Comments
Oldskool BBS and UseNet question
Written By silvertje on Nov. 26, 2007.
3 Comments
Report Note
+ Clip This
I was wondering where to put this note, I really wanted to post it in the non-existing category Web-- but decided to post it here.
I am doing some pre-web research and I have a question about BBS and UseNet. It is difficult to find the answer on the web as it concerns pre-web topcis (even though Google owns the UseNet archive)
Did BBS and UseNet discussion forums/boards have the same structure?
I found somewhere that:
The most commonly used BBS structure is a two dimensional topic tree. Each leave contains a list of senders and subject titles in a reverse chronological order. The contributions are kept for a certain period of time and may be sometimes retrieved in an archive. Browsing of subject keywords may be available. (Alton-Scheidl, 1993)
And UseNet articles
are organized into topical categories called newsgroups, which are themselves logically organized into hierarchies of subjects. For instance, sci.math and sci.physics are within the sci hierarchy, for science. When a user subscribes to a newsgroup, the news client software keeps track of which articles that user has read. (Wikipedia)
I can actually remember using UseNet but I have no way of knowing whether BBS discussions followed the same format. Any ideas?
Ozone42
Written Nov. 26, 2007 / Report /
Oh nostalgia. I used to be a SysOp and a CoSysOp. BBS was pretty varied. There were a lot of systems in use, and everyone was trying new things. Really it was a very exciting time. I was in the thick of it using 1200, 2400, whoo-whee fast 4800 baud modems.
I had a 300, but really there wasn't much to use them on at that point.
Most of the systems had a forum structure similar to a lot of the web forums nowadays. You had a list of forums, you could create a topic, you could respond to that topic.
Some had chat rooms which were cool, predecessors to IRC, the beginnings of emoticons. A lot had file libraries, which you could browse directories pick files and download them.
You should look into some more specifics with the types of BBS software. The most popular in my area were:
Renegade BBS
MBBS
Wildcat!
PC Board
These systems gave rise to shareware, ansi art (which was fantastic,) and a lot of the early hackers and "scene" programmers.
silvertje
Written Nov. 27, 2007 / Report /
Thanks for all the first-hand info Ozone42! I was born a tad late for BBS but I still remember the shrieking sound of our 28k modem and the joy of IRC. Oh the gold old (slow) times.
Cappuccino
Written Apr. 24, 2008 / Report /
OMG, my love affair with online communications began with BBS'ing. Forums were by large threaded as mentioned before. The really cool thing though, was FidoNet.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fidonet
It was the thing that took your BBS from a singular presence and connected it with the the world. In my opinion, the precursor to usenet groups.
I really consider that the golden age, it was wild that is for sure.