[Endy]

Like so many of us, I miss the days of the BBS. But I think I know precisely why I do. BBS systems and Usenet were plain-text communications which were fast and open. There wasn't much space for user tracking, analytics, etc. There just wasn't much corporate space. Yes, there were corporate BBSes and public FTPs; but by and large they couldn't pull your call log and see what you'd been up to. There was a sense of privacy - even if there was less anonymity. There was also a sense of control. This massive TCP/IP, ECMAScript/PHP, CSS+HTML Web leaves a user with no feeling of control over how they browse, what they browse, etc.

It's even worse when you know even a little about Web marketing and SEO. The manipulations employed which influence not just computers, but also users, have gotten wildly out of control. Back then, you the user had to make a deliberate choice to call into one BBS or another. You chose to interact with that specific group. Now it's all algorithmic.

[JustSomeNobody]

It seems everyone back then on BBS's were enthusiasts. We all had at least that in common. I remember groups of us would all gather on some random night of the week for drinks just to kind of put a face to the handle. It was great. And after we'd hurry and dial back in to see who else just dialed in.

Social networks today just leave you feeling gross.

[black-tea]

Why don't we just use them then? Only enthusiasts would use them now, as they did back then.

[bluedino]

I can remember that. A group of us who go to whoever's house had just gotten a new game, piece of hardware, etc

When we left we'd always say "see you on the roadhouse!", which was a multi-line board that we'd all dial into when we got home

[geoelectric]

Those multi-line chat boards were a total vice of mine late 80s, early 90s. That grew into a GEnie flat-fee chat account, which grew into AOL/IM (while maintaining a proper shell account on the side, mind you). Then there was IRC, forumnet/icb, etc., anything I could hit with a modem. I wasn't digital-native, but I was digital-to-analog-to-digital-native.

Nowadays, 47 and crustier, I can hardly be arsed to answer a Facebook message, and all the avenues for social connection have become kind of overwhelming. I can't imagine how it is for people my age or older who picked this all up late.

[eeZah7Ux]

Indeed plain-text BBS (over a slow modem) were faster than loading 10 MB of javascript over an ADSL.

Also the information density and signal-to-noise ratio was higher. Even if you use ad-blockers.

[nkozyra]

I have a lot of nostalgia for my bbs days, but one thing I distinctly recall was the slowness of it all. The palpable improvement when you went from 300 baud to 600 or from 14k to 28k to 56k.

I think we romanticize this stuff too much. Even showing a splash screen of ASCII text was stuttered. Chat operations were slow over the wire, you just never knew because ... maybe they just hadn't typed anything?

[martin1b]

True but we could do what nobody else in the world could do. We had chat, file sharing, forums, multiplayer games and more before everybody else. BBSers felt like the elite and nobody else understood it.

There was a low barrier to entry. Anyone could start a BBS. Since there were so few, any new BBS would have a flood of new users, making them successfully very quickly.

The slowness created an exciting anticipation.

[Endy]

I'm not sure I consider 'slowness' a 100% bad thing, though. I got into far fewer insignificant flame wars over BBS & dialup than I ever have since the advent of broadband. That slowness means you have to honestly consider what it is you're saying, who you're saying it to, and why you're saying it. In some ways, a slower connection means that you're more aware of a human being on the other end.

[eeZah7Ux]

> a splash screen of ASCII text was stuttered

...on a 600 baud modem. Not on a 28.8Kbps. I remember doing timing analysis at the time.

[nkozyra]

Well of course. The speed of the modem dictated how palpable the delay was.

[pjc50]

Yeah, I don't think interactive use was actually faster. Noninteractive use however - FidoNet (an early messageboard system with similar properties to UseNet) supported downloading a chunk of posts which you could then read through offline in a native, responsive program.

[Lorkki]

>There wasn't much space for user tracking, analytics, etc.

You literally sent every keypress to a remote server that was responsible for both generating all of the views and storing all of the data you touched during that session. It may not have been called user tracking, but the sysops definitely had the capability to see everything that you did.