Definitely get a nostalgia buzz thinking about the early 1990's BBS scene. Had a very vibrant community of BBS users in my city during that time.

It is ironic and somewhat interesting that the biggest aspects of the BBS scene that most people seem to miss (the community/local culture, meeting like-minded people in real life, some of the games, ANSI art, Echomail discussions), are all things borne from the technical limitations of the time. Slow modems and high long distance charges meant most people kept to their local boards. Games had to be designed in text with only a rudimentary colour scheme (sure, there was RoboBoard, RIP, NAPLPS and other graphical protocols - none which really caught on all that much) and still be compelling. Most were limited turn based (which meant being forced to only spend a couple hours a day playing, then having to wait). "World-wide" networks like FidoNet were dog-slow by today's standards (it was a toss-up whether a message would reach its recipient faster on an FTN network or via snail-mail), so discussion threads would last for days but only have several hundred messages in them to sort through.

I remember the years and work spent to try to improve on these limitations. Galacticomm and eSoft had their huge hackish ways to get past the non-multitasking nature of DOS and the IRQ limits of PCs to allow people to run huge multi-line boards on regular PCs. We saw Planet Connect dramatically lower the cost of distributing FidoNet packets via satellite downlink (still needed telephone uplink if you were sending, though). We saw big serial breakout boards and modem boxes (Galactibox?) come out. And of course, faster modems. Up to rip-roaring 33.6kbps speeds at the peak of the BBS era.

Ultimately, the internet and the "real" operating systems that are commonplace today overcame those limitations in ways that were pretty unfathomable to most of us common BBS users and sysops of the day. Unfortunately, BBS's today really only appeal to those of us who had lived through the struggle of configuring COM ports or QWK readers (or for many of us, a tosser/scanner, door game, FOSSIL driver, or getting DESQview working just right).

I run a "modern" BBS, Xibalba. Something I find is actually quite a few "callers" visiting the board are new blood. Younger generation that never lived through or touched a BBS but usually fall into one of two camps: 1 - "I'm tired of the modern corporate Internet", 2 - I just want to learn about history.

People still login to play games (I'm writing a new one!), and chat. Downloads here and there when you have hard to find history items, etc. Certainly nothing like it's heyday, but enough to keep me happy anyway :D

When I switched from the BBS to the modern web+newsgroups in 1998, I immediately missed the former.

The "modern" Internet is better for finding information and downloading files. Email is better for 1:1 communication. For everything else, the BBS experience was superior.

Playing door games was better than playing online games. I'm not competing with the rest of the world!

Conferences vs forums/newsgroups: At least the ones I was part of had very strict moderation policies.[1] Discussions were always civil. Spam didn't exist.

And yeah, I miss QWK readers (heavy OLX on DOS user). For a number of years I had a QuickBasic executable that would convert my (downloaded) email inbox into a QWK format. I would read and respond via OLX, and then had some mechanism to convert the responses back to text so I could upload to the mail server.

[1] You were required to use your real name. The sysops enforced this.

Reflecting, I feel like those limitations are what forced things to be good. With the limited toolkit, you had to focus on ux in a way that's not realistic to do today. So many classic games had excellent gameplay in spite of/because of those limitations. And waiting until midnight to play your turns on all those door games. It was compelling.

Contrast to a modern social media platform where you're just perpetually bombarded by mountains of shit... because they can.

I'm also from this era and I miss it so much. That being said, I used to read old Phrack issues and felt like I had missed out on the "real" golden age of BBSes. Everything already felt too complicated by the 90s and too locked down.

That being said using BananaCom with ZModem and running my own BBS on Spitfire then WWIV, was peak computing for me.

1982, Omaha.