| ▲ | jacquesm 7 hours ago |
| The OS that was running on these is irrelevant, the important part is the BBS software. And these usually ran quite a few lines per box, sometimes they would use external racks of modems, but I'm not seeing that here so maybe these were using internal modem cards, so maybe 6 per box, but if they were using external modems it could easily be 12 or more, with the PC cards hosting multiple serial ports, 4, 6 or even 8 per card. Typically a card would have a single large connector at the back and then a pigtail with a DB9 or DB25 (yes, I know) for every modem. |
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| ▲ | xenadu02 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| "usually" and "typically" are doing a lot of heavy lifting here :) Access to knowledge, equipment, and budget varied dramatically prior to widespread internet access. Someone setting up a BBS might not even know about multi-line modem cards or serial port expansions. Even if they knew about them they may not have been able to reasonably obtain them. Or they may have been operating on donations, surplus, or discount equipment. Or they simply may not have had the luxury of time to research all of that as user demand meant they were too busy laying tracks in front of the train. Many BBSes ran on 1-2 lines per PC because that's what they understood how to build or the hardware they had access to. You might be surprised at just how many lines some BBSes setup this way had! People forget there was a time that anything outside the standard PC was extremely expensive, often had flaky or nonexistent software support, locked you into a fly-by-night vendor that might go out of business tomorrow, was only available via a distributor who wanted to have you talk to a "sales consultant" before they'd sell you something, etc. Many many people chose sub-optimal implementations because it was an off-the-shelf PC they could replace at any time with trivially simple software requiring no special CONFIG.SYS drivers or TSRs to fiddle with. Especially if you'd ever been burned previously. |
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| ▲ | icedchai 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| The OS was relevant if your BBS software was limited to a single simultaneous user, like many of the early DOS BBSes. The late 80's "PCBoard" BBSes I'm familiar with needed one PC per user, plus a file server with Netware. |
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| ▲ | jacquesm 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | Ok, but that's just the vehicle, it is the BBS software that does the works. And even in the 80's there were ways to run multiple instances of 'single user' BBSs on one box, for instance (dare I say it...) OS/2 and TV. |
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| ▲ | rconti 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Yeah, this jumped out at me too. It's a wild misunderstanding of how BBSes worked. That said, I have no idea how a multi-node BBS would work, in terms of keeping state synchronized. |
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| ▲ | icedchai 7 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | It depends on the era. Earlier: one PC per user, shared file system using a Novell network.
Later: multitasking OS (Desqview, OS/2) or BBS software that natively supported multiple users (like MajorBBS.) I ran a BBS on an Amiga for a while. The OS natively supported multitasking, but I only had one line. At least I could log in the same time as a user... | | |
| ▲ | daneel_w 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | The older brother of a friend of mine in the 90s was the co-sysop of one of Sweden's largest "elite" BBSes at the time, Farout BBS. I got to tag along to the sysop's apartment once and see the setup, which was an Amiga 2000 with 3 active nodes and available serial ports for a total of 7 nodes, though the sysop hadn't gotten around to get more telephone lines wired to his apartment. | | |
| ▲ | icedchai 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | awesome! getting more phone lines into a residence could be a pain. I knew a guy who had an 8 line BBS in his (parents', actually) basement. Getting more was difficult because they were "out of facilities" and he had to move it to an office. |
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| ▲ | xenadu02 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > It's a wild misunderstanding of how BBSes worked. That's quite the assumption. There were a lot of different BBS hosting programs. They wildly varied in what they supported and how they were implemented. Further even within a given piece of software the ways you could configure them and the consequences also varied. Even if a given software supported concurrent users on a single PC for various reasons a BBS might choose not to host that way. | |
| ▲ | jacquesm 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I've seen NetWare, Vines, some proprietary hacks to form the backbone. |
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| ▲ | layer8 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| Aren’t the modems the black boxes sitting on top of each PC in the picture? |
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| ▲ | jacquesm 7 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Yes, you're right, I totally missed them. Those look like USR 'Courier' modems but the resolution is really crappy so hard to be sure and it looks like there are multiple types. There might still be modems in the boxes themselves as well. It doesn't look like more than two modems per box if there isn't. | |
| ▲ | jasongill 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | yes, most of them look like USRobotics Courier modems. Note that not all the machines have one, and some have two. Assuming that the parent commenter is right and that they are using internal line cards, I wonder if the external modems were being added to support higher speeds. However, the fact that we can see at least 2 (but I think four) 66 blocks means they had 50 to 100 phone lines for the machines visible, which would make sense that the external modems are the primary connection and no internal modems are being used, based on the number of modems visible and the fact that each 66 block can handle 25 lines. | | |
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