In the alcove on the right, I think I'm seeing 66-blocks, breaking out the phone lines that must be routed to each machine. Two blocks stacked, each with a fanout of wire on the right side.
The blur does interesting things.
The black cable underneath looked like the shadow of an oval frame
https://nitter.privacyredirect.com/ScottApogee/status/159372... Scott Miller - Apogee/3D Realms Founder :
>BBS's (bulletin board systems) were the backbone of the online world before the Internet came along in 1995. Apogee teamed up with Dan Linton's BBS, called Software Creations, and we poured $200k+ into it to grow it to nearly 140 call-in nodes with a T3 (high bandwidth) line.
maybe i'm a bot.
anyway i used to call into BBSs back in the early 90s and the thing I'm remembering is that they survived mostly on donations, and now that I am seeing the infrastructure that supported those systems and recalling the price of hardware back then I'm starting to second guess everything I thought I knew.
Top comment about this photo is ( and the poster) Scott Miller - Apogee/3D Realms Founder @ScottApogee BBS's (bulletin board systems) were the backbone of the online world before the Internet came along in 1995. Apogee teamed up with Dan Linton's BBS, called Software Creations, and we poured $200k+ into it to grow it to nearly 140 call-in nodes with a T3 (high bandwidth) line.
I miss BBSs and that's why I featured them in the story of my sci-fi game! If you are interested: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3040110/Outsider/
I was user #12 on the Bloom County BBS and, eventually, got the coveted sysop perms.
It felt far more of an "adult" accomplishment than (much later) when I got my driver's license.
Edit: Ugh... I'm gonna have to go back to floppy images to find it. There's a "MUBBS" for Mac from 1992 showing up in search engine results but that's not the one I'm thinking of. It was more like 1989 or 1990.
“as modems got faster, supporting 16 modems on a single machine became impossible, and it was often cheaper to buy a new commodity desktop PC rather than a much more expensive machine with a 16-port serial card capable of handling the IO.”
I knew a couple of local DOS BBSes that ran multiple lines with PCBoard under DESQview.
PRI was a huge step. The "individual modem" days were a mess. Each modem had a serial cable, phone line, and power brick. I remember doing some maintenance in one of the POPs. There were at least 100 modems, stacked on a cheap plastic shelving unit. The shelving unit was sagging from the weight and heat of all the modems.
This early POP was haphazardly built, so no cable management. I remember a river of phone cables coming out of the wall. The power bricks were also crazy. We had power strips 2 or 3 levels deep, making it a hazard to even get behind the rack without tripping on something.
[^1]: e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diversi-Dial
They were able to set up a 7 x 300baud modems in real-time chat system on an Apple ][ . The original marketing called it a CB (Citizens Band) Simulator. They were able to run up to 1200baud, but I never saw one of those functioning.
As if 7 people chatting through a single 6502 wasn't impressive enough, many of them dedicated one or two of their lines to interlinking with other D-dials.
Talk about an esoteric memory.
- https://www.ddial.com/ - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diversi-Dial
Our ddial was a few towns away so we bought a line in the exchange in between that would forward to the ddial. This way we would not pay a bunch on long distance calls.
Also, it was unusual at the time for a local phone company to receive a request for 25 lines (or more) to be installed in the basement of a residence. They would generally push back thinking you were running a bookie operation or some such.
Side note: virtual 8086 mode was protected mode, or rather, implied protected mode. A task could run in virtual 8086 mode where to the task it was (mostly) looking like it was running in real mode, when in actuality the kernel was running in full protected mode.
Note that the "kernel" was never DOS. It could often actually be a so called "memory manager", like EMM386, and the actual DOS OS (the entire thing, including apps, not just the DOS "kernel") would run as a sole vm86 task, without any other tasks. The memory manager was then serving DOS with a lot of the 386 32 bit goodness through a straw, effectively.
It's very bizarre from today's (or even back then's) OS standards, and evolved that way because compatibility.
I don't recall DESQview to be all that crashy. I was aware of a number multi-line BBSes that used it (just in the 416). Some BBS software called out its use specifically:
* https://www.synchro.net/docs/multnode_config.html
* http://software.bbsdocumentary.com/IBM/DOS/OMEGA/
Also, a comment from someone whose uncle co-founded the company Quarterdeck:
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29396561#unv_29400530
Also, also, if anyone wants to simulate the old-school DESQview experience, perhaps try out "twin":
* https://opensource.com/article/20/1/multiple-consoles-twin
ASCII windows may not have been everyone's cup of tea but I loved it.
I couldn’t afford a second machine in those days and having to sacrifice my one and only PC for the full-time BBS wasn’t fun :)
I remember running Win3.11 with-in a DESQview window (and IIRC there was a full-screen mode as well).
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A 286 used around 3 Watts of power, while a current generation PC PCU uses upwards of 150 W. That's a factor of fifty. That's not even factoring in the GPU's, which these computers would have lacked.
This room was neither quiet or cool. While the CPU's were comparatively low power back then, all the other stuff (modems in particular) would have put out a lot more heat than their modern equivalents. However, this room could realistically have been in somebody's residential home basement without any exotic A/C measures. Maybe a wall-mounted unit or two. It would not have pumped out nearly as much heat or consumed as much power as modern gear of equivalent volume.
An IBM AT was capable of consuming nearly 200W [1]. Of course a typical machine would not consume as much, because it did not have its RAM and disk slots maxed out. The CPU indeed consumed around 3W, and normally even lacked a radiator.
A modern PC can consume large amounts of power, mostly determined by the appetites of the GPU. But here is plenty of desktop CPUs with 65W and even 45W TDP, and a typical recent Intel or AMD CPU would consume 3-5W when idle. A quite powerful ARM A7 based system, such as an Orange Pi 5, would draw < 15W under maximum load, likely providing more compute and I/O than that whole room on the photo.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Personal_Computer_AT#Power...
The pictured room is not full of high-performance computing machines, even for the day. (HPC was ruled by mainframes back then, although if this picture was taken well into the obsolescence of the room, high-end workstations (e.g. Silicon Graphics and Sun) may have been gaining on them for some applications.) This room was built for getting a couple hundred callers networked into a BBS where they could access the same files, text chat, and perhaps even MUD a little. This was a fundamentally different beast.
My first modem was a Supra 2400 baud, then thinking about all the speed I would have with my new 56.6. My first hard drive was a 20 meg, new it was $320. 20 megs $320 kids, imagine that.
That was for my wonderful brand new Amiga 500. Those were the days.
There were even hypervisors available, such as VM/386:
I touch on similar point of view discussing digital audio work I do for fun. I use CSound, which I've heard described as "assembly language for audio", and I think that's accurate.
Anyway, when I first, FIRST started, and got a tiny bit familiar, I thought "Wow, I can do anything!" but quickly realized I was also responsible for everything. No free lunch.
And these usually ran quite a few lines per box, sometimes they would use external racks of modems, but I'm not seeing that here so maybe these were using internal modem cards, so maybe 6 per box, but if they were using external modems it could easily be 12 or more, with the PC cards hosting multiple serial ports, 4, 6 or even 8 per card.
Typically a card would have a single large connector at the back and then a pigtail with a DB9 or DB25 (yes, I know) for every modem.
Access to knowledge, equipment, and budget varied dramatically prior to widespread internet access. Someone setting up a BBS might not even know about multi-line modem cards or serial port expansions. Even if they knew about them they may not have been able to reasonably obtain them. Or they may have been operating on donations, surplus, or discount equipment. Or they simply may not have had the luxury of time to research all of that as user demand meant they were too busy laying tracks in front of the train.
Many BBSes ran on 1-2 lines per PC because that's what they understood how to build or the hardware they had access to. You might be surprised at just how many lines some BBSes setup this way had!
People forget there was a time that anything outside the standard PC was extremely expensive, often had flaky or nonexistent software support, locked you into a fly-by-night vendor that might go out of business tomorrow, was only available via a distributor who wanted to have you talk to a "sales consultant" before they'd sell you something, etc. Many many people chose sub-optimal implementations because it was an off-the-shelf PC they could replace at any time with trivially simple software requiring no special CONFIG.SYS drivers or TSRs to fiddle with. Especially if you'd ever been burned previously.
That said, I have no idea how a multi-node BBS would work, in terms of keeping state synchronized.
Earlier: one PC per user, shared file system using a Novell network. Later: multitasking OS (Desqview, OS/2) or BBS software that natively supported multiple users (like MajorBBS.)
I ran a BBS on an Amiga for a while. The OS natively supported multitasking, but I only had one line. At least I could log in the same time as a user...
That's quite the assumption.
There were a lot of different BBS hosting programs. They wildly varied in what they supported and how they were implemented. Further even within a given piece of software the ways you could configure them and the consequences also varied. Even if a given software supported concurrent users on a single PC for various reasons a BBS might choose not to host that way.
Assuming that the parent commenter is right and that they are using internal line cards, I wonder if the external modems were being added to support higher speeds.
However, the fact that we can see at least 2 (but I think four) 66 blocks means they had 50 to 100 phone lines for the machines visible, which would make sense that the external modems are the primary connection and no internal modems are being used, based on the number of modems visible and the fact that each 66 block can handle 25 lines.
After those 2 weeks, my parents decided to get me my own phone line in my room. That's also week I started running my own BBS. I ran it for several years.
Those were strange and interesting times.
That seems odd to me, too, because before DOS and the Commodore 64/Apple ][ era, multi-user systems were everywhere.
Not just mainframes and minicomputers, but there were many dozens of multi-user systems based on CP/M, MP/M, and other operating systems. Even Tandy had them.
The revolutionary part of the "personal computer" era was that it was your "personal" computer. You finally didn't have to share it with anyone.
It wasn't as secure or as easy, but you could certainly do multi-user systems without protected mode and within very small RAM amounts.
Boardwatch was the magazine for BBS ( I do not know of any others)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boardwatch
Some all? on internet archive https://archive.org/details/boardwatchmagazine I recall buyingthe magazine back inthe day...
https://web.archive.org/web/20220207120422/https://rachelbyt...
I remember dialing up to a BBS in the area in 1990 that had 4 phone lines. That was amazing at the time when most BBS only had 1 line.
But I do remember downloading text files FILE.IDZ about other BBS, and reading some magazines that mentioned other BBS systems that had 32 and more phone lines but you had to pay. That seemed like it was just on another level in another part of the world that seemed like fantasy compared to the area I was in.
https://groups.google.com/g/bit.listserv.games-l/c/1tg85kGBH...
Wouldn't mind hearing war stories from the cdrom.com guys as well.
Also thinking it's a lot environmental easier to host a BBS than a Discord server.
My first thought was that this was built someone who clearly cared about the system they were running.
You can have a second computer once you've shown you know how to use the first one.
-- Paul Barham, quoted in the COST paper
IBM had a network that ran over phone cords that were daisycbained from one node to the next.
I never worked with DOS BBS systems, so I can't say about this photo specifically, but the ones I did work with had between one and four dialup modems hooked up to each machine, depending on its capabilities. They did "networking" through a store-and-forward messaging system. It wasn't networking as we'd recognize it today.
She had no idea who these people were or why they were upset. I don’t think I copped to it, it was not an easy thing to explain but I did not do that again.
Some BBS servers also supported multiple instances by connecting to a master server, which supplied dynamic content such as chat, forum messages and e-mails or door game data to all of the other machines. In large markets a BBS having dozens of lines was not uncommon.
Definitely in the "wow, cool, they got to wrangle all of that" camp!
I remember dialing up to this BBS quite a bit, and I also remember downloading tons of demos from other BBSs that originally came from SCBBS!
Some more discussion then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30096565
There's a site called textfiles.com that's kind of a museum, and a documentary you can find on YouTube. There's stuff on archive.org too.
It wasn't actually that long of an era. The first modern BBS was probably CBBS in Chicago in 1978, though there's other claimants depending on how you define BBS. When the Internet started to go mainstream in the middle 1990s, the BBS scene died shockingly quickly. So it lasted a little under 20 years, probably 17 or 18.
The glory days of it were probably from about 1985 until 1995. By 1985 you started to have PCs and modems good enough to make it a pleasure to use and cheap enough (and with a used after-market) to achieve significant penetration and enable less wealthy and kids to get online. By 1995 the Internet was starting to kill it.
I read a lot of rosy stuff about how people behaved so much better back then, and some of that is BS. There were trolls, weirdos, creeps, racists, black hat hackers that would mess with you, and malware that would mess up your machine. There were flame wars and sectarian splits where a bunch of users on a BBS would leave for a different one. There was junk content, filler, and nasty stuff like CSAM around.
I would, however, say that the signal to noise ratio was a lot better than modern social media and the modern SEO-trashed web. The big difference is that these systems did not have algorithms biasing things in this direction. You didn't have an algorithmic feed preferentially surfacing the most idiotic or inflammatory content to get you to get angry about it and "maximize engagement." You didn't have algorithms incentivizing endless amounts of chum to game the rankings. It was easy to just ignore the trolls and morons and creeps and go for the good stuff.
Much of the same can be said of the early pre-socials pre-SEO web.
You also didn't have a lot of money involved, and while money can create productive incentives in a lot of areas it seems to create mostly perverse incentives in media, especially if the money is coming from advertisers rather than consumers of the media.
The original sin is really the time-on-site/time-on-app KPI. It is literally destroying civilization. I don't think that's much of an exaggeration.
All in all it was good times, and I miss the ethos and community and sense of discovery of it.
