Bulletin Board System
A Bulletin Board System or BBS (in Spanish Sistema de Tablón de aunciones) is software (a set of computer programs installed on a computer) that was popular in the 1980s and 1990s in the United States for computer networks, as it allowed participating users to connect through a telephone line to a network where they could see and consult different information published by participating users. Currently, it is easily accessible by means of telnet (computer program used by most computers to access an external server; not to be confused with the computer protocol of the same name) through the internet to servers and perform functions such as downloading software, data, reading news and bulletins, exchanging messages with other users through email, online gaming, etc.
Bulletin boards are, in many ways, precursors to modern forums and other aspects of the Internet. Historically, the first BBS software is considered to have been created by Ward Christensen in 1978, while Usenet, for example, did not go live until the following year.
During their years of popularity, BBSs were the meeting point for communications enthusiasts and software developers, and constituted the first public file-sharing systems, including the first shareware programs and the first computer viruses.
Unlike web pages on the internet, by relying on a computer connected to a telephone line, users had to "queue", that is, as long as the previous user did not disconnect and release the telephone line, the next one couldn't connect (most boards only had 1 phone line).
With the rise of the Internet in the second half of the 1990s, BBSes decreased in popularity, although they have not disappeared for that reason: today they continue to exist and have adapted to the Internet, using it to facilitate access to BBSs.
It is worth noting the systems linked by the FidoNet network that, altruistically maintained by their Sysops (system operators or system administrators), use software that is compatible with each other that allows them to act as a server for the BBS system and exchange with other nodes mail packages that, moving from node to node, were distributed throughout the world. FidoNet is a quality alternative to email, far from the prevailing spam in forums, news and mailing lists.
In Spain Pucela, Eye Of The Beholder, among others, continue to perform. For their part, these are found in other countries around the world, such as Argentina where Mummy BBS still works via telnet, among others, and Rolling BBS, which still maintains the traditional Dial-Up connection. Matrix BBS also works in Mexico.
Even users of the Amiga platform had a large number of BBS, some of the best known being: Amiga Penedès, Hypnosys BBS, Euskal Amiga BBS, Nyarlothotep BBS, oDRuSBa BBS, etc.
History
The first BBS was the Computerized Bulletin Board System, or CBBS, created by Ward Christensen. It went online on February 16, 1978 in Chicago.
The first BBSs ran on large systems (usually in universities), CP/M equipment or home computers such as the Apple II, the TRS-80, the Atari 800 or the Commodore 64, with 300 baud modems, which made extremely slow transfer (a 64KB program could take up to 30 minutes to transmit). The advent of 1200 and 2400 baud modems increased their popularity and they began to grow. But the storage problem was still present, since the usual thing is that they were computers with a medium capacity 180 KB floppy drive (only a privileged few could afford up to 4 floppy drives), which forced the sysop to make manual changes. The appearance of hard drives for both systems was embraced by all those who could afford it.
The appearance of 16-bit equipment produced a migration to the platforms of each manufacturer until the fall in prices of PC clones (and especially their notably less expensive hard drive, as well as their internal modems) meant the generalization of its use in BBS. However, some have survived until today running on Commodore Amiga, Mac, Commodore 64 or TRS-80 IV
When multitasking operating systems such as Amiga OS, OS/2, Unix (in its multiple variants), Windows 95 or added to MS-DOS such as DESQview or Windows 3.1 became available, the number of BBS and other timetables increased. restricted to 24 hours by being able to use the Sysops on your own computer instead of needing a dedicated one. This coincides with the appearance of 14,400 baud modems, which mark a leap in the speed of communications.
Along with the appearance of private networks such as Fidonet, WWIVnet or VirtualNET, many computer companies began to maintain their own BBS to support their products (support forums, patches, drivers, shareware versions of Antivirus or compilers, etc..) while maintaining a presence on CompuServe (a kind of global paid BBS with local access points in certain countries). In a few cases, they chose to financially support a Fido BBS highly specialized in their products as official support.
In Spain, some of the most important Fido BBSs began to offer paid access at high speeds (in addition to 1 or 2 free public access modems, they had 1 to 10 additional lines with the fastest – and most expensive – modems – of the moment) and even access to the incipient Internet. Some of them collaborated in the foundation of IRC-Hispano.
The programs of the BBS used to be written either in assembler for each machine, or in Pascal (Turbo Pascal mainly) or C. The latter facilitated its portability to different hardware platforms. A particular case is Virtual BBS, not only because it was written in Quick BASIC (without this implying a decrease in speed), but also because its author, Roland De Graaf, was legally blind.
There were two main ways of using the BBS. The most widespread was the online connection. But the resulting phone bills and locking down the system for other users led to numerous offline connection packages. Basically, in each connection, the new emails and posts in the forums were uploaded, the files that were contributed to the exchange area, and after that, the new messages and the selected files were downloaded. This allowed to shorten the connection time. These packages could be monolithic made up of several interchangeable programs, and specialized in a specific BBS or of general purpose. The most popular were the Fidonet point package and BlueWave (a multiBBS client).
These packages generalized the custom of including a famous quote or phrase at the bottom of each message, which may or may not be related to the subject of the message (there are compilations of about 100,000 quotes). The most modern clients (such as BlueWave) allowed not only to assign blocks of appointments to certain areas, but also to customize the tags depending on who was being responded to or the topic that was being discussed.
Given the generalization of the Internet and its graphic interface (in contrast to the text of BBS) graphic clients began to emerge that allowed a more visual connection, with the use of additional codes to include icons or images, but they did not achieve much popularity.
Presentation
BBSes were generally text-based, rather than GUI-based, and early chat boards used the ASCII character set. However, some computer manufacturers extended the ASCII character set to take advantage of the advanced color and graphics capabilities of their systems. The authors of the BBS software included these extended character sets in their software, and the authors of the terminal program included the ability to display them when a compatible system was called. The native Atari character set was known as ATASCII, while most BBS wildcards supported PETSCII. PETSCII was also supported by the Quantum Link nationwide online service.
The use of these custom character sets was generally incompatible between manufacturers. Unless a caller was using and running on a terminal emulation program written for the same type of system as the BBS, the session would simply fall back to plain ASCII output. For example, a Commodore 64 user calling an Atari BBS would use ASCII instead of the machine's native character set. As time went on, most terminal programs began to use the ANSI standard, but could use its native character set if it were available.
COCONET, a BBS system created by Coconut Computing, Inc., was released in 1988 and only supported a GUI (initially no text interface was available but finally became available in 1990), and worked in EGA/VGA graphical mode, which made it stand out on text-based BBS systems. COCONET's bitmap and vector graphics and support for multi-type fonts were inspired by the PLATO system, and graphics capabilities were based on what was available in the Borland BGI graphics library. A competing approach called the Remote Imaging Protocol (RIP) emerged and was promoted by Telegrafix in the early and mid-1990s, but it never caught on. An industry standard technology called NAPLPS was also considered, and although it became the underlying graphics technology behind the service [Prodigy (online service) | Prodigy]], never gained popularity in the BBS market. There were several GUI-based BBSs on the Apple Macintosh platform, including TeleFinder and FirstClass, but these remained widely used only in the Mac market.
In the UK, BBC Micro based OBBS software, available from Pace for use with their modems, optionally for color and graphics using the Teletext based graphics mode available on that platform. Other systems used the Viewdata protocols popularized in the UK by the British Telecom Prestel service, and the online magazine Micronet 800 who were busy giving away modems with their subscriptions.
The most popular form of inline graphics was ANSI art, which combined the blocks and symbols of the IBM Extended ASCII character set with ANSI escape sequence to allow changing colors on demand, provide cursor control and display formatting, and even basic musical tones. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, ANSI was used by most BBSes to create elaborate splash screens and colored menus, and therefore ANSI support was a much-requested feature in terminal client programs.. The development of ANSI art became so popular that it spawned an entire BBS "artscene" subculture dedicated to him.
The ['Friend]]' 'Skyline BBS' 'was the first in 1987 with a script markup language communication protocol called Skypix that was capable of providing the user with a complete graphical interface, with rich graphical content, changeable fonts, mouse-controlled actions, animations and sound..
Today, most BBS software that is still actively supported, such as Worldgroup, Wildcat! BBS and Citadel / UX, is web-enabled and the traditional text interface has been replaced (or operates concurrently) with a web-based user interface. For those more nostalgic for the true BBS experience, one can use NetSerial (Windows) or DOSBox (Windows/*nix) to redirect DOS COM port software to telnet, allowing them to connect to telnet BBSes in the 1990s. 1980s and 1990s terminal emulation modem software, such as Telix, Terminate, Qmodem, and Procomm Plus. Modern 32-bit terminal emulators such as mTelnet and SyncTerm include native telnet support.