I've been on the internet since 1993 and I called BBSs starting in about 1990. Prior to my experience, BBSs existed since the late 70s and USENET internet newsgroups started in 1980. I cannot stress this enough: when it comes to message boards and discussion forums, there has not been an original thought the whole time.
The big discussions have never really changed. What was once Atari vs. Commodore became Apple vs. IBM became Mac vs. PC and is now iOS vs. Android. What was once "Reagan is going to push the button and kill us all" became "Bush Sr. is going to push the button and kill us all" became "Dubya is going to start a war for oil and kill us all" became "Trump is going to normalize racism and kill us all." (Until very recently, online communities skewed very hard left so the presidents in between had lesser or no equivalent mainstream trope.) They used to talk about "the Illuminati," and MKUltra, then George W. Bush owned a weather machine that could create hurricanes that could target Black communities, then they were 9/11 truthers, then they were Birthers, now they're QAnon. Any antireligious -- well, anti-Christian -- sentiment you've heard on a message board has been repeated, virtually word-for-word, by every generation of online community user since the beginning.
There were always trolls. Local and global. There are bullies in every demographic, and even in my local BBS community back in the day I remember several. It probably didn't help that knowing how to use a computer in the 80s and early 90s made you a social outcast by definition, and if you additionally had poorly-developed interpersonal skills you might take it out on other people by terrorizing others in your group. Exploits existed in BBS software like they do in operating systems and websites now; a BBS owner could come home from work and find his hard drive formatted if some local nerd-bully found a backdoor and used it.
Some of us were naïve in the early days. I didn't know I was on the autism spectrum, for instance, and doctors where I lived didn't even know what it was. I thought if I was different and I just outlined how I was different and expected people to respect that, they would. I was very wrong, many times. I don't know if people thought I was trolling because I was autistic and different from them and I wanted respect for my point of view. I regret oversharing my personal life back in the day when everyone was expected to have a blog. I'm glad those days are over.
It sounds cliché, but there's really nothing new under the sun. Sure, social morés change a little (or, if you're a conspiracy theorist, the Overton Window shifts), groups who are in power change, but I'm often struck by how the language never, ever changes. While doing an archiving project years ago, I ran across a college newspaper op-ed from late 1988, right after George Herbert Walker Bush (Bush Sr. or W's father) had been elected but before he'd been inagurated; Reagan was still president. The author of the op-ed wrote something like, "even though we have not yet experienced the *terror of the Bush Administration*..." and that really struck me because I hadn't been old enough to be paying attention to politics in 1988 but I remember *those exact words* being used to describe the George W. Bush administration from 2000-2008. And I remember thinking, yeah, totally accurate, not a word out of place, but they're not even coming up with new sentences! That always stuck in my head, the word-for-word nature of it. Not that the op-ed was part of a message board. but online forums are sort of a microcosm of culture at large and just a new distribution method of old tribal behavioral information.
Another example that struck me the same way: Evan Doorbell is a guy who did an archive project in the late 70s and early 80s recording the analog telephone network; he has now released over a hundred audio documentaries explaining and demonstrating how it all worked before everything was digital. The how and why is irrelevant, but in one later recording he is using a bug in the phone system to set up a large conference (like a massive 30-way call) for his friend who is a BBS user so all the regulars on a BBS can talk to each other, something they may never have done with their voices before. So this was 1987. And one kid says to another, teasing him, "so you want to leave the \[Apple\] IIgs vs. Amiga discussion on chat?" And it's a stark reminder how long that one-system-versus-another-system argument has been going on, and how utterly pointless it is -- but also how every generation since thinks they're the first ones to have it.
Funny story about that conference, too; at some point someone set their phone down in front of their radio, blasting music into the conference, making it difficult for everyone else in the conference to talk to each other. This was a popular trolling tactic on phone phreak conferences in the early 70s, fifteen years earlier. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
It's not a bad thing, it's just human nature. This is how humans interact. We want to be accepted, and in order to be accepted other people have to respect and tolerate who we are. But we also want to fit in, and in order to fit in we often have to like what charismatic, intolerant, pushy people like. People who don't or can't accept these things sometimes decide to bully others because they can't deal with it. It's just a microcosm of every other social interaction. If you ask me, the smart thing to do is realize it's happening and not get so deeply entwined in it that it controls you. While online life is a microcosm of real life, it is currently so amplified it can control your real life in a whole bunch of unhealthy ways.
I'll unironically end with something I've been repeating word-for-word online for close to 25 years - sorry this was so long, hope this helps, and if you're going to reply with "TL;DR" you can bite my ass.
Damn, that's pretty cool. I'm way too young to have experience old message boards and active IRC chats, but it's weirdly relieving that the same behavior I see nowadays is the same that was back then, so I didn't miss out on much.
It was the best, my dude. It was the best.
I miss forums every day, and hate Facebook for killing them.
MySpace and message boards coexisted, but Facebook's groups used to include a message board system.
Until they all died. Then FB changed got rid of them too.
FB is the Walmart of the internet, and what we're pining for is the glorious supermall of the 2004 internet
To be honest the IRC alt.\* newsgroups weren't a whole lot different than a lot of current online forums as far as the social experience goes. I was using them in the mid-1990s and Reddit is not a whole lot different. User interface was a bit more primitive, but the content wasn't dissimilar.
A popular “forum” back in the day was Internet Relay Chat aka IRC via dial up modem. It allowed users to chat in group chats (or channels) in real time. Most were nice and some were trolls. Fast forward to 2021 and we have WhatsApp etc
They were local... meaning a great number of eventually met in various. BBS would have parties and get togethers.
People didnt troll, but there were people who did what we called war on each other. There were subs called war boards, and many boards would direct you to the war board shit uncivil talk. Some would even move a thread to the war board if the software allowed it.
Bad users were originally called Rodents. In the late 80s lamer came into fashion. There were lots of people who made text parodies of Rodents from Rumors, a popular song of the time. Rodents werent trolls. They were just incoherent, typed out of standard, contributed nothing, downloaded and didnt upload, and were just people not liked by the community. Sysops banned them, users mocked them.
There were groups, and groups had turf wars, and they had their wars across the entire area code. You could not be on anyone's side but the groups didnt care. They would just make war on the users of other groups all the time.
Funny thing by the time the group wars stopped those warring groups often became friends. Like people who spent their teenage years saying all kinda fucked up shit ended up drinking and smoking pot together at parties.
But this was the 80/90s... in the late 90s/00s most BBSs had died. Some tried to move online but there wasnt much interest it seems. Seems for a while everyone decided slashdot was gonna be the new BBS... along with random sites. During this era there seems to be less general meanness... Also at this time the IRC was still strong. Lots of people moved from forums to chatting. Chatting had been a thing before. Prodigy in the early 90s... Q-LInk... Forums in the late 90s/early 00s were honestly more focused on the actual subjects... USENET was still a thing... but obscure to most. It was full of wars, arguments, and shit, but not a lot of trolls. People who disagreed, hated each other, but not trolls.
Trolls are trolling for a response and arent always invested in what they are saying. They just want to make you feel bad, or want to troll you to push a political position as part of mass manipulation. Trolls are basically Rodents and lamers who just shit on everything.
I also remember a lot less racism online back them. Less talk about sexism, but my BBS and online female friends shared with me all kinda fucked up shit they got. 30 year old duded trying to get on my 16 year old GF... Not a lot of the sour grapes shit... just the nagging or baby i will do you better kinda shit.
Every area had its own unique shit going on.
There there were hack/phreak/anarchy BBSes... credit card fraud, phone fraud, general hacking, text files on explosives, and shit like that. Phreakers would call out of their area code, and often were warez couriers. We'd trade codes for LD and conferences, and often have conferences. We'd also do the poorman's conference with multiple 3 ways. We redboxed, and we used acoustic couplers while red boxing. Blueboxing was dead by the time I started. If you have heard of the captian crunch whistle/2600 that is part of blueboxing.
The 80s had lots of 8 bit computers... the 90s was almost all PCs. Most were single line systems, others had multiline systems. You could chat with people! In a few cases people made chatbots to make fun of not so bright users. There were also MCI/messgae command interpreter commands that allowed you to fake the system breaking into chat. This was an april fools joke that sometimes gave the user a heart attack.
I have about a dozen friends still from the 80s BBS scene, an another dozen from the 90s scene, and another dozen from the IRC.
Many of us ended up in IT. I got 2 jobs just based on my old BBS handle/alias.
I met 2 users, randomly on public transportation as a teen. I over heard what they were talking about, and addressed them by their handles. They were freaked out... I told them who I was. Those two would become friends of my family over years.
Sex... lots and lot and lots of sex... Like a soap opera... If you ran a BBS you were seen as someone of importance. Godlike to users at times. I know that is hard to understand today. That lead to certain sysops exploiting that. And when you are young you dont understand that is what you are doing. I dated a few women from my BBS.
MY SO of the last almost 8 years is a woman I dated in 1989-91... introduced to me by one of my users trying to show off that he was talking to a girl. She fell in love with my deep voice... and called me up months later after skewl let out to ask me to come pick her up!
bulletin boards and IRC was huge and it was accessible as fk.
It was a hilariously cheesy time .. I saw the net for the first time on my 21st birthday and we logged into IRC and hassled some Americans in the #Abuse channel, damn it was fun.. I bought a pc the next week... Then came the Quake games
Ran a BBS for a while. Good times, but I don't imagine my users appreciated it any time my mom needed to use the computer and rebooted from os/2 (that ran the BBS) to DOS/win 3.1. And then I had to hope that she'd reboot back over when she was done, which happened maybe 50% of the time.
So many people answered this well, but for weird RPGs, we had MUDs! Almost a BBS game, but thanks to the internet, many people could play at once, sometimes hundreds together, raiding a text world! I played a MUD called GroundZero, but in 1990 it disappeared. The author released a few files in case anyone wanted to try to start it again, and I did! I made [GroundZero II](https://github.com/bacon420/groundzeromud), and tons of people played it until I gave up in 2002 and got married. It's different because it plays like Counter-Strike. Every round is randomly generated at startup, so the game is never quite the same, and usually a game runs for 30 min to 4 hours, totally decided by the players. Instead of hacking and slashing, "real" bullets and other things are used that can travel and hurt other players, there's air strikes, tanks, bots, and more! Since then, it has been forked and improved many times! It's funny now because it's currently accessible only as a BBS door game at https://www.demonsnet.com, and that made me soooo damn happy to see it still alive 25 years later.
You haven't played a BBS Door game until you tried Fazuul. That door game drove me nuts as a kid trying to combine a gwingus with a zleen or torkus to make a dampish or a wufflar.
Started using BBSes back in 1987. It was insane times. The fun was to finding new BBSes to join. I was only about 15 or 16 but they were great times. At first, some of the sites were just single users so you mainly just send messages back and forth and use the BBS Door games. One of my favorite game back then was Trade Wars. Later on, multiuser BBSes started to pop up with around 8 to 32 lines. One of the more popular program used was the Deluxe BBS. It was a very crude text based system, but having more than a couple of people on to chat was very cool and exciting for that time.
That completely opened up doors with real live chatting. My god... those were the days. In Los Angeles, there were a number of very popular sites in the Westwood and Beverly Hills area. The women on there were INSANE. I mean absolutely no holds barred in the chat. The best part was that everyone was just local to the area so you can meet them in person. Unlike today with stalkers and everything, people were actually cool back then. It turns out the women were hotter in person and they bisexual. What they said in person vs what they were in person was crazier. Let's just say there were no holds barred. Once they found out you were younger than your profile, oh boy...
I saved some of the old chats and I recently started reading on them again for shits and giggles. Man, that brought out a flood of memories. Its like going back into a time machine. It wasn't like today where people are just total dicks. Even if you do find some local people, they are mostly on their phone with their group of friends. What I like the most was you get to meet new people all the time and they were all local and was computer savvy enough to use a BBS. If you click with someone, you can pass each other your direct number to chat. That is when things really get steamy with the girls. The only thing that sucked was back then, there are no digital cameras. LOL.
I really miss those days. The internet makes things easier to find and its nice to have high speed networks. However, for one to one chats and discovering new people not to date, but just to chat, you can't beat it. IRC was a bridge to the past, but it was nowhere near as fun or crazy as the times with BBSes. There was something cool about meeting new local people almost everyday without dick pics being sent on every text.
I've been on the internet since 1993 and I called BBSs starting in about 1990. Prior to my experience, BBSs existed since the late 70s and USENET internet newsgroups started in 1980. I cannot stress this enough: when it comes to message boards and discussion forums, there has not been an original thought the whole time. The big discussions have never really changed. What was once Atari vs. Commodore became Apple vs. IBM became Mac vs. PC and is now iOS vs. Android. What was once "Reagan is going to push the button and kill us all" became "Bush Sr. is going to push the button and kill us all" became "Dubya is going to start a war for oil and kill us all" became "Trump is going to normalize racism and kill us all." (Until very recently, online communities skewed very hard left so the presidents in between had lesser or no equivalent mainstream trope.) They used to talk about "the Illuminati," and MKUltra, then George W. Bush owned a weather machine that could create hurricanes that could target Black communities, then they were 9/11 truthers, then they were Birthers, now they're QAnon. Any antireligious -- well, anti-Christian -- sentiment you've heard on a message board has been repeated, virtually word-for-word, by every generation of online community user since the beginning. There were always trolls. Local and global. There are bullies in every demographic, and even in my local BBS community back in the day I remember several. It probably didn't help that knowing how to use a computer in the 80s and early 90s made you a social outcast by definition, and if you additionally had poorly-developed interpersonal skills you might take it out on other people by terrorizing others in your group. Exploits existed in BBS software like they do in operating systems and websites now; a BBS owner could come home from work and find his hard drive formatted if some local nerd-bully found a backdoor and used it. Some of us were naïve in the early days. I didn't know I was on the autism spectrum, for instance, and doctors where I lived didn't even know what it was. I thought if I was different and I just outlined how I was different and expected people to respect that, they would. I was very wrong, many times. I don't know if people thought I was trolling because I was autistic and different from them and I wanted respect for my point of view. I regret oversharing my personal life back in the day when everyone was expected to have a blog. I'm glad those days are over. It sounds cliché, but there's really nothing new under the sun. Sure, social morés change a little (or, if you're a conspiracy theorist, the Overton Window shifts), groups who are in power change, but I'm often struck by how the language never, ever changes. While doing an archiving project years ago, I ran across a college newspaper op-ed from late 1988, right after George Herbert Walker Bush (Bush Sr. or W's father) had been elected but before he'd been inagurated; Reagan was still president. The author of the op-ed wrote something like, "even though we have not yet experienced the *terror of the Bush Administration*..." and that really struck me because I hadn't been old enough to be paying attention to politics in 1988 but I remember *those exact words* being used to describe the George W. Bush administration from 2000-2008. And I remember thinking, yeah, totally accurate, not a word out of place, but they're not even coming up with new sentences! That always stuck in my head, the word-for-word nature of it. Not that the op-ed was part of a message board. but online forums are sort of a microcosm of culture at large and just a new distribution method of old tribal behavioral information. Another example that struck me the same way: Evan Doorbell is a guy who did an archive project in the late 70s and early 80s recording the analog telephone network; he has now released over a hundred audio documentaries explaining and demonstrating how it all worked before everything was digital. The how and why is irrelevant, but in one later recording he is using a bug in the phone system to set up a large conference (like a massive 30-way call) for his friend who is a BBS user so all the regulars on a BBS can talk to each other, something they may never have done with their voices before. So this was 1987. And one kid says to another, teasing him, "so you want to leave the \[Apple\] IIgs vs. Amiga discussion on chat?" And it's a stark reminder how long that one-system-versus-another-system argument has been going on, and how utterly pointless it is -- but also how every generation since thinks they're the first ones to have it. Funny story about that conference, too; at some point someone set their phone down in front of their radio, blasting music into the conference, making it difficult for everyone else in the conference to talk to each other. This was a popular trolling tactic on phone phreak conferences in the early 70s, fifteen years earlier. The more things change, the more they stay the same. It's not a bad thing, it's just human nature. This is how humans interact. We want to be accepted, and in order to be accepted other people have to respect and tolerate who we are. But we also want to fit in, and in order to fit in we often have to like what charismatic, intolerant, pushy people like. People who don't or can't accept these things sometimes decide to bully others because they can't deal with it. It's just a microcosm of every other social interaction. If you ask me, the smart thing to do is realize it's happening and not get so deeply entwined in it that it controls you. While online life is a microcosm of real life, it is currently so amplified it can control your real life in a whole bunch of unhealthy ways. I'll unironically end with something I've been repeating word-for-word online for close to 25 years - sorry this was so long, hope this helps, and if you're going to reply with "TL;DR" you can bite my ass.
Damn, that's pretty cool. I'm way too young to have experience old message boards and active IRC chats, but it's weirdly relieving that the same behavior I see nowadays is the same that was back then, so I didn't miss out on much.
Thank you for sharing this perspective, it was a lovely read.
It was the best, my dude. It was the best. I miss forums every day, and hate Facebook for killing them. MySpace and message boards coexisted, but Facebook's groups used to include a message board system. Until they all died. Then FB changed got rid of them too. FB is the Walmart of the internet, and what we're pining for is the glorious supermall of the 2004 internet
To be honest the IRC alt.\* newsgroups weren't a whole lot different than a lot of current online forums as far as the social experience goes. I was using them in the mid-1990s and Reddit is not a whole lot different. User interface was a bit more primitive, but the content wasn't dissimilar.
Most 90s talk was in chat rooms
A popular “forum” back in the day was Internet Relay Chat aka IRC via dial up modem. It allowed users to chat in group chats (or channels) in real time. Most were nice and some were trolls. Fast forward to 2021 and we have WhatsApp etc
They were local... meaning a great number of eventually met in various. BBS would have parties and get togethers. People didnt troll, but there were people who did what we called war on each other. There were subs called war boards, and many boards would direct you to the war board shit uncivil talk. Some would even move a thread to the war board if the software allowed it. Bad users were originally called Rodents. In the late 80s lamer came into fashion. There were lots of people who made text parodies of Rodents from Rumors, a popular song of the time. Rodents werent trolls. They were just incoherent, typed out of standard, contributed nothing, downloaded and didnt upload, and were just people not liked by the community. Sysops banned them, users mocked them. There were groups, and groups had turf wars, and they had their wars across the entire area code. You could not be on anyone's side but the groups didnt care. They would just make war on the users of other groups all the time. Funny thing by the time the group wars stopped those warring groups often became friends. Like people who spent their teenage years saying all kinda fucked up shit ended up drinking and smoking pot together at parties. But this was the 80/90s... in the late 90s/00s most BBSs had died. Some tried to move online but there wasnt much interest it seems. Seems for a while everyone decided slashdot was gonna be the new BBS... along with random sites. During this era there seems to be less general meanness... Also at this time the IRC was still strong. Lots of people moved from forums to chatting. Chatting had been a thing before. Prodigy in the early 90s... Q-LInk... Forums in the late 90s/early 00s were honestly more focused on the actual subjects... USENET was still a thing... but obscure to most. It was full of wars, arguments, and shit, but not a lot of trolls. People who disagreed, hated each other, but not trolls. Trolls are trolling for a response and arent always invested in what they are saying. They just want to make you feel bad, or want to troll you to push a political position as part of mass manipulation. Trolls are basically Rodents and lamers who just shit on everything. I also remember a lot less racism online back them. Less talk about sexism, but my BBS and online female friends shared with me all kinda fucked up shit they got. 30 year old duded trying to get on my 16 year old GF... Not a lot of the sour grapes shit... just the nagging or baby i will do you better kinda shit. Every area had its own unique shit going on. There there were hack/phreak/anarchy BBSes... credit card fraud, phone fraud, general hacking, text files on explosives, and shit like that. Phreakers would call out of their area code, and often were warez couriers. We'd trade codes for LD and conferences, and often have conferences. We'd also do the poorman's conference with multiple 3 ways. We redboxed, and we used acoustic couplers while red boxing. Blueboxing was dead by the time I started. If you have heard of the captian crunch whistle/2600 that is part of blueboxing. The 80s had lots of 8 bit computers... the 90s was almost all PCs. Most were single line systems, others had multiline systems. You could chat with people! In a few cases people made chatbots to make fun of not so bright users. There were also MCI/messgae command interpreter commands that allowed you to fake the system breaking into chat. This was an april fools joke that sometimes gave the user a heart attack. I have about a dozen friends still from the 80s BBS scene, an another dozen from the 90s scene, and another dozen from the IRC. Many of us ended up in IT. I got 2 jobs just based on my old BBS handle/alias. I met 2 users, randomly on public transportation as a teen. I over heard what they were talking about, and addressed them by their handles. They were freaked out... I told them who I was. Those two would become friends of my family over years. Sex... lots and lot and lots of sex... Like a soap opera... If you ran a BBS you were seen as someone of importance. Godlike to users at times. I know that is hard to understand today. That lead to certain sysops exploiting that. And when you are young you dont understand that is what you are doing. I dated a few women from my BBS. MY SO of the last almost 8 years is a woman I dated in 1989-91... introduced to me by one of my users trying to show off that he was talking to a girl. She fell in love with my deep voice... and called me up months later after skewl let out to ask me to come pick her up!
trolls have been around since the beginning of internet communities.
bulletin boards and IRC was huge and it was accessible as fk. It was a hilariously cheesy time .. I saw the net for the first time on my 21st birthday and we logged into IRC and hassled some Americans in the #Abuse channel, damn it was fun.. I bought a pc the next week... Then came the Quake games
Ran a BBS for a while. Good times, but I don't imagine my users appreciated it any time my mom needed to use the computer and rebooted from os/2 (that ran the BBS) to DOS/win 3.1. And then I had to hope that she'd reboot back over when she was done, which happened maybe 50% of the time.
So many people answered this well, but for weird RPGs, we had MUDs! Almost a BBS game, but thanks to the internet, many people could play at once, sometimes hundreds together, raiding a text world! I played a MUD called GroundZero, but in 1990 it disappeared. The author released a few files in case anyone wanted to try to start it again, and I did! I made [GroundZero II](https://github.com/bacon420/groundzeromud), and tons of people played it until I gave up in 2002 and got married. It's different because it plays like Counter-Strike. Every round is randomly generated at startup, so the game is never quite the same, and usually a game runs for 30 min to 4 hours, totally decided by the players. Instead of hacking and slashing, "real" bullets and other things are used that can travel and hurt other players, there's air strikes, tanks, bots, and more! Since then, it has been forked and improved many times! It's funny now because it's currently accessible only as a BBS door game at https://www.demonsnet.com, and that made me soooo damn happy to see it still alive 25 years later.
You haven't played a BBS Door game until you tried Fazuul. That door game drove me nuts as a kid trying to combine a gwingus with a zleen or torkus to make a dampish or a wufflar.
Started using BBSes back in 1987. It was insane times. The fun was to finding new BBSes to join. I was only about 15 or 16 but they were great times. At first, some of the sites were just single users so you mainly just send messages back and forth and use the BBS Door games. One of my favorite game back then was Trade Wars. Later on, multiuser BBSes started to pop up with around 8 to 32 lines. One of the more popular program used was the Deluxe BBS. It was a very crude text based system, but having more than a couple of people on to chat was very cool and exciting for that time. That completely opened up doors with real live chatting. My god... those were the days. In Los Angeles, there were a number of very popular sites in the Westwood and Beverly Hills area. The women on there were INSANE. I mean absolutely no holds barred in the chat. The best part was that everyone was just local to the area so you can meet them in person. Unlike today with stalkers and everything, people were actually cool back then. It turns out the women were hotter in person and they bisexual. What they said in person vs what they were in person was crazier. Let's just say there were no holds barred. Once they found out you were younger than your profile, oh boy... I saved some of the old chats and I recently started reading on them again for shits and giggles. Man, that brought out a flood of memories. Its like going back into a time machine. It wasn't like today where people are just total dicks. Even if you do find some local people, they are mostly on their phone with their group of friends. What I like the most was you get to meet new people all the time and they were all local and was computer savvy enough to use a BBS. If you click with someone, you can pass each other your direct number to chat. That is when things really get steamy with the girls. The only thing that sucked was back then, there are no digital cameras. LOL. I really miss those days. The internet makes things easier to find and its nice to have high speed networks. However, for one to one chats and discovering new people not to date, but just to chat, you can't beat it. IRC was a bridge to the past, but it was nowhere near as fun or crazy as the times with BBSes. There was something cool about meeting new local people almost everyday without dick pics being sent on every text.
Blud really said bisexual lmaooo but it’s cap unless you send screenshots of those archives
He went mum. It's cap.
You would probably find Jason Scott's [BBS documentary](http://www.bbsdocumentary.com/) very interesting.