Good Night, BBS

On January 1st, 2015, I shut down my BBS.

(Yes, you read that date right. 2015, not 1995.)

I’ve been messing around with BBSes for almost 35 years now. When I was just a little kid, my dad and his friends ran multiple BBSes. There was PC-X (which ran on a PC XT), the Backdoor BBS (which ran on our PC Jr.), and many others. In the mid-80s, several of my friends ran Commodore 64 BBSes (I think Jeff even ran one after hours for a while).

My BBS, The Gas Chamber, didn’t go online until the 90s. It ran on a PC. It had tons of files available for download (including a six-disc CD-ROM changer!), great message boards, a few online games, and two phone lines (both of which were always busy). There was a time when I thought nothing could kill The Gas Chamber’s popularity. Then the internet came along and killed not only my BBS but the hobby in general. Things coexisted for a while, but when I realized I was constantly using the internet to pull down new files to put on the BBS just to entice callers, I knew the writing was on the wall.

With nostalgia removed from the equation, there’s not much that BBSes did better back then than the internet does today. Anyone who says spending hours downloading a file over a phone line (and hoping it didn’t arrive corrupted due to line noise) is better than grabbing a free game for their phone from the app store in a matter of seconds is full of shit. Back then, you might wait days for someone to call a BBS, read a message you had sent them, and respond. Today, if someone in another country doesn’t respond to a text message I send them on my phone within 10 seconds, I’m pissed.

There are still BBSes up and running today. It’s a niche thing, not unlike people who mess with short wave radios or CBs. Up until a couple of days ago, I was one of those people.

A couple of my friends still run BBSes (Icbrkr’s Particles BBS is one). Reeling with nostalgia, I decided to set up my own in 2012. I spent a lot of time configuring things and importing old graphic files from my original dial-up BBS. It was fun. In two years I had 40 users sign up. Of those, 33 never called back a second time. I suspect they called for the same reason I set it up — because it was neat and because it brought back old memories. But not because it technically offered anything the internet doesn’t offer.

My goal for 2015 is to focus like a laser on the projects I want to finish. Unfortunately, sometimes that means putting other ones to rest. The BBS was a fun experiment, and I greatly enjoyed it while it was up, but now it’s over. Here’s to regrouping and refocusing my time in 2015.