How the boards came and went

A snowstorm and a spare phone line

Ward Christensen shoveled for two hours and still couldn't get out. It was January 1978 and the snow wouldn't quit. So he stayed home and called his friend Randy Suess.

Both of them belonged to CACHE, the Chicago Area Computer Hobbyists' Exchange, and the club had a phone line with a recorder on it so members could call in and find out when the next meeting was. Christensen's idea was to hang a computer on that line instead, so members could dial in and leave messages for each other.

Suess built the machine, an S-100 system cobbled together for the job, while Christensen wrote the software. They called it CBBS, the Computerized Bulletin Board System, and it went online on February 16, 1978. It actually took them about two weeks, but they told people four so it wouldn't sound like a rushed job.

One line. One caller. You dialed, read the messages, typed a reply, and hung up so the next person could get in. Christensen and Suess wrote the whole thing up for the November 1978 issue of Byte, and hobbyists around the country started building their own.

Berkeley had something like it first: Community Memory put public terminals around town in 1973, and you had to walk up to one to use it. CBBS was the first board you could call from home.

Christensen left one more thing behind. A year earlier, he'd already written a small program called MODEM for sending files between computers over a phone line. It grew into XMODEM, and for years that was how almost everybody pulled a file off a board.

AT, for attention

Early modems were dumb. You dialed the number on a regular telephone, waited for the squeal on the other end, and then either flipped a switch or jammed the handset into a pair of rubber cups.

In 1981 Hayes shipped the Smartmodem, a 300 bit-per-second box that took its orders straight from the computer. Dennis Hayes and Dale Heatherington gave it a small command language, plain text that any program could type at it the way a person types at a keyboard, and every command started with AT. ATZ reset it. ATDT dialed a number with touch tones. ATA answered a ringing line. ATH hung up.

Nearly every modem maker copied those commands word for word, and "Hayes compatible" ended up printed on the box of almost every modem sold after that. A computer that could dial and answer on its own could run a board all night with nobody watching. Sysops went to bed. The boards stayed up.

That's where the names come from, if you were wondering. ATDT dials. ATA answers.

The IBM PC came out the same year, the clones followed, and suddenly a lot of ordinary people owned a machine that could run a board. The software caught up. RBBS-PC was free and written in BASIC, and PCBoard, from Clark Development, became one of the big commercial packages.

On November 28, 1983, a consultant named Bob Mahoney put a board called Exec-PC online from his home in Wisconsin, with one line and a 1200 baud modem. Remember that name.

Fido, and mail that moved at night

Around Christmas 1983, Tom Jennings started writing a new BBS program in San Francisco. He called it Fido, because the pile of hardware it ran on was a real mongrel.

Long distance was the enemy. A call to another state cost real money by the minute, so most people only called boards inside their own area code. Jennings wanted to trade messages with John Madill, who was setting up a Fido board of his own in Baltimore, so the two of them added code that let their boards call each other with nobody at the keyboard, in the small hours of the morning, when the lines were idle and the sysops were asleep.

That was FidoNet. Jennings was node 1 and Madill was node 2. By September 1984 the list had 50 boards on it, and by early 1985 more than 160. By 1993: more than 20,000.

Then came the pizza party. Late in 1985 the Dallas sysops got together and griped about one caller who was pestering all of them, and somebody wanted a faster way to warn each other. Jeff Rush took notes. A few weeks later he came back with EchoMail: shared message areas that copied themselves from board to board across the network. By the early nineties FidoNet carried somewhere between 500 and 1,000 echo conferences.

Wayne Bell's WWIV, which went online in Los Angeles in December 1984, later got a network of its own called WWIVnet, one of several that grew up beside FidoNet. Bell handed out WWIV's source code to sysops who wanted it, and that turned out to matter a great deal. People hacked on it. Telegard came out of WWIV. Renegade came out of Telegard.

The same year, Chris Sherrick wrote a space trading game called Trade Wars and gave it away to other sysops. The games had arrived.

Busy. Busy. Busy. CONNECT.

Here's how a call went.

You loaded a terminal program, Telix or Procomm Plus or Qmodem or Telemate, and told it to dial. Usually you got a busy signal, because a good board with one line stayed busy all evening, so you set the program to redial and went to get a Coke.

Fun fact: before Zmodem was built into Telix, the way Telix users got it was Z-Tel. I wrote Z-Tel. I was in middle school. :: Ariel

Then the modem screamed. You know the sound. The screen said CONNECT 2400, and the board's login screen drew itself a line at a time, slow enough that you could sit there and watch the colors fill in while the lights on the front of the modem blinked away on the desk.

New callers filled out an application, mostly your real name and your phone number, so the sysop could call you back and make sure you were a real person. Then you waited a day or two for the sysop to validate you. Until then you could look around and not much else.

Once you were in, you had a handle and a daily time limit. Often half an hour. The limit kept the line free for the next caller. File areas ran on ratios: upload something, earn the right to download more. Exec-PC gave members four times the credit for every upload.

And the sysop was a real person, sitting at a computer in their own house. You could page them for a chat, and sometimes they broke in on you first. When you were done you hit G for goodbye, the modem let go of the line, and your screen said NO CARRIER.

Through the door

A door was a separate program that the board handed you off to. The BBS wrote a little drop file, usually DOOR.SYS or DORINFO1.DEF, with your name and how much time you had left. Then it stepped aside and let the game run. When you quit the game, the board picked you back up.

For a lot of callers, the doors were the whole reason to call.

Seth Robinson wrote Legend of the Red Dragon in 1989, in Pascal, for his own board, because he didn't have the popular doors other boards were running and he needed something to keep people coming back. His answer was a fixed number of turns per day. You fought in the forest, flirted at the inn, ran out of turns, and came back tomorrow. LORD is still one of the best-known door games ever written.

Trade Wars had been through a lot of hands by then, ported and patched by one sysop after another, when Gary Martin, a sysop in Kansas, rewrote it from the ground up. TradeWars 2002 came out in June 1991 and ran on almost any BBS software. People planned evenings around it. Corporations formed. Planets changed hands. When a sysop reset the universe, everybody started over at sector one.

Most doors were turn-based. You played your turns and hung up, and the other players found out what you'd done the next time they called. Usurper, released in 1993 by Jakob Dangarden, let players fight through the dungeons of Durunghins together, in real time. On a multi-node board that was a very big deal. It still plays that way on the ATDT demo board.

One line was never enough

One line meant one caller. That was fine for a hobby board and hopeless for a popular one.

The fix was more nodes, and it wasn't cheap. Every node needed its own modem and its own phone line, and the phone companies wanted business rates for multi-line boards. Sysops ran several nodes on one PC under multitasking software like DESQview, or wired a stack of PCs together on a network.

Big boards got huge. By 1990 Exec-PC was taking about 3,000 calls a day on 90 lines in Bob Mahoney's basement, and Wisconsin Bell had to dig a quarter-mile trench to bring in more. By the mid-nineties it had more than 250 lines and a file library measured in hundreds of gigabytes. Channel 1 in Cambridge, Massachusetts ran its own shareware library.

More nodes meant callers could finally see each other. Two people on two lines could chat in real time, or meet in the same game and try to kill each other.

Faster, louder, everywhere

Speeds climbed fast. The 300 bit-per-second crawl gave way to 1200 and then 2400. U.S. Robotics pushed its HST modems past 9600, and for a few years they were the unofficial standard among PC boards. V.32bis made 14,400 an open standard in 1991, and V.34 brought 28,800 in 1994.

Boards also got better looking, because sysops wanted login screens that made callers stop and stare, and ANSI artists started forming groups the way graffiti writers form crews. ACiD, short for ANSI Creators in Demand, formed on September 1, 1990. iCE was its big rival. Starting in 1992 the groups put out monthly artpacks, zip files of new work that got passed from board to board.

New software kept coming. Cott Lang released Renegade in June 1991, built on Telegard's code and free to run. That same year Rob Swindell wrote most of Synchronet while stuck at home recovering from surgery, because WWIV wouldn't give him the multiple nodes he wanted.

Around the big packages grew a crowd of smaller programs. Sysop utilities, most of them shareware, written by sysops for other sysops and passed around on the same boards they were built for.

How many boards were there? Nobody knew exactly. In 1993 Jack Rickard, the editor of Boardwatch magazine, put the number at 53,000 public boards in North America and 92,000 worldwide. A 1994 estimate in InfoWorld counted 60,000 in the United States alone, with 17 million users. The boards outdrew CompuServe.

Plenty of boards weren't respectable. Warez boards traded pirated software. Phreak boards traded stolen long-distance codes, because long distance was expensive and a code made it free. The elite boards kept their numbers quiet and their user lists short.

In May 1990 the Secret Service ran Operation Sundevil. About 150 agents served search warrants in cities across the country and carried off roughly 42 computers and 23,000 disks. Few charges followed. The fight over those raids and the court cases that followed led to the founding of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Everybody's competition, all at once

For years the internet was something you reached from a university or an office, and then, around 1993 and 1994, that changed. Graphical web browsers showed up, and local providers started selling dial-up internet accounts for a flat monthly fee. One local call and you could reach the whole world.

Boards couldn't match that. The slide started in late 1994, and callers left for AOL and the web. Fast. A board that had been busy every night of the week could go quiet in a few months, and the sysop would be sitting there paying for phone lines that almost never rang.

Some of the big boards turned themselves into internet providers, and Exec-PC, which started selling internet access in 1994, became the biggest provider in Wisconsin. In 1996 it put its file library on the web. Boardwatch became a trade magazine for the internet provider business.

The developers moved on as well, and on April 23, 1997, Cott Lang stopped working on Renegade and handed it to two of its utility authors. When 56k modems finally settled on one standard, V.90, in February 1998, most of the people buying them were dialing internet providers.

The board apocalypse, and the holdouts

By 2000 the dial-up BBS was nearly gone, as sysops canceled the phone lines and reformatted the drives. Years of message history went with them, and most of it is gone for good.

A few sysops kept going. They moved their boards to telnet, so callers could reach them over the internet instead of the phone network. Synchronet dropped its DOS versions around 2000 and carried on under Windows and Linux, and it's still being updated. Mystic, first released in December 1997, now runs on everything down to a Raspberry Pi. Renegade got a new maintainer in January 2000 when it needed a Y2K fix, and version 1.40 came out in March 2026. FidoNet is still running too, a lot smaller than it was.

In 2005 Jason Scott released BBS: The Documentary, built from interviews with the people who were there. His site, textfiles.com, archives thousands of the text files that used to get passed from board to board.

The hobby that's left is mostly the people who were there the first time. Running a telnet board still means a server somebody has to keep up. Calling one still means finding a terminal program and learning how to use it. That's why this project exists.

Dial in. The ATDT demo board is up right now, and there's a new user application waiting for you on the other end of the line. Pick a handle.