
Speaker 1: the I mean chess was very popular on bbs is.
Speaker 1: But one of the games that is incredibly popular in
Speaker 1: bbs is And yes I did play this game, Legend
Speaker 1: of the Red Dragon, which was often known as just
Speaker 1: Lord l O R d UM. It was created by
Speaker 1: Seth Robinson and it was It was a game where
Speaker 1: you created a character that um developed skills and prowess,
Speaker 1: and the goal was to defeat the Red Dragon that
Speaker 1: is terrorizing this one town. And the way the game
Speaker 1: worked was it would work in cycles. The game would
Speaker 1: start and everybody would be on equal ground, and all
Speaker 1: the people who are playing the game have the same goal.
Speaker 1: They want to be the one to defeat the dragon.
Speaker 1: When a player got to the point where he or
Speaker 1: she could defeat the dragon and the dragons defeated, new game,
Speaker 1: I see and everyone starts again at the bottom. Uh.
Speaker 1: It had other features in it where you could challenge
Speaker 1: other players to fight, but they were um they were
Speaker 1: usually it was automated, so when you weren't online and
Speaker 1: someone else was playing, they could challenge your character to
Speaker 1: a duel and the computer would run your character as
Speaker 1: if you know you were doing it. Uh. You could
Speaker 1: also flirt with other characters, and there were consequences to flirting,
Speaker 1: including things like you might be greeted with a child
Speaker 1: within the game. I won't go into any more detail
Speaker 1: on that. Yeah, So anyway, it was actually kind of interesting.
Speaker 1: I had a little bit of a complex social structure
Speaker 1: to it. Um And some of the other games were
Speaker 1: really cool too, like the Trade Wars twenty twenty two
Speaker 1: or two thousand two. That was a good one. Barren
Speaker 1: Realms Elite was amazing, really. Yeah. Barren Realms Elite was
Speaker 1: a multiplayer strategy game and if you could have twenty
Speaker 1: five people playing this game, and the way the game
Speaker 1: worked was that would pitt bbs is against each other.
Speaker 1: Each BBS would essentially be a planet in a in
Speaker 1: a galaxy of planets, and so you were trying to
Speaker 1: have your planet come out on top of all the
Speaker 1: other planets. So it was this neat competition between BBS
Speaker 1: is UM And I'm sorry, go ahead, I was gonna
Speaker 1: say just that that that was kind of interesting because
Speaker 1: you could you know, BBS is not like the Internet.
Speaker 1: You know, you log into the Internet. The Internet is
Speaker 1: one gigantic network you could visit as many bbs is
Speaker 1: as you liked. Uh, we were really only limited by
Speaker 1: your phone bill and the amount of time you had
Speaker 1: at your disposal. Because each bbs was its own distinct
Speaker 1: thing with its own community, and some of the communities
Speaker 1: had multiple liked, some of the communities overlapped, right, and
Speaker 1: you would find the same people going to maybe three
Speaker 1: or four of the bbs is in their local area,
Speaker 1: but some of them would be more niche oriented, and
Speaker 1: you would really just see a certain group of people
Speaker 1: just stay there, like especially the ones that were centered
Speaker 1: around a very specific topic like dungeons and dragons, right,
Speaker 1: and yeah, there are a lot of the bbs is
Speaker 1: that I was familiar with had a specific slant to them,
Speaker 1: like they were specifically geared toward a particular interest. Um.
Speaker 1: I know, I know there were plenty of general topic
Speaker 1: bbs is, but it's you know, the ones that I
Speaker 1: was familiar with. Now, I didn't I admit I never
Speaker 1: actually dialed into a bbs I was, um just I
Speaker 1: didn't really become aware of it until after I had
Speaker 1: already started using the Internet or actually bitten net technically. Um,
Speaker 1: And you know, I was vaguely aware of it, but
Speaker 1: I didn't have a modem, so I didn't really participate
Speaker 1: for about five or six that I used to lug
Speaker 1: into pretty regularly. But um, yeah, I mean and in
Speaker 1: a lot of cases, I think this is this is
Speaker 1: sort of what evolved into the online service provider was,
Speaker 1: you know, the the gradual interest in people of logging
Speaker 1: into these systems and they became more complex. Uh, we
Speaker 1: had lots more people than you have companies looking to
Speaker 1: uh develop something more robust like a CompuServe or in
Speaker 1: America online before you know, the Internet became more of
Speaker 1: a public sphere when it was still dominated by government
Speaker 1: and academic interests, and you also had at this point
Speaker 1: the technology for modems has evolved as well, so that
Speaker 1: you could include things like some graphics in your in
Speaker 1: your system, like as we said before with BBS, as
Speaker 1: it was mostly text based or symbol based stuff because
Speaker 1: the well, for multiple reasons, One you have limited amount
Speaker 1: space on the computer that's hosting the BBS, but for another,
Speaker 1: it's just the limitation of how fast your modem can
Speaker 1: can conduct data through it. And at that speed you
Speaker 1: just couldn't do graphics. Um, that didn't stop people from
Speaker 1: creating as key art. They started doing that. They would
Speaker 1: use as key symbols to create uh uh sketches. Really
Speaker 1: I love as art. Well is interesting is they kind
Speaker 1: of became a currency on bbs is. People would build
Speaker 1: a design and they could trade it for other designs
Speaker 1: or sometimes for other programs things like that. It was
Speaker 1: kind of interesting that that became currency on BBSs or
Speaker 1: magic beans or magic beans. I wanted to read a
Speaker 1: little bit or or refer a little bit to an
Speaker 1: interesting document I found at text files dot com, which
Speaker 1: is a it's an archive of BBS text files. This
Speaker 1: is a text file called what has Killed BBS Systems.
Speaker 1: What I find interesting about this is that it was
Speaker 1: written in nineteen eighty two eight two What has Killed
Speaker 1: BBS Systems? That, keeping in mind the first public bbs
Speaker 1: is nineteen seventy nine. Yes, it did not take long
Speaker 1: to kill the bbs is according to this guy, Well, yes,
Speaker 1: but I I have a theory on this, but go
Speaker 1: ahead and make here. So the points that he made
Speaker 1: was that he said that the uploading and downloading program
Speaker 1: was killing bbs is because people would just come in,
Speaker 1: get whatever they wanted, and go, and they wouldn't they
Speaker 1: wouldn't participate in the community. Um. They said that there
Speaker 1: was a retaliation that was getting very cliquish, and people
Speaker 1: were retaliating against folks who were there just to communicate
Speaker 1: and to make friends and to exchange information. UH. He
Speaker 1: also blamed the proliferation of bbs is in a single area,
Speaker 1: in any given area. That was one of the things
Speaker 1: I talked about. How you could be on several bbs is,
Speaker 1: you know, you would go from one to the other.
Speaker 1: He he was saying that that's a problem. Um. He
Speaker 1: says that in places where there were only a couple
Speaker 1: of bbs is, things were going great. UM. He said
Speaker 1: that the loss of anonymity was a big problem, which
Speaker 1: is interesting because that's something that you hear on internet
Speaker 1: forums where people are reluctant to tie their own name
Speaker 1: to an online handle. You know that there's a lot
Speaker 1: of that still going on today. UM. The anti hacker movement,
Speaker 1: he said, was a big problem, which was the whole
Speaker 1: idea of UH. The hacker in the sense of programmer,
Speaker 1: not in the sense of phone freaker or or malicious hacker.
Speaker 1: He says that that whole uh turning the word hacker
Speaker 1: into something bad was part of what was killing BBS is. Uh,
Speaker 1: they said that the press is ignorance of the BBS
Speaker 1: community was a problem. Sissop ignorance, which he said that
Speaker 1: because it became so easy to host a BBS, people
Speaker 1: who had no business hosting them were doing so, and
Speaker 1: that was killing the BBS is. You could argue the
Speaker 1: same thing for web pages today. I would assume like
Speaker 1: web administrators would probably say the same sort of thing.
Speaker 1: People who run really good websites might really complain about
Speaker 1: folks who don't run such great websites. Um. So, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's just interesting to see that these complaints came out
Speaker 1: as early as a D two and and his his
Speaker 1: text file is much longer than what I've indicated. But um,
Speaker 1: bbs is of course kept on going throughout the eighties
Speaker 1: and into the nineties, and as we've said, they're still
Speaker 1: out there today. It's just there're no what we're near
Speaker 1: as prevalent as they used to be right now. Uh. True,
Speaker 1: BBS is not on the Internet. It's not you know
Speaker 1: there there are there are approximations. I mean, you can
Speaker 1: think about this that the Internet is basically a gigantic
Speaker 1: form of this. But because they're all kinds of message
Speaker 1: boards that you can post too, in places to upload
Speaker 1: and download files from and and online communities. But uh,
Speaker 1: you know, a BBS itself is a very limited uh world,
Speaker 1: if you will, if you'll accept that as a term there,
Speaker 1: and um, yeah, I think that for for the poster
Speaker 1: of that post, Um, it's obviously something. It was obviously
Speaker 1: something very special. He liked that community, uh, and that
Speaker 1: particular environment. And the more people it's like you you
Speaker 1: have your uh, your band, your favorite indie band, and
Speaker 1: then they finally get you complain that nobody ever likes
Speaker 1: them in everyone likes and they totally sold out exactly.
Speaker 1: Super Chunk was on NPR. What is up with that? Dude?
Speaker 1: I saw super Chunk in nineteen nine. Okay, I'm getting
Speaker 1: a little ahead of it. Yeah, I'm getting off topic anyhow,
Speaker 1: But yeah, it's it was. It was that kind of
Speaker 1: loyalty and interest in the BBS world that I think
Speaker 1: inspired that, and I mean causes a lot of people
Speaker 1: now to think back on it, uh favorably. In fact, Um,
Speaker 1: you know, Jason Scott, did you see this the BBS
Speaker 1: documentary called the documentary? I saw that it was, Um,
Speaker 1: I saw the website for it. Of course, don't have
Speaker 1: access to the documentary, so I didn't get to watch it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they they, I think, get into much more granular detail
Speaker 1: on bbs IS and and the whole culture. Eight different episodes, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's on several so you know, I'm sure it would
Speaker 1: be fascinating. I just didn't have time to check it
Speaker 1: out before. But but yeah, I mean, so there's there's
Speaker 1: a lot to it, but those are those are the basics. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and and some of the people who are really doing
Speaker 1: important work in technology today, we're big into bbs IS
Speaker 1: back in the eighties. So for example, well, I mean
Speaker 1: there's the laws. Yes, Wozniak he uh, Steve Wozniac he
Speaker 1: one of the founders of Apple. He was a big
Speaker 1: proponent of bbs IS back in the day. And of
Speaker 1: course he even used it to help people figure out
Speaker 1: how to phone freak. He may remember our phone freaking
Speaker 1: episode from several months back. But also there was a
Speaker 1: guy who wrote a document on bbs as that got
Speaker 1: spread around quite a bit. The document called the Bill
Speaker 1: of Rights Light l i t E. Which was a
Speaker 1: rephrased bill of rights that were It was designed to
Speaker 1: kind of point out the issues that were surrounding um computer,
Speaker 1: uh technology and how that relates to constitutional it's and
Speaker 1: how it's a complicated issue, kind of really looking ahead
Speaker 1: to see how the digital age is conflicting with basic
Speaker 1: rights and and like how does it fit and where
Speaker 1: does it not fit and where do we need to
Speaker 1: tweak it so that it works properly. Was written by
Speaker 1: a guy named John Perry Barlow. UH. Barlow is one
Speaker 1: of the founders of the Electronic Freedom Foundation the e F. Yes,
Speaker 1: so the e F continues today to try and and
Speaker 1: shape public policy so that internet freedoms, things like net
Speaker 1: neutrality remain untouched. They advocate for uh for net neutrality,
Speaker 1: among other policies. So, uh, some people who are really
Speaker 1: you know, movers and shakers in the technology world, we're
Speaker 1: big into bbs IS back in the day. Yeah, that's uh,
Speaker 1: that's definitely true, and um, you know, and and other
Speaker 1: people knew it too as well, because the government of
Speaker 1: the federal government in the United States had its I
Speaker 1: on bbs IS And we're watching to see who was
Speaker 1: on the different uh bulletin boards. I know that Steve
Speaker 1: Jackson Games, which is an office favorite among uh some
Speaker 1: gamers here at how stuffworks dot com. Their offices were
Speaker 1: rated because they were hosting a bbs and the Secret
Speaker 1: Service thought there was some illicit material on there about
Speaker 1: hacking in computer networks. As it turns out there wasn't. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but but BBSs did. Yeah, BBSs did provide some people
Speaker 1: the ability to to either share tips on how to
Speaker 1: pirate software or actually would include pirated software as a download. Um,
Speaker 1: there were hackers specific bbs is. Uh. In fact, a
Speaker 1: lot of the early ones were hackers specific. We're not
Speaker 1: just not just hackers as in programmers, but hackers asn't
Speaker 1: the people who enjoy breaking into systems, learning how they
Speaker 1: work than exploiting them. So yeah about them, Yeah I
Speaker 1: should Hey wait a minute, anyway, Yeah, there there were
Speaker 1: there were some kind of shady bbs is out there,
Speaker 1: and even some of the general purpose bbs has had
Speaker 1: some material on it that probably wasn't appropriate for all eyes.
Speaker 1: I can actually, I won't say maybe definitely. I was
Speaker 1: a kid and I was on those bbs is, and
Speaker 1: I know that there was material A lot of them
Speaker 1: actually had. UM, had ways of of making you talk. No,
Speaker 1: they had ways to to guard against that. You had
Speaker 1: to use a like a credit card to um access
Speaker 1: certain parts of the BBS. And it wasn't necessarily that
Speaker 1: they would charge you, but they wanted the credit card
Speaker 1: to to prove that you're an adult. Right, if you're
Speaker 1: old enough to have a credit card, then you're old
Speaker 1: enough to get access to this material. And uh, you know,
Speaker 1: some of them followed that and some didn't. And yes,
Speaker 1: you can build your own BBS even to this day.
Speaker 1: You can either use a dial up modem and have
Speaker 1: people call in physically to that machine and explore your BBS,
Speaker 1: or you can use a tell net client and have
Speaker 1: people tell net into it. Um. But the you know,
Speaker 1: the era of the BBS is is. I mean, there's
Speaker 1: still a few out there that are still that still
Speaker 1: have their die hard fans who who contribute and are
Speaker 1: big into that community, but the Internet is really um
Speaker 1: appropriated a lot of that. Yeah. It's kind of ironic
Speaker 1: too in a way that as popular as electronic communication
Speaker 1: is now, the BBS surged in popularity and has now
Speaker 1: receded to the point where people like the one you
Speaker 1: quoted a few minutes ago are probably happy again because
Speaker 1: just the you know, they're still back to the original
Speaker 1: little communities of people little pockets of people. Yeah maybe,
Speaker 1: um yeah, because I I often will think of a
Speaker 1: BBS as if you it's sort of similar to what
Speaker 1: would happen if you grabbed a web server and then
Speaker 1: you severed its connection to the rest of the Internet,
Speaker 1: so you could connect directly to the at web server,
Speaker 1: but you could not connect to any other web page,
Speaker 1: like you couldn't go outside the boundaries of that server,
Speaker 1: say somewhere kind of things. And again we're talking about
Speaker 1: you know, text based stuff, right and and interesting askey art. Okay,
Speaker 1: well that wraps up this discussion on bulletin board Systems
Speaker 1: b b S. I hope you enjoyed it this little
Speaker 1: walk down Internet memory lane or network memory lane, body
Speaker 1: memory lane. To bring back that joke. If you have
Speaker 1: any topics you would specifically like us to cover, you
Speaker 1: can let us know on Facebook or Twitter are handle
Speaker 1: there is tech stuff HS double you or you can
Speaker 1: shoot us an email. That address is tech stuff at
Speaker 1: how stuff Works dot com and Chris and I will
Speaker 1: talk to you again really soon for more on this
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