The first BBS came to life in 1978 during a particularly bad Chicago blizzard. Its inventors, Ward Christensen and Randy Suess, wanted a way to keep up with their computer club without having to gather together in person. So they figured out a way to do it with computers.
The resulting software, called CBBS, allowed personal-computer owners with modems to dial-in to a dedicated system and leave messages that others would see later, when they, in turn, dialed up the BBS. People could, in theory, call BBSes anywhere, but since they'd have to pay for long-distance, they tended to stay local. The BBS concept was a digital version of a push-pin bulletin board that might flank a grocery store entrance or a college student union hallway.
By the time dad brought home the modem, BBSes had grown dramatically in scope. They facilitated file transfers, inter-BBS messaging networks, multi-node chat, and popular text-based games.
My 15-year-old brother began BBSing. He visited five or six local boards, with names like “Octopus’s Garden,” “Southern Pride,” and “Online's Place.” I followed in his footsteps the next summer, spending hundreds of glorious hours online.
Dialing into a BBS felt like whole-body teleportation. It was the intimacy of direct, computer-to-computer connection that did it. To call a BBS was to visit the private residence of a fellow computer fan electronically. BBS hosts had converted a PC—often their only PC—into a digital playground for strangers’ amusement.
For an 11-year-old exploring online spaces for the first time, my mental model for these electronic connections was physical. Although every BBS displayed walls of text—menus, options, and prompts—those characters somehow translated, in my brain, into a casual walk through a cozy living room or a stroll in a grassy yard.
Maybe it was because the system operators (sysops) that ran each BBS were always watching. Everything users did scrolled by on their screen, and they soaked in the joy of someone else using their computer. It was a gentle, pleasant form of surveillance.
The sysops might initiate one-on-one chat at any time. Long before texting and Slacking and Facebook messaging became the norm for interchange, BBS chats felt like being with someone in person. Sometimes strong personal relationships were built. My best friend is someone I first met when he called my BBS in 1993.
That personal connection was sorely missing on big-name online subscription services of the time—Prodigy, CompuServe, and AOL. Even today, the internet is so overwhelmingly intertwined that it doesn't have the same intimate feel. Once the web arrived in the mid-1990s, it seemed inevitable that the BBS would die off.