A number of us have been thinking about the community that used to exist within the BBS world and how that community sense might be restored within the current world-wide access. It might be useful to just remember what a BBS was. It consisted of a computer (or computers) sitting at the end of a telephone line, into which people would dial and connect. It is an important distinction - the users computer was directly connected to my computer. If two people where connected at the same time I had to have two telephone lines coming into my computer. It was an expensive hobby to run a BBS.
As I think back to my old BBS, ”Glastonbury Tor”, there were certain activities that the BBS offered that attracted visitors. On-line competitive games were popular. These were mostly role playing games written with ANSI graphics and you could play once a day. You then had to wait until the next day to play your game and compete against others who had played during the day. Remember again, this is a dial-in situation so only those that were in a ‘non-long-distance’ telephone exchange were calling. My board averaged about 100 calls a day on a single line.
There were popular message networks with pre-configured topic headings. One I remember well was FIDONET which had hundreds of topic headings (I.E. categories) and as the BBS owner I could select those topics I wanted to carry on my BBS. My users could post and respond to comments in these message area and during the wee hours my computer would compress all of the days topics and comments and call a central node and contribute what our users had commented on. In turn the main node acted as an exchange hub so that over 40,000 BBS could share the same content. Thus, something I had written was squirted out of the hub to BBS all over the world. It was not instant (perhaps part of the appeal) in that something written on my board might work its way around the world and back over 24-48 hours. Even game scores and participation was shared so in my little dark basement office I could be competing against people all over the world. It is amazing that it worked - but it was almost flawless - and great fun.
The Internet killed the BBS star. No doubt about it. It also seems to have killed the real sense of community that could develop. It also killed the intimacy of the BBS community and the selectivity of information.
I realize that news groups, web sites and e-mail have filled a void, but it sometimes seems that we are missing something.