wait, are you OP? or did you happen to find a high res version of the same paper-copy picture that OP supposedly was given 30 years ago and then scanned and then threw out. or did OP make it up? or is OP just a bot?
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.
In this picture it seems that all machines have a 3.5" floppy disk inserted. Maybe they had no hard drive and only booted from floppy and then ran software over the network?
A lot of network interface cards had a socket for an option ROM that would allow network boot, but you could definitely fit a client on a floppy and boot that way, too. Novell Netware server would be the mostly likely server for that vintage of rig and a Netware client fit easily on a floppy.
> It's possible they managed to do some rudimentary multitasking with DESQview (or worse...) and so supported two whole users with each box. Does that mean they had to be at least 386s to do protected mode? Or was it virtual 8086 mode? I (fortunately) have forgotten the finer points of how that stuff used to work. I DO remember how damn crashy a box became when you ran it "under DV". Constant system freezes. Yep.
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:
> do you think "wow, cool, they got to wrangle all of that", or do you think "OMG they had to wrangle all of that"?
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.
I am surprised by the assumption that each box could only handle one modem. I seem to remember that some DOS BBS packages could handle multiple modems/users concurrently and only needed multitasking operating systems for “door” programs. Am I misremembering?
A guy who was local to me, when I was a kid, wrote multi-user BBS system (called "MUBBS" originally-- I don't remember what the name was changed to later) in Turbo Pascal that had a preemptive multitasking loop running in x86 real mode to handle multiple lines simultaneously. The coolest part was the console was just a "line" so you could logon to the board and interact while somebody was on the phone, too. Most other DOS BBS packages were only available for the SYSOP or the caller individually.
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.
Even for a standard PC, you could buy a 16 port serial card and hook it up to 16 modems, either discreet devices or the dedicated ISP kit which might support dozens of incoming calls (possibly on a single bearer) via various means. Telebit netblazers and then ascend maxs were common in those days.
For sure. I knew people who ran multi-line BBS's on DOS PCs under DESQview, just like that (running Searchlight BBS, in my case). I know of a four line that was just using multiple external modems and non-standard IRQ's for COM3 and COM4 (since, by default, COM1/3 and COM2/4 share an IRQ).
MajorBBS could handle multiple lines on its own, but you had to handle ALL of the lines with one box. That meant a serial port interface like DigiBoard which provided some number (8 or 16 or more) of serial ports that you would connect to modems.
I remember DigiBoard from my early ISP days. We attempted to turn a mid 90's-era Linux system (Slackware) into a terminal server. The Linux drivers for DigiBoard weren't quite up to it so we wound up going with Telebit Netblazers, I think.
Portmasters were very popular. Later on the ISP I worked with moved on to Ascend boxes which had digital modems (T1 / PRI lines.)
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.
Does BBS still have a usage nowadays? I feel HN is not too different -- and actually offer less than a BBS -- back then there are a lot of goods on a large BBS. And it's easier to mix a pic with text, but I could be wrong.
Also thinking it's a lot environmental easier to host a BBS than a Discord server.
Office chair technology also has really advanced since then (looking at the chair on the picture, which is commonly seen near computers in photos of this era)
Those were the days. I still believe nothing replaces the camraderie of the small, local BBSs. The large ones were good too, but these tended to resemble the modern Internet forums a bit more.
The OS that was running on these is irrelevant, the important part is the BBS software.
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.
The OS was relevant if your BBS software was limited to a single simultaneous user, like many of the early DOS BBSes. The late 80's "PCBoard" BBSes I'm familiar with needed one PC per user, plus a file server with Netware.
Ok, but that's just the vehicle, it is the BBS software that does the works. And even in the 80's there were ways to run multiple instances of 'single user' BBSs on one box, for instance (dare I say it...) OS/2 and TV.
> It's a wild misunderstanding of how BBSes worked.
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.
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...
yes, most of them look like USRobotics Courier modems. Note that not all the machines have one, and some have two.
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.
I think you're right and that there were only two modems connected to the boxes so that's just the built in serial ports, here is another copy of the same picture by someone that apparently funded the board with some details:
Yes, you're right, I totally missed them. Those look like USR 'Courier' modems but the resolution is really crappy so hard to be sure and it looks like there are multiple types. There might still be modems in the boxes themselves as well. It doesn't look like more than two modems per box if there isn't.
I remember thinking that I would reach absolute peak-coolkid if I could start and run a BBS. I even installed WWIV and DesqView to fuel the fantasy and prepare. But my parents didn't understand technology and couldn't grasp why I wanted to hook up (and pay for) a second phone line for the house. So, unfortunately I would remain a mere luser until I went off to University where the Internet was just getting popular and 10-Base-T ethernet drops to the dorm rooms were standard, and I very quickly forgot all about BBSing.
Would love a technical explanation of how all that stuff worked by someone who did that kind of stuff in those days. In the old days I personally never saw anything bigger than a four line BBS. But I remember reading about that one in shareware README.TXT files
Wouldn't mind hearing war stories from the cdrom.com guys as well.
I can recall people being very impressed at unix systems being able to handle many clients, and being personally confused at the idea of a computer only being able to handle a single user.
I can recall people being very impressed at unix systems being able to handle many clients
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.
I remember trying to set up a bbs on my pc in the 80s and I didn’t have a separate phone line so I just put it on while I slept. Then people started calling and annoying my parents with daytime modem calls, because I was like 10 and I didn’t think through any of this.
I set up a uh war dialer around the same age over night and my mom got some pretty upset calls the next day.
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.
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.
If they were really badass, they had a rack of Telebit modems. (Telebit made 68020 based modems that did 56+ Kbps long before a 56K standard, and literally had more compute power than most of the computers they were connected to.)
Higher resolution photo https://web.archive.org/web/20230531042903im_/https://static...
wait, are you OP? or did you happen to find a high res version of the same paper-copy picture that OP supposedly was given 30 years ago and then scanned and then threw out. or did OP make it up? or is OP just a bot?
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.
Oh that's a breaker box (or a box of wiring of some sort), not a mirror!
A mirror? I first saw it as a common (US-centric) exterior metal door, with a window -- and with a shelf blocking the opening.
The blur does interesting things.
Glorious. This must be what is like when old people long for the hot car they lusted for in their youth.
That telephone cord is impressive.
In this picture it seems that all machines have a 3.5" floppy disk inserted. Maybe they had no hard drive and only booted from floppy and then ran software over the network?
A lot of network interface cards had a socket for an option ROM that would allow network boot, but you could definitely fit a client on a floppy and boot that way, too. Novell Netware server would be the mostly likely server for that vintage of rig and a Netware client fit easily on a floppy.
There is so much speculation in the OP that I am not even sure if the title is correct.
> It's possible they managed to do some rudimentary multitasking with DESQview (or worse...) and so supported two whole users with each box. Does that mean they had to be at least 386s to do protected mode? Or was it virtual 8086 mode? I (fortunately) have forgotten the finer points of how that stuff used to work. I DO remember how damn crashy a box became when you ran it "under DV". Constant system freezes. Yep.
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
* https://github.com/cosmos72/twin
> do you think "wow, cool, they got to wrangle all of that", or do you think "OMG they had to wrangle all of that"?
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.
I am surprised by the assumption that each box could only handle one modem. I seem to remember that some DOS BBS packages could handle multiple modems/users concurrently and only needed multitasking operating systems for “door” programs. Am I misremembering?
A guy who was local to me, when I was a kid, wrote multi-user BBS system (called "MUBBS" originally-- I don't remember what the name was changed to later) in Turbo Pascal that had a preemptive multitasking loop running in x86 real mode to handle multiple lines simultaneously. The coolest part was the console was just a "line" so you could logon to the board and interact while somebody was on the phone, too. Most other DOS BBS packages were only available for the SYSOP or the caller individually.
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.
Even for a standard PC, you could buy a 16 port serial card and hook it up to 16 modems, either discreet devices or the dedicated ISP kit which might support dozens of incoming calls (possibly on a single bearer) via various means. Telebit netblazers and then ascend maxs were common in those days.
Even the Apple II had multi-line BBSes[^1], so I'm not sure about her assumption.
[^1]: e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diversi-Dial
I'm fairly certain you are correct. I remember the MajorBBS could handle multiple lines on its own.
I knew a couple of local DOS BBSes that ran multiple lines with PCBoard under DESQview.
For sure. I knew people who ran multi-line BBS's on DOS PCs under DESQview, just like that (running Searchlight BBS, in my case). I know of a four line that was just using multiple external modems and non-standard IRQ's for COM3 and COM4 (since, by default, COM1/3 and COM2/4 share an IRQ).
MajorBBS could handle multiple lines on its own, but you had to handle ALL of the lines with one box. That meant a serial port interface like DigiBoard which provided some number (8 or 16 or more) of serial ports that you would connect to modems.
I remember DigiBoard from my early ISP days. We attempted to turn a mid 90's-era Linux system (Slackware) into a terminal server. The Linux drivers for DigiBoard weren't quite up to it so we wound up going with Telebit Netblazers, I think.
I think we used RocketPorts for a while until switching to Livingston Portmaster 3s, which you plugged a T-1 into.
Portmasters were very popular. Later on the ISP I worked with moved on to Ascend boxes which had digital modems (T1 / PRI lines.)
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.
That assumption feeds into the moral of the post and its followup
Serial ports are a fun thing to learn about, computers had more than one. Now with USB, computers can have many serial ports.
My first thought when looking at those racks of old PCs is--the heat.
Does BBS still have a usage nowadays? I feel HN is not too different -- and actually offer less than a BBS -- back then there are a lot of goods on a large BBS. And it's easier to mix a pic with text, but I could be wrong.
Also thinking it's a lot environmental easier to host a BBS than a Discord server.
Office chair technology also has really advanced since then (looking at the chair on the picture, which is commonly seen near computers in photos of this era)
Those were the days. I still believe nothing replaces the camraderie of the small, local BBSs. The large ones were good too, but these tended to resemble the modern Internet forums a bit more.
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/
The OS that was running on these is irrelevant, the important part is the BBS software.
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.
The OS was relevant if your BBS software was limited to a single simultaneous user, like many of the early DOS BBSes. The late 80's "PCBoard" BBSes I'm familiar with needed one PC per user, plus a file server with Netware.
Ok, but that's just the vehicle, it is the BBS software that does the works. And even in the 80's there were ways to run multiple instances of 'single user' BBSs on one box, for instance (dare I say it...) OS/2 and TV.
Yeah, this jumped out at me too. It's a wild misunderstanding of how BBSes worked.
That said, I have no idea how a multi-node BBS would work, in terms of keeping state synchronized.
> It's a wild misunderstanding of how BBSes worked.
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.
It depends on the era.
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...
I've seen NetWare, Vines, some proprietary hacks to form the backbone.
Aren’t the modems the black boxes sitting on top of each PC in the picture?
yes, most of them look like USRobotics Courier modems. Note that not all the machines have one, and some have two.
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.
I think you're right and that there were only two modems connected to the boxes so that's just the built in serial ports, here is another copy of the same picture by someone that apparently funded the board with some details:
https://x.com/ScottApogee/status/1593729387106512896
Yes, you're right, I totally missed them. Those look like USR 'Courier' modems but the resolution is really crappy so hard to be sure and it looks like there are multiple types. There might still be modems in the boxes themselves as well. It doesn't look like more than two modems per box if there isn't.
Ahh BBS's: where I learned the difference between a local call and a "local toll call" (parents were not happy)
I remember thinking that I would reach absolute peak-coolkid if I could start and run a BBS. I even installed WWIV and DesqView to fuel the fantasy and prepare. But my parents didn't understand technology and couldn't grasp why I wanted to hook up (and pay for) a second phone line for the house. So, unfortunately I would remain a mere luser until I went off to University where the Internet was just getting popular and 10-Base-T ethernet drops to the dorm rooms were standard, and I very quickly forgot all about BBSing.
Cool Kids run T1s ;)
Really Cool Kids T3s...
I used to dial into that BBS... long distance. It had a huge library of shareware.
https://groups.google.com/g/bit.listserv.games-l/c/1tg85kGBH...
Would love a technical explanation of how all that stuff worked by someone who did that kind of stuff in those days. In the old days I personally never saw anything bigger than a four line BBS. But I remember reading about that one in shareware README.TXT files
Wouldn't mind hearing war stories from the cdrom.com guys as well.
https://www.cnn.com/TECH/computing/9904/08/cdrom.idg/ and https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/wow-what-a-system-ftp... I'm not aware of any others with more details and war stories.
I can recall people being very impressed at unix systems being able to handle many clients, and being personally confused at the idea of a computer only being able to handle a single user.
I can recall people being very impressed at unix systems being able to handle many clients
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.
There were also commercial multi-user systems like Compuserve and Delphi.
Wow, I used to dial into BBS for around 3-4 years. good time!!
How do you dislike a post
Looks like the shelves were custom-built for those machines. I wonder what the monitors were hooked up to, or if they were just spares.
My first thought was that this was built someone who clearly cared about the system they were running.
In the 90’s we had microsystems, in the 2020s we have microservices.
In 2030 we'll have microagents
And the follow-up article: https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2022/01/27/scale/
The quote at the bottom is great:
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
The real question is: Was the turbo button pressed?
Probably not. That would slow them down. The turbo button under-clocked CPUs :-)
I remember trying to set up a bbs on my pc in the 80s and I didn’t have a separate phone line so I just put it on while I slept. Then people started calling and annoying my parents with daytime modem calls, because I was like 10 and I didn’t think through any of this.
I set up a uh war dialer around the same age over night and my mom got some pretty upset calls the next day.
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.
Would these machines have been networked with CAT-3? Daisy chained phone cords?
More likely coax. 3com 509c network cards. Much less infrastructure to have a lan that way.
IBM had a network that ran over phone cords that were daisycbained from one node to the next.
It's also possible they used coax, either ethernet (10base2) or Arcnet.
Depends on the exact date.
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.
For a similar nostalgic hit:
Related:
Ask HN: Remember Fidonet?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47321760
(2022)
Some more discussion then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30096565
If they were really badass, they had a rack of Telebit modems. (Telebit made 68020 based modems that did 56+ Kbps long before a 56K standard, and literally had more compute power than most of the computers they were connected to.)
By the early 90s didn’t most BBS software support multi-line setups on a single pc?