The pre-Internet BBS era is something I remember fondly. I was a kid, so there's that halo effect of course, but I loved the indie DIY nature of it and the diversity and community you'd get.

There's a site called textfiles.com that's kind of a museum, and a documentary you can find on YouTube. There's stuff on archive.org too.

It wasn't actually that long of an era. The first modern BBS was probably CBBS in Chicago in 1978, though there's other claimants depending on how you define BBS. When the Internet started to go mainstream in the middle 1990s, the BBS scene died shockingly quickly. So it lasted a little under 20 years, probably 17 or 18.

The glory days of it were probably from about 1985 until 1995. By 1985 you started to have PCs and modems good enough to make it a pleasure to use and cheap enough (and with a used after-market) to achieve significant penetration and enable less wealthy and kids to get online. By 1995 the Internet was starting to kill it.

I read a lot of rosy stuff about how people behaved so much better back then, and some of that is BS. There were trolls, weirdos, creeps, racists, black hat hackers that would mess with you, and malware that would mess up your machine. There were flame wars and sectarian splits where a bunch of users on a BBS would leave for a different one. There was junk content, filler, and nasty stuff like CSAM around.

I would, however, say that the signal to noise ratio was a lot better than modern social media and the modern SEO-trashed web. The big difference is that these systems did not have algorithms biasing things in this direction. You didn't have an algorithmic feed preferentially surfacing the most idiotic or inflammatory content to get you to get angry about it and "maximize engagement." You didn't have algorithms incentivizing endless amounts of chum to game the rankings. It was easy to just ignore the trolls and morons and creeps and go for the good stuff.

Much of the same can be said of the early pre-socials pre-SEO web.

You also didn't have a lot of money involved, and while money can create productive incentives in a lot of areas it seems to create mostly perverse incentives in media, especially if the money is coming from advertisers rather than consumers of the media.

The original sin is really the time-on-site/time-on-app KPI. It is literally destroying civilization. I don't think that's much of an exaggeration.

All in all it was good times, and I miss the ethos and community and sense of discovery of it.

I remember that time fondly also. You are spot on with the glory days. I dialed into my first BBS in 1988 with a 1200 baud modem. By 1995, they were basically dead.