The Early Nerd Years: The World of BBS Chat

I have been dabbling in computers for a long time. Before most people in the world had them or even considered having them.

I even had and used a modem before there was internet!  Yes, it's true. Let's back up a few decades.

In the late eighties, computers were starting to come down in price, but they were still an expensive luxury.  I was very "into" them at that time.  I have to give my ex-wife credit back then for putting up with my fancy.  Although I didn't overdo it, computer equipment and components were not cheap.  I wish I had all the money I spent on computer stuff sitting on the desk in front of me right now.  They were also very quickly obsolete.

I don't remember the speed of the modem I first had.  During that time, they were doubling in speed very, very quickly.  Although they were originally even slower, for consumers they started out at the 300-baud range.  For those models to work, you actually would dial up the phone number and place the phone handset across the top of the modem cups.  600, 1200, 2400, 4800, 9600 soon followed.  When they hit the "k-bit" speeds of 14.4 (14,400), they were showing up pretty much everywhere and were affordable to the masses.

But there was no internet--What good were they?

In the 80's there was a free newsprint magazine in our area called the Puget Sound Computer User.  It was free all over the place like the Little Nickel paper is, and every geek worth his pocket protector eagerly awaited the twice-monthly issues when they came out.  Besides the great articles, reviews, and other things that it had, it also had a huge listing of BBS systems in our area.  What is a BBS?  It's short for Bulletin Board System.  In short, a BBS consisted of some geek (or group thereof) that hosted a "place" in cyberspace.  They would publish their phone number in that giant listing and people could "dial in" to their BBS.  Some were centered around certain topics of interest, some had passwords so only select geeks could log in.

Like I said before, I don't remember the speed of the modem I first had, but it was slow.  I'll never forget the first time I logged on to a BBS though.  After the familiar modem "handshake" sound, the screen said, "connected" and the text slowly scrolled across the screen, line after line.  Can you imagine?  I mean it literally flowed across the screen like someone was quickly typing it.  You could read it as it appeared--It was that slow.

But it was exciting!  Here I was actually connected to someone else's computer in some other town that I didn't even know!

Now what?  Well, I don't know what all there was to do on those BBS's outside of chatting with other users on them, but they were cool.  I was reaching out to the rest of the world, eager to experience this new form of communication.

And it was all before the internet even existed.