📌 Bulletin Boards and Online Hangouts!
The 1970s and 1980s — Where People Met Online Before the Web 📞💾
with a modem
somebody's house
In January 1978 a giant blizzard buried Chicago. Stuck at home, Ward Christensen and Randy Suess started building a computer that friends could call to leave messages. It went online that February as CBBS, the first dial-up bulletin board system.
📋 What Was a BBS?
A bulletin board system was a computer you called with your own computer to read messages, post replies, trade files, and play text games.
Most BBSes were not on the Internet. Your modem dialed the board's phone number directly, and many boards had only one phone line. If someone else was on, you got a busy signal.
Early modems ran at 300 bits per second. Words appeared on the screen slowly enough that you could read along as they arrived.
The person who ran a board was called the sysop, short for system operator. Many were hobbyists running a board from a spare room.
By the early 1990s there were tens of thousands of boards in North America. Then the Web arrived and most of them faded away.
☎️ Famous Boards and Dial-Up Services
- 1973 Community Memory puts a public computer terminal in a record store in Berkeley, California. Anyone can walk up and post a notice.
- 1978 CBBS in Chicago becomes the first dial-up bulletin board. Thousands of hobby boards follow.
- 1979 CompuServe and The Source open to home users. They are big paid services with news, email, and chat rooms.
- 1984 FidoNet links separate boards together. Boards call each other at night to pass messages along, so a note can cross the country.
- 1985 The WELL opens in California and becomes one of the best-known online communities. Quantum Link starts for Commodore 64 owners and later becomes America Online.
- 1986 The Cleveland Free-Net gives a whole city free dial-up access to community information.
🌐 Meanwhile, on the Networks
- 1973 PLATO, a teaching system at the University of Illinois, adds message boards called Notes and a chat program called Talkomatic.
- 1975 MsgGroup becomes the first ARPANET mailing list. A list for science fiction fans, SF-Lovers, soon becomes a favorite.
- 1978 MUD, the first online multi-player adventure world, starts at the University of Essex in England.
- 1980 Usenet begins sharing "newsgroups" between Duke University and the University of North Carolina. It grows into a worldwide set of discussion boards on every topic.
- 1988 Internet Relay Chat (IRC) is created in Finland, letting people around the world type to each other live.