BBS

While I have no official statistics, let's just say that I was a B.B.S. addict and made quite a few friends from there.  What comforts me is that both my first husband and second husband were both very involved in BBSes in their own areas (but I didn't know them then, as both lived in places far from me.)  and not ironic, but I met them both online from the internet. 

I kinda miss the small community feel of BBSes.

Short answer: It was huge, but only amongst the geek set. 

Medium-length answer: Excerpts from the documentary:

A85RJMhB8_s

The estimate of 150,000 BBSes in the US is as accurate an estimate as you're likely to get -- I used to hang out on around 20-30 boards back in the day, and envied people in nearby neighborhoods with wider local calling ranges, who had access to about twice as many boards as I did.  Good times. 

For the whole skinny: 2005's 5-and-a-half-hour DVD set - BBS: The Documentary (IMDB)


I kinda miss the small community feel of BBSes.


This board's a pretty good approximation to a typical active 80s BBS, both in terms of number of active users and amount of content; the biggest difference between the BBS scene and small boards like this one was that everyone was within local calling range.  (30 years ago, several hours of long distance calling per night was prohibitively expensive.)  And that there were (effectively) no graphics, just text in a 40x24 or 80x24 window.  The text scrolled by as fast as the modem could receive it, which was about as fast as the human eye could read it.

Short answer: It was huge, but only amongst the geek set. 

Medium-length answer: Excerpts from the documentary:

A85RJMhB8_s

The estimate of 150,000 BBSes in the US is as accurate an estimate as you're likely to get -- I used to hang out on around 20-30 boards back in the day, and envied people in nearby neighborhoods with wider local calling ranges, who had access to about twice as many boards as I did.  Good times. 

For the whole skinny: 2005's 5-and-a-half-hour DVD set - BBS: The Documentary (IMDB)

Thanks, had not heard about this documentary, will definately check it out.

I lived in a very rural area of Ohio, in my teens.  So, I would call around a good 5 BBSes on a regular basis and an additional 6 or so sporadically.  One that I called posted to usenet (which I wasn't familiar with) and I thought it was the coolest thing posting to message boards from around the United States.  I felt so worldly!  I wasn't especially knowledgable about computers either.  I didn't get my first computer (Commodore 64) until my senior year in high school (1987).


This board's a pretty good approximation to a typical active 80s BBS, both in terms of number of active users and amount of content; the biggest difference between the BBS scene and small boards like this one was that everyone was within local calling range.  (30 years ago, several hours of long distance calling per night was prohibitively expensive.)  And that there were (effectively) no graphics, just text in a 40x24 or 80x24 window.  The text scrolled by as fast as the modem could receive it, which was about as fast as the human eye could read it.


I was gonna say that about this message board.  The primary difference for me is that the people from local BBSes would tend to meet in the "outside world", for lunch/dinner at least once a month.  Our group would even go as far as have birthday parties for other members kids at the local bowling alley.  When a member passed away, we had a memorial dinner and I went to her funeral to "represent" her BBS friends.  I'm sure the people would probably meet more often (at least some of the members here) if they lived closer.  There are people that live within driving distance that I have not met (or only met by accident, being in the same restaurant and recognizing each other).  I guess there isn't necessarily the desire to meet people from the internet as much as there was from BBS era.  Not entirely sure why.  :-\\

I still have found memories of connection noises of the screech of the modem... the laughable connection speed of 1800 baud per minute.  My patience has grown thin apparently, I'd never be able to deal with that with internet graphics now.

To give the best estimate quantitatively, I used the Google Groups search and used the word "the" for each calendar year from 1981 to 2000, and came up with the following amount of hits for all groups, usenet/BBS and toward the very end, some forums like the one here. You can see that while there were some geeks during the 1980s, the rate of growth was slow, only doubling approximately over the course of the 1980s. The 1990s however showed exponential growth, increasing approximately a hundredfold over the course of that decade. The '90s are clearly the boom years of the IT industry, and nothing since matches such development.
1981: 416,000
1982: 443,000
1983: 570,000
1984: 638,000
1985: 574,000
1986: 549,000
1987: 603,000
1988: 835,000
1989: 798,000
1990: 1,390,000
1991: 2,380,000
1992: 5,040,000
1993: 7,440,000
1994: 14,100,000
1995: 17,800,000
1996: 40,300,000
1997: 57,600,000
1998: 84,000,000
1999: 101,000,000
2000: 131,000,000

I guess there isn't necessarily the desire to meet people from the internet as much as there was from BBS era.  Not entirely sure why.  :-\\


In the BBS era, you were part of a local community first - there was some self-segregation based on choices of computer hardware, but it was essentially one community with geographical proximity in common, with a wide range of shared interests.  Each board (remember, only one user at a time, unless the sysop is really loaded and has hardware that can handle two or even (gasp!) four phone lines!) had its own flavor, but there was generally the same set of sub-boards on each.  General, computers, programming, etc.

In the Internet era, you're part of multiple geographically-distributed communities - and narrow shared interests are what define each of those communities.  Here, it's pop culture.  On Slashdot, it's tech.  On Fark, it's current events.  (USENET was all of those things, but each had its own newsgroup -- USENET was effectively a planetary-scale BBS with 50,000 message boards.)

It's only been relatively recently that geography (in the sense of meetups in meatspace for people with shared interests) has become relevant again.

But there are still large online communities with meetups - F'rinstance, the green light just went out today for World Fark Party, Part Deux, April Fool's Day, Vegas, in honor of the late legendary TheNaSkAr.

Would an average computer user (mac, ibm, amiga, atari) in 1985 or 1990 say that they knew was dial-up was?


No,they would have no clue what dial up was in 1985 cause dial up didn't exist until the early 1990's.

There was definitely an "underground" culture in the '80s and early '90s with regards to being online, as most mainstream press about computing was simply about being offline with disks and dot-matrix printers the most useful means of communication. The underground was fueled by not just colleges and certain research instiutions but also magazines such as Network World and Computerworld, which targeted the real geeks who wanted the most out of their computers. You didn't even hear stuff like "online" in the mainstream media until around 1993-94, or even as late as 1995 in the most mainstream areas. Simply put, the average, mainstream user just saw a computer as having the following: A monitor, a main computer (motherboard), disk drive, printer (if equipped), and mouse (if they even had one). They probably understood more about how DOS or BASIC would function as opposed to anything related with online activity; simply find some books about computers from this era, and you'll see that only the most sophisticated books mention about how to use B.B.S or electronic mail (before it was shortened to e-mail).

I would guess by the early 90s there were probably something like i don't know, maybe 10 million users worldwide?

Simply put, the average, mainstream user just saw a computer as having the following: A monitor, a main computer (motherboard), disk drive, printer (if equipped), and mouse (if they even had one). They probably understood more about how DOS or BASIC would function as opposed to anything related with online activity; simply find some books about computers from this era, and you'll see that only the most sophisticated books mention about how to use B.B.S or electronic mail (before it was shortened to e-mail).


Pretty much this. We had a Commodore 64 when I was growing up in the 90's, and it basically served as nothing more than an extra video game console for me. Nobody in my neck of the woods even knew what the internet was until about 1997, and I didn't get online for the first time until 1998.