BBS's are alive and well!

Some people mistakenly and self-satisfactorily claim that the BBS is the online environment of a bygone era. They couldn't possibly be more incorrect.

Vince Quaresima mentioned at the 1993 OwlBash that "the day of the dialup BBS is almost done and will rapidly be supplanted by something newer, bigger, and better." He was not, at that time, entirely sure what that new thing would be, but by 1996 he claimed that in retrospect it certainly did happen that way.

But did it?

It's a shame, really ... not only BBS's, but computers in general, were far more charming then. They had a more earthy, hobbyish feel. Sure, now we've got a global network and computers that can do far more, but the mainstreaming of both has caused a rapid influx of morons (see also: eternal September).

In 1996 I asserted that the venerable BBS would again rise in popularity. And it has -- in absolutely every respect -- but the self-importanterati of Web 2.0 stubbornly refuse to admit it.

Before the Internet was big, there were three types of BBS's. There were for-profit BBS's, corporate information BBS's, and hobbyist BBS's. The profit-making BBS's, naturally, disappeared in favour of the same people opening their own ISP's, which is just fine because those people really wanted to be miniature commercial online services in the first place, and now they had a standard service to offer, with real mainstream consumer demand. The corporate boards were properly replaced by Web sites, which offered the same functionality to a wider audience and without the need for a telecommunications infrastructure. That just left the hobbyist BBS's.

Many of us were facing a bit of a dilemma. The economies of scale had not yet arrived at a point where a hobbyist could afford a full-time Internet connection or commercial hosting services, yet the single user dialup paradigm was rapidly losing its audience. Personally, I got lucky -- I was able to get a reasonable price from my ISP at the time for permission to keep my dialup connection pinned up 24/7, and I happened to have a static IP as well. It wasn't the best arrangement, but it did serve us well from 1996 until 2000, when DSL finally came to town. And that served us quite nicely until 2007 when I moved the BBS to a commercial hosting facility at which I happen to oversee network operations. :)

The software is, of course, the easy part. The combination of Linux and Citadel is a perfect fit for this type of thing, and the latter has been deliberately made very easy to install in order to position it to be the obvious choice for this type of site.

Now let's debunk the various "innovations" claimed by subsequent generations.

• Groupware - well, we all know where that went. BBS's were the original groupware. I once had the operator of a Citadel site tell me of a "eureka moment" where he realized that systems like Lotus Notes and Microsoft Exchange were really nothing more than "a big BBS optimized for business poindexters." He's right.
• Weblogs - sites like Slashdot love to talk about the bygone days of the venerable BBS. This is ironic considering that Slashdot is itself merely a big BBS optimized for tech news and discussion. Perhaps if the average Slashdot user were over 14 years old, they'd understand this oversight.
• Social Software - the big deal with Web 2.0, right? The idea of making it important to connect with people rather than technology? This is something we understood three decades ago. The self-importanterati of Web 2.0 didn't invent it.

The users are there. More and more people are wondering if there's anything worthwhile beyond the World Wide Waste-o-time and the moronic chat rooms and assorted other crap that currently infests the Internet. Usenet? Puh-leeze. Show me a newsgroup and I'll show you a 10% signal-to-noise ratio. BBS's have always been where the real users are, and there's no reason it won't continue that way. The mainstream Internet scene has been (unsuccessfully) trying to "invent" for years what the BBS scene figured out nearly three decades ago. The underlying infrastructure may change, the look and feel of the systems may change, but the *people* are what matters, and no other paradigm is as "folksy" as a BBS.