Thanks to local toll or long distance fees your local BBS was literally local. Everyone on it lived nearby and if you were an ass you were close enough to get punched in the face. Contrast with Usenet where trolling and flamewars were rampant because instigators could hide behind a veil of anonymity or pseudo-anonymity.
The BBS era was also long before public doxxing and spammers scraping any and all personal info. At least before the Internet made such things easily amplified and trivial to do.
> "Thanks to local toll or long distance fees your local BBS was literally local. Everyone on it lived nearby and if you were an ass you were close enough to get punched in the face."
What? This is mindblowing to me, being born in 1997. I can't imagine an online experience like this, it sounds pretty neat.
With BBSes you were literally dialing in to the machine via a modem. Local calls were free but long distance charges were expensive. There were even local toll calls, a number might be in your area code by far enough away you were charged to call. You wouldn't pay long distance rates but it wasn't free. Charges were also billed to the caller rather than callee.
So just by nature of tolls you wouldn't call many out of area BBSes. If you did it was brief calls for a post or to check mail but not sit around playing a door game or downloading some big file.
That all meant BBSes were very local for most people. This is in addition to the fact only a small fraction of homes had computers, a fraction of those had modems, and a fraction of those actually called BBSes. That aspect also meant the populations were relatively small. A small web forum might have a hundred users spread over a large area while a BBS would have a dozen in the same town.
The phreaking scene opened up access to any bbs bypassing long distance/toll charges.
What some use to do is put a 1-800 on a 1-900 number. By calling a 1-800 number you could connect to a sexline for free. We had so much as kids calling and making fun of the operators.
A few years back I got a tv for Christmas. Christmas night I setup it up and it scans the cable channels available. Next day I notice some channels with fractions like 88.2 were programmed but the screen was blank. I rescanned and discovered new channels at different freq and they were playing really new movies. I watched a movie and when it finished there wasn't any content. I rescanned often and new movies would popup during the night. Then sex movies started to show up. I realized whatever anyone ordered via ondemand in my building was being broadcast and my tv could pick it up. If someone paused the movie I would have to wait. Mornings were a mix of cartoons and fast-forwarded porns. Day was mostly cartoon. Evenings were when people would order the hit movies.
Interesting things are constantly happening no matter what era you are in.
I noticed the same thing probably 15 years ago when I bought a TV with a digital tuner. You mirrored my experience exactly with one thing to add - another thing that cracked me up was when they would order it in Spanish!
That pausing thing was annoying - on Friday or Saturday nights though you could usually change to another channel and find someone else watching the same movie at almost the same spot that didn’t have it paused.
Oh and around 1985 and 1986 I wrote my own software to guess calling card numbers between midnight and 6 am. I would either use Sprint or MCI access numbers and get about 20 working codes per night.
That's awesome. Nothing better than finding a code (turning on the screen the next morning). I got into it a little later and by that time a lot of software existed at least for the c64. I use to wardial in my sparetime and I published fun findings for a local zine for my areacode. Finding endpoints connected to a modem was a treat. Nothing better than figuring out you have to connect at 7,2 baud/parity instead of standard 8,1 then you are promped with a menu.. Fun times..
Lost to time apparently, there was a service called “PC Pursuit” that allowed you to dial into a local access number and then dial out again through a remote modem to BBSs in other area codes. The traffic in between was carried over an X.25 network. I used this service for a number of years before trading it for a Unix shell account w/ Usenet access. It was a little choppy sometimes but opened the door to a larger world.
I still use the phreaking files from that era today - the phone number I use has rung busy for at least forty years. You can still use those automated callback numbers as a convenient exit for long meetings “oops, I’ve got to take this…”
> There were even local toll calls, a number might be in your area code by far enough away you were charged to call. You wouldn't pay long distance rates but it wasn't free.
And in the late 80s long distance rates meant something like $4/minute inflation adjusted. Even "local" toll calls were up to $1/minute. Of course the billing scheme was far more complex. The paper phone book would usually have a page or two to determine the rate between various exchanges.
Sometimes the people on the local BBS would even get together for stuff! See a movie together, have a potluck out in the local park... you know, human social stuff. Hang out with the people you've been chatting with regularly.
Oh, heck yeah. I was a member of several BBSs but found a true home when I came across one run by a local newspaper reporter (Sredni). Everyone was at minimum an avid reader, and two were writers including the reporter. The BBS was run out of her home and had only one phone line, so people had to wait their turn to dial in, batch upload messages and download replies using software similar to uucp. Even with that software a BBS with a large user base like hers was often busy, so the software had a war dial mode that just retried forever.
One of the members (Skippy) literally had everyone's birthday and there was a celebration or meeting just about every weekend. When my apartment lease ended but I didn't want to move home and had no money for a deposit, Vermithrax Pejorative let me sleep on his couch. One of the guys (Dorothy) came to every event dressed exactly like Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz. My point is we were a very friendly and non-judgemental crew. Sort of the polar opposite of the modern-day internet.
I was eventually lucky enough to date Sredni I think in part because I actually knew who Sredni Vashtar was. LOL. She called me incredibly excited after I gifted her a Spider Robinson novel and it had a word she'd never seen before on page one. It was an elegant community for a more civilized age.
Remember that the internet as we know it today is young. At the peak of BBSes, you called actual phone numbers to connect to places. If you've ever seen Hackers or War Games, the hardware wasn't too far from reality
If the phone number was long distance, you had to pay more - just as it is today. Local calls were usually free. Hence the GP's comment :)
My hometown had 300 BBSes that I wrote a set of expect-like automation scripts in {COMMO} to dial in, download a ZIP of any new DMs and forum posts, and then log off and rotate on to the next one. When the number was busy, the dialer would move to the next, and when it connected successfully, the dialed would mark it completed until I clear them.
It wasn't the only online experience, but maybe it was the most common one. You also had services like Q-Link(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7jLBOIvxhg), which later became AOL.
> Everyone on it lived nearby and if you were an ass you were close enough to get punched in the face.
Didn't stop folks from flaming and trolling. The BBS Documentary [1] has an example of a kid who follows around and threatens a BBS owner who owns a computer so because he didn't like the computer it ran on.
Definitely not but the prevalence was far less. The local nature of BBSes inspired a lot of prior restraint we don't see a lot on the Internet anymore. That's not to say anonymity or pseudo-anonymity is bad. It just creates a different environment than what you'd typically find on BBSes.
Yup. Plus if you were plugged in enough, you knew about OSUNY BBS, telenet and hidden places to exchange messages like WSMR. The phreaks were everywhere. Uh, so I'm told. cough
The BBS era was also long before public doxxing and spammers scraping any and all personal info. At least before the Internet made such things easily amplified and trivial to do.