yeah the shine in the top left of the rectangle was what led me to think it was a mirror, which from my experience would have been really strange for the types of nerds that would work in windowless rooms back in those days.
The black cable underneath looked like the shadow of an oval frame
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.
Click on the HN “past” link for this submission near the top of this page, then you’ll get to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30096565 (see the top comment there) from when the original image link was still working.
Many sites including Google offer reverse image search. You give it an image and it gives you a list of places it appears, sometimes in higher resolution or with more context (or different context, which can be interesting).
Rachel says she had the photo as a postcard. It's likely that more postcards were printed, and that other people had owned those copies, rather than people being bots.
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.
Top comment about this photo is ( and the poster)
Scott Miller - Apogee/3D Realms Founder
@ScottApogee
BBS's (bulletin board systems) were the backbone of the online world before the Internet came along in 1995. Apogee teamed up with Dan Linton's BBS, called Software Creations, and we poured $200k+ into it to grow it to nearly 140 call-in nodes with a T3 (high bandwidth) line.
This makes me wish I took photos of Diversi-Dial (aka D-Dial) setups, which somehow impressed me more due to how much they accomplished with much much less hardware.
They were able to set up a 7 x 300baud modems in real-time chat system on an Apple ][ . The original marketing called it a CB (Citizens Band) Simulator. They were able to run up to 1200baud, but I never saw one of those functioning.
As if 7 people chatting through a single 6502 wasn't impressive enough, many of them dedicated one or two of their lines to interlinking with other D-dials.
And the larger ddial sysops would daisy chain multiple Apple IIes together. A connector would take up one port on each machine. Two machine would give you 12 modems. Each new machine after the second would add space for 5 modems (-1 on old machine, +6 on new machine). For the sysop it was a big investment for very little, if any, monetary reward. I remember a user account would cost $5 a month.
Our ddial was a few towns away so we bought a line in the exchange in between that would forward to the ddial. This way we would not pay a bunch on long distance calls.
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?
“as modems got faster, supporting 16 modems on a single machine became impossible, and it was often cheaper to buy a new commodity desktop PC rather than a much more expensive machine with a 16-port serial card capable of handling the IO.”
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.
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 online with the BBS, 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.
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.
Not mentioned but very important was the number of inbound telco lines installed. Equally important was making sure the local phone company properly configured the hunt group for those lines. Without a properly functioning hunt group it would be very difficult to optimize the allocation of telco connections to all the users connecting and disconnecting.
Also, it was unusual at the time for a local phone company to receive a request for 25 lines (or more) to be installed in the basement of a residence. They would generally push back thinking you were running a bookie operation or some such.
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.
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)
> 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.
> 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:
I remember dialing up to a BBS in the area in 1990 that had 4 phone lines. That was amazing at the time when most BBS only had 1 line.
But I do remember downloading text files FILE.IDZ about other BBS, and reading some magazines that mentioned other BBS systems that had 32 and more phone lines but you had to pay. That seemed like it was just on another level in another part of the world that seemed like fantasy compared to the area I was in.
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.
"usually" and "typically" are doing a lot of heavy lifting here :)
Access to knowledge, equipment, and budget varied dramatically prior to widespread internet access. Someone setting up a BBS might not even know about multi-line modem cards or serial port expansions. Even if they knew about them they may not have been able to reasonably obtain them. Or they may have been operating on donations, surplus, or discount equipment. Or they simply may not have had the luxury of time to research all of that as user demand meant they were too busy laying tracks in front of the train.
Many BBSes ran on 1-2 lines per PC because that's what they understood how to build or the hardware they had access to. You might be surprised at just how many lines some BBSes setup this way had!
People forget there was a time that anything outside the standard PC was extremely expensive, often had flaky or nonexistent software support, locked you into a fly-by-night vendor that might go out of business tomorrow, was only available via a distributor who wanted to have you talk to a "sales consultant" before they'd sell you something, etc. Many many people chose sub-optimal implementations because it was an off-the-shelf PC they could replace at any time with trivially simple software requiring no special CONFIG.SYS drivers or TSRs to fiddle with. Especially if you'd ever been burned previously.
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...
The older brother of a friend of mine in the 90s was the co-sysop of one of Sweden's largest "elite" BBSes at the time, Farout BBS. I got to tag along to the sysop's apartment once and see the setup, which was an Amiga 2000 with 3 active nodes and available serial ports for a total of 7 nodes, though the sysop hadn't gotten around to get more telephone lines wired to his apartment.
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.
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:
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.
Same here! This brings me back. And makes me feel old. Dialing the big BBSes like this one were rare special occasions for me, due to the cost of long distance.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.)
The blur does interesting things.
The black cable underneath looked like the shadow of an oval frame
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.
https://x.com/ScottApogee/status/1593729387106512896
Top comment about this photo is ( and the poster) Scott Miller - Apogee/3D Realms Founder @ScottApogee BBS's (bulletin board systems) were the backbone of the online world before the Internet came along in 1995. Apogee teamed up with Dan Linton's BBS, called Software Creations, and we poured $200k+ into it to grow it to nearly 140 call-in nodes with a T3 (high bandwidth) line.
They were able to set up a 7 x 300baud modems in real-time chat system on an Apple ][ . The original marketing called it a CB (Citizens Band) Simulator. They were able to run up to 1200baud, but I never saw one of those functioning.
As if 7 people chatting through a single 6502 wasn't impressive enough, many of them dedicated one or two of their lines to interlinking with other D-dials.
Talk about an esoteric memory.
- https://www.ddial.com/ - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diversi-Dial
Our ddial was a few towns away so we bought a line in the exchange in between that would forward to the ddial. This way we would not pay a bunch on long distance calls.
“as modems got faster, supporting 16 modems on a single machine became impossible, and it was often cheaper to buy a new commodity desktop PC rather than a much more expensive machine with a 16-port serial card capable of handling the IO.”
[^1]: e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diversi-Dial
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.
I knew a couple of local DOS BBSes that ran multiple lines with PCBoard under DESQview.
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.
Also, it was unusual at the time for a local phone company to receive a request for 25 lines (or more) to be installed in the basement of a residence. They would generally push back thinking you were running a bookie operation or some such.
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/
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 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
https://web.archive.org/web/20220207120422/https://rachelbyt...
I remember dialing up to a BBS in the area in 1990 that had 4 phone lines. That was amazing at the time when most BBS only had 1 line.
But I do remember downloading text files FILE.IDZ about other BBS, and reading some magazines that mentioned other BBS systems that had 32 and more phone lines but you had to pay. That seemed like it was just on another level in another part of the world that seemed like fantasy compared to the area I was in.
Boardwatch was the magazine for BBS ( I do not know of any others)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boardwatch
Some all? on internet archive https://archive.org/details/boardwatchmagazine I recall buyingthe magazine back inthe day...
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.
Access to knowledge, equipment, and budget varied dramatically prior to widespread internet access. Someone setting up a BBS might not even know about multi-line modem cards or serial port expansions. Even if they knew about them they may not have been able to reasonably obtain them. Or they may have been operating on donations, surplus, or discount equipment. Or they simply may not have had the luxury of time to research all of that as user demand meant they were too busy laying tracks in front of the train.
Many BBSes ran on 1-2 lines per PC because that's what they understood how to build or the hardware they had access to. You might be surprised at just how many lines some BBSes setup this way had!
People forget there was a time that anything outside the standard PC was extremely expensive, often had flaky or nonexistent software support, locked you into a fly-by-night vendor that might go out of business tomorrow, was only available via a distributor who wanted to have you talk to a "sales consultant" before they'd sell you something, etc. Many many people chose sub-optimal implementations because it was an off-the-shelf PC they could replace at any time with trivially simple software requiring no special CONFIG.SYS drivers or TSRs to fiddle with. Especially if you'd ever been burned previously.
That said, I have no idea how a multi-node BBS would work, in terms of keeping state synchronized.
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...
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.
https://x.com/ScottApogee/status/1593729387106512896
Really Cool Kids T3s...
https://groups.google.com/g/bit.listserv.games-l/c/1tg85kGBH...
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.
It wasn't as secure or as easy, but you could certainly do multi-user systems without protected mode and within very small RAM amounts.
Also thinking it's a lot environmental easier to host a BBS than a Discord server.
Wouldn't mind hearing war stories from the cdrom.com guys as well.
My first thought was that this was built someone who clearly cared about the system they were running.
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
IBM had a network that ran over phone cords that were daisycbained from one node to the next.
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.
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.
Related:
Ask HN: Remember Fidonet?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47321760
Some more discussion then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30096565