For the past few months I’ve spent an incredible amount of time working on my own bulletin board system, or BBS. That’s right, a major project I’ve spent many days on has been my own implementation of an otherwise obsolete online communications method and it’s been one of the most fun things I’ve worked on in a while.
While I’ve written about them before, now would be as good a time as any to give a small primer on what a Bulletin Board System actually historically was and is today.
Before the internet was a thing in any real capacity, BBS’s were the way computer users got “online.” Starting in the late 70’s and growing in popularity through the 80’s and 90’s users would have their computers quite literally call other computers, connecting to the BBS’s running on those systems to post messages, upload and download files, and play games. Honestly it wasn’t to different from how we would grow to use the internet, especially when that was new to everyone.
The difference was that instead of all these things being accessible at any one time, like websites and online services are, with a Bulletin Board System you were connected to that one system. If you hung up and called another system, that would be a completely different experience, with its own set of users, files, games, etc. It was like being in another town away from your own because, in a sense, it was actually just that! Keep in mind this is a time when long distance calls cost, and cost quite a bit, so generally BBS usage was kept local, but in some cases you could and would call long distance to get access to a unique community or some special file or door game you had to have or play, and you (or someone somewhere) had to pay for that call!
Move to today. BBS’s are, quire simply, an anachronism. The internet, for all its good and bad, has taken over. With the rise of social media the idea of even personal websites, let alone isolated communications methods like forums or BBS’s seems practically archaic, and yet in an odd twist the Bulletin Board System scene thrives today because of the internet.
BBS’s today are connected to the internet just like any old server is – while many do offer dial up service most rely exclusively on using terminal programs over the internet to access them – usually Telnet or SSH connections. Once on, users get an experience quite similar to that one would have had back in the 80’s or 90’s, but with a modern twist of much better speeds, more intricate software running the back end of things, and other things you’d just have to experience to understand. With the right hardware one can use a computer from the 80’s, like my Commodore 128, to access these services over the internet, bringing these machines that could once only network over dial up connections into the modern broadband era!
It’s a pretty wild thing to experience honestly, and back in May I got bit by the “BBS Bug” once again, deciding I might want to not just visit them but start my own.
Enter Final Zone BBS. Originally started on a Raspberry Pi zero I was given, it now runs on that old Dell PowerEdge R310 server I own, sitting in my living room humming away day and night every day.
It’s running Synchronet, a very power BBS server solution, and one that is regularly updated and very actively developed. While a bit overwhelming at times, both as a new user and for me as a new sysop, as I’ve grown to understand it I’ve found the way it manages discussions, files, door programs and the like all to generally fit how I feel interaction with a BBS should be. It’s fast, organized, and logical. It also offers numerous ways to interact beyond a direct log in over a terminal program, but that’s stuff I’ll get to in the near future.
For now what’s important is that Final Zone exists, and has been running for a few months now. While it’s a bit of a ghost town at times, other times it has been quite lively. There are games to play, messages to read, message areas to post to and services to be used and enjoyed.
My goal is to build a little community away from the broader mess that is the world wide web, social media, and all its trends. A place where the conversation is what’s important and things can be appreciated for what they actually are, rather than what flavor-of-the-week value they have in the meme-polluted, emoji-filled, hashtag-ridden wastes of Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube.
I plan on publishing many follow up articles detailing what’s available to anyone who wishes to use the service. I dare say I may wind up with the best documented BBS on the internet by the time this is done, which would be pretty neat.
Time will tell on that, though, but for now, if you know how to use a terminal program then telnet in to finalzone.ddns.net and check things out.
More to come, as always.