Bulletin-Board Systems

The Birth of the BBS

The first “real” BBSs arrived shortly after the 1974 introduction of the first personal modems, which were marketed to the public in 1977. As computing historian Vince Long puts it, this was a time “when names such as Apple, Ohio Scientific, Tandy, and Commodore ruled the landscape,” and when modems amounted to little more than two suction cups into which the telephone handset was fitted. BBS enthusiasts “[weren't] interested in ARPA or big laboratories,” explains Howard Rheingold. Instead, they “want[ed] to know what they [could] do at home with their own hands and affordable technology.”

Ward Christensen and Randy Seuss illustrate Rheingold's point perfectly. January 16, 1978, was a very snowy day in Chicago, where Christensen and Seuss lived. Unable to dig himself out, Christensen called Seuss to talk about a plan he had to hook up their microcomputers to the phone lines. Seuss challenged him: “You do the software, and I'll do the hardware.” Christensen, who had already written the first binary-transfer file protocol, MODEM.ASM, envisioned a message system similar to corkboard [Page 46]bulletin boards for his project: “You know, garage for rent, dog grooming, etc.”

In two weeks' time, the first bulletin board, CBBS (Computer Bulletin Board System), was functional in Chicago. Afterward, hobbyists bought, borrowed, and tweaked Christensen's original code in order to build systems compatible with their own hardware, and a series of now-familiar BBS names were born: C64 for Commodore 64 machines; MTABBS for TRS-80s; GBB for Apple machines; and Fido, Opus, and Seadog for early IBM 8088s. Whatever software or hardware the various BBSs used, however, they all offered similar services: the ability to send and receive local email, the uploading and downloading of files, and opportunities for online game playing with rudimentary graphics.

Social Engineering in Cyberspace

Almost from the beginning, BBS users formed their own cultures, complete with interest groups and social strata. Though “hacking for the sake of hacking” has long been a raison d'être for BBSs, some services were slightly loftier in their social designs. Communitree, begun in 1981, used tree-like programming that encouraged users to participate in free-wheeling discussions online, while the Citadel BBS software used “rooms,” encouraging user “construction crews” to participate in a board's design. The designers of the Habitat BBS, a virtual community that still flourishes in parts of Japan today, learned that contrary to what software engineers might think, “detailed central planning is impossible; don't even try.”

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